With membership in religions across Japan in free fall, many are trying to make themselves more appealing to attract more followers. How do you get people excited about religion? Do you pull a Pope John Paul II and get some sweet-ass breakdancers to get the kids all excited about God?

Japanese Buddhists have found their weapon of choice: hunks. Not just any hunks, but hunky monks. Earlier this year, a book was released in Japan called 美坊主図鑑, or the Beautiful Monk Encyclopedia, and it’s gotten quite a few people excited about Buddhism.

Beautiful Monks

Think of Beautiful Monk Encyclopedia like a Tiger Beat for Buddhist monks — the Encyclopedia has pictures and little bios of all of the 40+ monks featured in the book. The Encyclopedia‘s first print run of 10,000 copies sold out quickly.

Why would Buddhist monks put out what ultimately amount to be a book full of personal ads? Aren’t monks supposed to be chaste and all that? It turns out that unlike Catholic monks, some Buddhists monks are not only allowed to marry, but may need to marry in order to carry on the lineage.

Some monks have even turned to matchmaking parties to meet potential mates. It’s funny to me to imagine a bunch of Buddhist monks essentially speed dating. So tell me about yourself. Wait, you think that life is suffering too? We should go back to my place and talk about the Noble Truths.

Rapping Monks

Japanese Buddhist have other ways of luring in new faithful. For example, rapping monks. It seems to me that Buddhists are a little late to the party by just getting into rapping, but I suppose when your religion is thousands of years old, being a few decades late seems pretty insignificant.

Rapping monks certainly isn’t a widespread phenomenon, but a monk by the name Kansho Tagai took up the cause on behalf of Buddhism in Japan and began rapping and performing at his temple under the moniker “MC Happiness.”

“Getting the young people back to religion is key to Buddhism’s survival,” MC Happiness has said, and his performances have done just that. More and more visitors and devotees have shown up to his temple since MC Happiness began rapping.

Boozin’ Buddhists

If rapping doesn’t appeal to you, then Japanese Buddhists know something that has universal appeal — booze.

As temples continue to close down across Japan, Buddhist monks are trying to get back to their roots. Once upon a time, Buddhist temples were the centers of towns; now, lay people don’t visit unless for a funeral or some other sort of traditional service.

For better or worse, bars are central locations for many communities around Japan (where everybody knows your name and all that). Vow’s Bar in Tokyo is trying to leverage the bar’s central place in modern life to better serve Buddhism.

Can Buddhism in Japan be Saved?

Will all of these efforts stem Buddhism’s decline in Japan, or will they simply be a bandage on a fatal wound? I suspect it’s the latter but for now, I’ll kick back a super dry beer or two with a rapping monk.

Read more: In Japan, Buddhism may be dying out, Have a Thing for Shaved Heads? This Cute Monk Guide May Be Up Your Alley, Japan’s monks turn to wife matchmaking parties, Japanese monks serve up alcohol and hip hop music to lure in followers, The Real Buddha Bar, Tended By Tokyo Monks

Talking about mummies usually conjures up images of ancient Egypt with giant Pyramids, Sphinxes, and Pharaohs. But there are tons of different mummies all over the world, even in Japan! A weird sect of Japanese Buddhism not only turned their monks into mummies, but mummified themselves while they were still alive. How on earth did that work?

In a sect of Japanese Buddhism called Shingon Buddhism, there was a small group of monks in the Yamagata prefecture that mummified themselves. They called those who succeeded sokushinbutsu (即身仏).

It all started hundreds of years ago, in the 1700s there was a horrible famine in Japan. One Shingon monk decided the best way to end this famine was to bury himself alive. (Why? Who knows.) So the monk buried himself alive, and the famine came to an end. 3 years later, his fellow monks unearthed his body and found that he’d been mummified!

The monk in question.

These monks felt that they should obviously not only try to mummify themselves, but that they could improve upon the mummification process. They experimented and tested out different methods and eventually settled upon what they thought was the best process.

Here is the Shingon-approved self-mummification process a few easy steps!

1. For three years, eat nothing but nuts and berries. This caused monks to lose a lot of weight, keeping pesky fat off of the body for the mummification process.
2. For the next three years, only eat bark and roots. Eating only these things removed a lot of moisture from the body, moisture that could cause the body to decay instead of mummify.
3. Drink a special tea. By drinking tea made out of urushi tree, a substance which is poisonous and usually used to lacquer bowls. This made the body poisonous and made it harder for bacteria to eat away at the body.
4. Bury yourself alive. Seal yourself in a giant stone tomb. The monks gave the mummy-to-be a bamboo pipe for air and a bell. The mummy-to-be rang the bell every day to let his fellow monks know that they were alive. When they didn’t hear the bell ring, they knew that the monk had died.
   

Unfortunately for the monks, this process didn’t really work all that well. Out of the many monks that attempted this long and painful process of self-mummification, only a handful (maybe two dozen) were able to successfully become mummified.

Sometime in the 1800s the Japanese government outlawed ritual suicide, putting a stop to these monks’ self-mummification.

Art Imitates Life

While there haven’t been any sokushinbutsu for a few hundred years, the Shingon monks have definitely left their mark on the world. A few years back, a performance artist from a group of artists called “Chim↑Pom” put on an exhibition called “Making of the Sokushinbutsu.” The artist fasted for days and meditated while on display in a museum.

Apparently fasting gives you a sweet ‘fro.

I hope I’m not the only one who finds this more than a little disturbing. The performance group claims that the artist was fine after the end of the whole ordeal, but that doesn’t stop me from being pretty freaked out.

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More Reading

• Dainichibo Temple’s site.
• Chim↑Pom’s site.
• A firsthand account of a visit to the sokushinbutsu.

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