Koyasan but no temple stay.. worthwhile?

Hello,

I live in Kyoto and want to take an overnight trip to Koya-san on my two days off. However, for many reasons, I'm not really interested in doing a temple stay. So, in short, I'm not here to be persuaded to stay in a temple, so please don't try :)

What I wanna know is what what kind of experience I could expect if I went and stayed in a guesthouse. How much access to the temples will a non-guest be able to have? Are they worth visiting if you're not staying overnight? Is there any way to experience prayers or meditation areas without staying?

I love visiting temples and enjoy the idea of spending a couple of days in the mountains and visiting the cemetery and temples but I'm just unsure of how much is available if you don't stay.

Thanks for any help!!
Paris

So it's about money then?

I'm not interested in listing my reasons as I'm not here to justify my travel preferences. Just looking for advice :)

Thanks

You get to see the outside of a lot of places, and the inside of not very much.
Unless you want to see the cemetery in the dark, why not do a daytrip?

Ahhh ok fair enough. Day trip isn't impossible :) will consider. Thank you

I am not seeing anything bad in staying at a guest house. Really the only thing you can get if you don�ft stay at a monastery is :
- special dinner & breakfast (but most likely not with the monks)
- early morning ceremony (and I guess you are not terribly interested into that)

All the rest of Koyasan you can enjoy the same if you stay at a guest house. There are still many temples that you can visit as a tourist, the graveyard and the mountains. If you have the time and find a guesthouse I would definitely do that instead of a daytrip. Specially because you mentioned that you want to enjoy the mountains.

Enjoy your trip!

That's great news - that was my main concern really that I wouldn't be able to visit the temples as a tourist as is the norm in basically all other temples in the country that don't offer lodging.

To be honest from Kyoto, although possible, it'd be a fairly rushed day trip. Not sure it would amount to the relaxing weekend getaway I was hoping for :)

Thanks

I stayed at a business hotel in Koyasan for 2 nights. I visited temples, walked through the graveyard, hiked a trail, and enjoyed it very much.

I visited Koysan as a daytrip from Osaka, and it was definitely worth it. Especially walking around the graveyard was amazing, and we visited several temples as well. We also weren't interested in an overnight experience, so this worked for us.
The best tip I can give you: don't underestimate how much colder it is in the mountains! We made that mistake and were quite cold in the shade without a sweater. Hope you have a good time!

I'll give you my experience of the temple and Koyasan.

For this I wanted the whole experience, so I chose one of the pricier places that had its own hot spring, and I did the overnight since I wanted to see the cemetery at night as well. I really didn't know what to expect but I wanted to see the more spiritual side of Japan.
The first observation that I made was that over 90% of the activities going on were regarding housing the guests like me and taking care of the meals. The place I stayed had over 100 guests staying there that night (on a weekday no less) and for whatever reason there were a huge number of French tourists there. The temple was nice enough - it had 2 nice gardens, plus a small koi pond and some beautiful art work in the temple. But it was a long trip to reach Koyasan, and I was getting tired that night. I was still hoping to go see the cemetery but I was surprised to find that like a number of other temples, they had a 9 PM curfew. Had I known, I would have picked another place.

I recommend doing an overnight at Koyasan though, given the time and trouble it takes to reach there. But if you would like to see the Okunoin at night, you should pick a place with no curfew!
https://awesome-tours.jp/en/tour/night-tour-return-bus/
There are paid tours there but you can just go yourself. And having a clock ticking away in the back of your head that you only have so many minutes left before you have to leave is not an enjoyable way to see the place.

So in the end, the temple stay was not really different from any ryokan stay - except the food was Buddhist vegetarian. As for visiting temples, there are what is shown on this site:
https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e4900.html
but if you mean visit the places with temple stays, I never saw anyone do that - the temples were open to guests staying overnight only.
So what's the guesthouse like? As far I could tell, similar to staying at any other guesthouse in Japan.

Was it worth it? Yes - Okunoin makes it worth it. I could have spent a whole day walking through there - it was marvelous.
But if I couldn't go to Okunoin while visiting Koyasan, forget it.