Biografia di Yamada Mumon 山田無文 (1900-1988)

Yamada Chōjirō, known by his Buddhist name of Yamada Mumon, was born on 16 July 1900 in Busetsu, a mountain village located in a valley northeast of Toyota city, Aichi Prefecture. The fourth of five siblings, Mu- mon was born into a family of transporters in the Ōaza Chōji Yashiki district, “the residence in the main part of the village”. The name of the location re- minded of the country’s feudal past when samurai used to live there to guard the border between the adjacent provinces of Minō and Shimano. As Yam- ada Mumon recounts in his autobiography Wa ga kokoro no furusato (“My Spiritual Home”), life in Busetsu was quite vibrant in his childhood: the village provided hospitality to travellers passing along the Iida High Road that connected Nagoya to Nagano Prefecture via the mountains. In warmer seasons, pilgrims typically wearing white clothes and adorned with bells also passed through the village on their way to the sacred Mount Ontake, the second-highest volcano in Japan.