The town sits on a plateau half a mile up, ringed by eight peaks, most easily reached by cable car. There are no hotels. There are a hundred and seventeen temples, hundreds of monks, and a cemetery with 200,000 graves winding through cedars so old they block out the sky.

It is not trying to be found.

Kōyasan is a working Buddhist town. Guests who come here stay in the temples themselves, sleeping on futons, eating vegetarian meals prepared by monks, attending morning prayers if they choose. The lodgings are plain and you are clearly a guest in someone else's home.

My family came here a few summers ago during the Candle Festival, Rōsoku Matsuri, when thousands of candles line the mile-long cemetery path for the Obon holiday. There were few Western visitors.

We booked a room at one of the temples, ate meals the monks made entirely from tofu, course after course, each one different. None of us expecting what they could do with bean curd and sesame.

At night we slept together on mats on the tatami floor, the whole family side by side in one room. In the morning, we sat with the monks for prayers, still half-asleep, in a language none of us understood.

Okunoin is why most people come. It's Japan's largest cemetery, and a stone path runs about a mile through ancient cedars, past more than 200,000 graves: feudal lords, monks, samurai, Panasonic employees.

A pest control company erected a memorial to the termites its products killed.

The path ends at the mausoleum of Kūkai, the monk who founded this place in 819. Shingon Buddhists don't believe he died. To them, he sat down to meditate and never stopped, and so every morning at six and again at ten-thirty, monks carry wooden boxes of rice and vegetables to his tomb. They've done this every day, rain or snow or summer heat, for nearly 1,200 years.

Stone Jizo statues line the path in red knitted caps and bibs, placed there by parents. Jizo protects the souls of children who died too soon, and the bibs are a way of saying: keep them warm.

The Hall of Lamps holds more than 10,000 lanterns donated by worshippers over the centuries, and the monks keep every one of them lit. Two are said to have burned without interruption for nearly a thousand years.

We stayed longer than we planned. The cedars, the moss on the graves, the smell of incense caught in wet bark.

On the night of the festival, we walked the cemetery path with hundreds of others, the candles low to the ground on both sides, the only light for a mile. Nobody spoke much. We didn't need to.

Tomorrow morning a monk will carry breakfast to a man who has been meditating for twelve centuries. The meal will be warm.