The Japanese climate is not conducive to mummification at all. There are no peatlands, waterless deserts and icy alpine peaks. Summers are hot and humid. However, a group of Buddhist monks from the Shingon sect discovered a way to mummify through rigorous ascetic training in the shadow of a particularly sacred peak located in the mountainous northern Yamagata Prefecture. In this way they became incarnations of Buddha, living gods.
Founder
These monks followed the example of a ninth century monk. Kukai, posthumously known as Kobo Daisi, founded the esoteric school of Shingon Buddhism in 806. In the eleventh century, a manuscript appeared where it was stated that Daisi did not die, but went down to the tomb and entered a state of nyūjō - meditation so deep that a person plunges into suspended animation. According to this hagiography, Kukai plans to emerge from it in about 5,670,000 years and show the righteous Buddhists the way to nirvana.
The first flight
The first recorded attempt to become a sokushimbutsu through an act of samumification is dated 1081. A monk named Shōjin tried to follow Kukai's example and buried himself alive. He also planned to return in the distant future for the benefit of mankind, but when the students opened the cell, they found only a decomposed body. Almost two centuries passed until one of the followers understood how to mummify themselves, entering a state of eternal meditation.
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The process of self-mummification is long and difficult. For 10 years, the monk has led an extremely ascetic lifestyle, switching to a special diet, mokujikigyō. You could only eat the bark and roots of the pine. At the end of the first stage (the process was divided into three stages, 1000 days each), poisonous urushi juice was added to the diet. Urushiol toxin accumulated in the muscles of a still living person. The future Buddha spent the rest of the search for food in meditation.
The goals of asceticism
From a spiritual point of view, this regime was intended to harden the spirit and distance itself from the human world. Biologically, a strict diet would rid the body of fat, muscle and moisture, while at the same time helping to retain nutrients from the natural biosphere of bacteria and parasites. The cumulative effect was to delay the decomposition of the body after death.
On a long journey
When the pious monk felt the approach of death, the disciples imprisoned him in a special pine box and immersed him in a previously dug hole, about 3 meters deep. Bamboo pipes for breathing were carried into the box to the monk and a special bell was installed: this way the person showed that he was still alive.
Outcome
For a thousand days, after the last ringing of the bell, the disciples unsealed the grave to check the body for signs of decay. If any were found, the corpse of the "loser" was taken out and moved to the nearest cemetery. If not, it was believed that the monk had reached the true sokushimbutsu stage.
Living god
Between 1081 and 1903, approximately 17 people managed to preserve their bodies in this way. The most famous - and, moreover, put on public display - the monk Shinniokai. He entered the sokushimbutsu state in 1783 when he was 93 years old. Now the monk's mummy is sitting under glass in a box, near a small temple in the forests of Japan.