Who would you be if you could begin again?

On the trails of Mount Haguro, you may hear the Yamabushi before you see them: the low call of a conch shell, the horagai, rolling through the cedars. It’s blown to purify the path and to let the gods know someone is coming.

Abroad has spent time on these mountains with Tak-san, who introduced us to Zen and to the Yamabushi path. Over time, those relationships led us to Master Hoshino, a Yamabushi master whose family has kept a pilgrim lodge on Haguro for thirteen generations, and who now hosts our groups. Lodges like his have welcomed pilgrims here for more than 350 years, and life inside still keeps an old rhythm: tatami floors, a shared bath, simple food from the mountains, early sleep and earlier waking. We are welcomed as students rather than guests.

There are mountains you visit, and mountains you’re welcomed onto.

Zen comes at the same truth from the other direction. In the temple, there’s nothing to climb. You sit, and you begin again, breath by breath.

Zen came to Japan from China more than 800 years ago, and it shaped far more than its temples. You can see it in Japanese gardens, in the tea ceremony, in calligraphy, in the way a meal is served and the way a room is left mostly empty. From the tea ceremony comes a phrase, ichigo ichie, “one time, one meeting.” Each gathering happens once and will never happen again in quite the same way.

The practice itself is disarmingly simple. In zazen, you sit upright and still and pay attention to the breath. You aren’t trying to empty the mind or reach some special state. When a thought arrives, you notice it and come back. In many temples, the sitting is followed by kinhin, a slow walking meditation in which each step keeps time with a breath.

Zen treats the ordinary as practice too. Dōgen, who founded the Sōtō school of Zen in Japan in the 13th century, wrote that cooking a meal for the monks was as much spiritual training as sitting in meditation. Washing a bowl, sweeping a floor, eating a bowl of rice: in the temple, each gets your full attention, and none is beneath it.

Zen teachers speak of shoshin, beginner’s mind: meeting each moment as though for the first time, without the certainty of the expert. Shunryu Suzuki, one of the teachers who brought Zen to the West, put it plainly: the beginner sees many possibilities, the expert sees few. For people whose lives are built on knowing the answer, it can be the hardest practice of all.

What would you notice if you stopped being the expert in the room?

Then we go up. For two nights, the group lives at Master Hoshino’s pilgrim lodge. Meals are shojin ryori, the mountain cuisine, eaten in silence, each mouthful chewed slowly as a meditation of its own.

Imagine entering the forest without the things that usually tell you who you are: no title, no schedule to manage, no distractions, very little conversation. Training here can mean walking in silence, following your guide without a watch and answering every instruction with uketamo. Depending on the season and the teacher, it can also include chanting and purification beneath a waterfall.

Mount Haguro, the present, begins at a carved wooden gate, where pilgrims bow to the guardian spirits of the mountain. Then, unexpectedly, the path goes down. In Yamabushi lore, that first flight of stone steps is a descent into hell, and the long climb that follows, across a river and up through the trees, is the way back to life. The 2,446 steps run beneath an avenue of cedars planted in the 1600s, past a five-storied pagoda and more than a hundred small shrines. At the summit, pilgrims have offered bronze mirrors to a small sacred pond since around the eighth century.

From Haguro, the pilgrimage moves on to the other two mountains. Mount Gassan, at 1,984 meters the highest of the three, is the past, the realm of ancestors, where pilgrims meet impermanence face to face. Mount Yudono is the future, the most secret of the three, where rituals take place around a natural hot spring.

The Yamabushi climb in white, carrying a tall wooden staff that stands for a grave marker in the ritual of rebirth. In the language of the pilgrimage, you climb Gassan to die and descend Haguro to be reborn. It isn’t really about the summits. It’s about what happens to you along the way.

What would you set down on the mountain, and leave there?

Dewa Sanzan is remote by Japanese standards, and the pilgrimage is a real one. We take care of every piece of it, from flights to and from northern Japan and every transfer to the meals at the lodge and guides who travel with the group, so your attention can stay on the mountains and the teachers.

You stay in premium hotels in Tokyo and among the rice fields, with two nights of pilgrim-lodge simplicity in between. Groups are small and thoughtfully composed. Before you go, you’ll be prepared for the climbs and the practices, and when you come home there’s space to make sense of them.

Expect long days on mountain trails and stone stairs, simple rooms and shared bathing at the lodge, early mornings and long stretches of silence. The comfort on either side is there so you can give the mountains everything.