日光

The sound of Nikkō is an accident — Futara, the Japanese rendering of the mountain Kannon comes from, read a second way. The characters are not: they are thought to name Dainichi Nyorai — the Buddha of the Sun.

The mountain here was Futara-san, and Futara is a Japanese rendering of Potalaka — a mountain on an island south of India that Buddhist tradition names as the home of Kannon. The characters written for that sound, 二荒, can also be read ni-kō, a shift the monk Kūkai (774–835) is credited with proposing. Ni-kō became Nikkō, and Nikkō could be written with the characters for sun and light. That much is accident: a name crossed an ocean on pronunciation alone. The characters are not accident. They are thought to name Dainichi Nyorai, whom the source calls the Buddha of the Sun and the most esteemed figure in Tendai Buddhism. The sun in Nikkō is not the one in the sky. The mountain that started it was later renamed Nantai.

Futara did not disappear. The shrine here is Nikkō Futarasan-jinja, and the mountain it faces — Nantai, the one that was renamed — is its object of worship. The temple that shares the site still writes the old name in brackets beside the new one: Nikkō (Futara) Gongen. Two names, one place, both still in use.