A
recent researcher in this fi eld who we have already mentioned is Sugihara Takuya. His studies lead him to conclude that the origins of the Tengu beliefs may profi tably be looked for in China, possibly inspired by extra-terrestrial phenomena such as large meteorites seen streaking across the night sky combined with myths reaching China con-cerning the garuda, winged demons of ancient Indian Vedic and Hindu religious folklore. The garuda was the ‘sun-bird’, an eagle, the vehicle (va¯hana) on which Vishnu fl ew in the heavens. Sugahara puts forward a well-argued case but my own opinion, based also on examining the garuda images and Chinese paintings of various deities, is that while there may well have been knowledge of these reaching Japan, certainly after the introduction of Buddhism187 and the greatly increased interest there in Chinese culture, the Japanese concept of the tengu does not come from these sources. That is not to say that there were not any infl uencing Chinese elements though, as we have already seen from the quotation from the Nihon Shoki in my Introduction.My thesis traces the tengu back to the shaman-warriors who may have reached Japan in various forms from the earliest land-taking on through the successive waves of militant tribal settlers to the end of the Yamato period. Classical Chinese art follows a number of strict conventions that suggested ‘approved’ subjects and these are limited in number. The variety and breadth found in the art within these con-straints is extraordinarily rich, particularly in the fi eld of visualizing the huge numbers of deities, however, the threads that connect the Inner Asian religious and shamanic beliefs to the yamabushi-tengu fi gures cannot be ignored.
Alternatively, it is now becoming well-known that the Chinese were used to seeing Indo-European travellers of every description from, per-haps, the T’ang period onwards, possibly earlier. By Indo-Europeans, I refer to those people with western features rather than those with the fl atter facial structures of central and eastern Asia. The trade routes were well-travelled from the earliest centuries of the fi rst millennium and at least three centuries BCE; certainly Marco Polo and his companions were not by any means the fi rst Occidentals to reach Cathay following the Silk routes. In fact, westerners, from north-eastern Persia - Saka, Alan and Sarmatian, the western Russian steppe, from southern Europe, and the Levant, travelled part or the whole way to China and settled in great numbers in the cities that were growing up there, particularly round the trading ports. One recent estimate put the ‘foreign’ population resident in these cities bordering the littoral even as high as a quarter of the total inhabitants around the eleventh and twelfth century. Whether this is an exaggeration or not is a matter for argument, but it does suggest a great deal of cross-cultural contact. Artworks from the west abounded in both China and Korea, some even fi nding their way, presumably as luxury goods, to Japan in the Nara period. Witness to these cultural contacts are some of the precious items surviving in the Sho¯ so¯ -in in Nara. While these items are wonderful and it is a marvel that despite the vicissi-tudes of war they exist at all, it should be remembered that there were thought to be some fi ve or six similar repositories in western Japan that were robbed or destroyed in disturbance or by fi re many centuries ago.
All this points to Japanese merchants and their protecting warriors who sailed to China encountering strange men with, to them, extraordinarily
Fig. 23 Dignitary seated with bird-headed attendant (Chinese: late Han, second century CE).
long noses and rather hirsute faces. When we consider that the founders of Tendai-shu¯ and Shingon-shu¯ visited Ningpo¯ at the beginning of the ninth century and that these intermittent voyages continued sporadically through to the end of the sixteenth century, I fi nd it hardly surprising that beings like the tengu should be given their prominent noses or a deep-seated memory of their hawk totem.
Did the Chinese artists have contact with the shaman from the Altai – and have been infl uenced by them ? We know that the nomadic tribes
Fig. 24 Three fl ying demons, thought to possibly represent Chinese tengu. (Based on depictions from The Five Hundred Rakans painted by Shu¯ kijo¯ (1178–84). Drawings by the author.) According to Sugihara Takuya, the three demon-deities are classifi ed into two groups. The one at the top has a bird’s head and upper torso, holding the Hyo¯ ho¯ -Into¯
(see Glossary). This therianthropic fi gure has a human lower body but his feet are repre-sented as taloned. The other demons, who fl ank the fi rst, are human-like but furnished with fl eshy bat-like wings and a pair of short white horns on their heads. All three wear red loincloths. Sugihara comments that the two with membranous wings may indicate that they are of higher rank than their feathered associate. In the Japanese folklore that was heavily coloured by Buddhism, there are also two different types of tengu; the lower group have a hawk’s head and body, the higher ranking ones are more human looking.
The fi rst of these tengu with a feathered body and wings is almost exactly copied in a work named ‘Tengu-zo¯ shi’.
of the Hsiung-nu were a thorn in the Empire’s side for several centuries and, in fact, during the Han period and after, the Chinese studied care-fully and adopted some of the warrior skills that they had encountered.
This contact may even be inferred from a late-Han, third century CE, engraving showing a winged fi gure with a hawk’s head kneeling beside a seated dignitary.188
When we reach the Song period (960–1279), we fi nd, in Chi-nese Buddhist art, depictions of winged and beaked fi gures that look remarkably like the iconography we encounter from Japan in the Kamak-ura period a century later. These fi gures, depicting three demon deities fl ying with tiny iron treasure towers grasped in their hands, are from one panel of an enormous religious work, ‘The Five-hundred Rakans’
painted by Shu¯ kijo¯ (Japanese reading) in China between 1178 and 1184.
The ‘Rakans’ are the disciples of the Buddha and the iron towers are called H o¯ gyo¯ -into¯ .189 Sugihara Takuya elaborates that this enormous painting, large because only fi ve disciples are depicted on each panel, was, according to a monk named Kisho¯ residing on the island of Ningpo¯ , the work of two other artist-monks of the Eanin Temple on Ningpo¯ , named Shu¯ kijo¯ and Rinteikei.190 The subject of these paintings, in a style only found in Chinese Buddhism, may have been found all over the Empire and were popular with the adherents of the esoteric Tendai-shu.
The winged demons are visualized as therianthropic beings, one having a beaked hawk’s head, feathered wings and three-clawed feet similar to the Japanese sho¯ -tengu; the other two are human featured but horned, and provided with bat-like wings as the dai-tengu. In the style of painting these fi gures are impish cartoons depicted in an almost identical manner as they appear in Japan. Whether this is purely Chinese in origin is open to question, especially when we examine some of the
‘daemon’ iconography found in medieval Europe.191 However, it is agreed that the lively postures of these fl ying ‘demons’ is refl ected both in the iconography and written descriptions of Japanese tengu.
Apparitions
N
ot until the eleventh century in Japan, with the one exception from the Nihon Shoki already quoted, do we fi nd literary accounts of the tengu, and we have to wait until the Kamakura period for the fi rst iconography. From the outset, nearly all the descriptions present the tengu as mischievous beings who seem intent on playing tricks on humankind at every level but especially on priests. Marius de Visser, in setting out his study of the tengu myths and legends, observes that the tengu constantly try to deceive and mislead the prelates, particu-larly the most senior. What is interesting from de Visser’s accounts is that the tengu are just behaving like undisciplined adolescents, but are not particularly evil. They are not vengeful like many ghosts and other apparitions in early Japanese folklore. On occasion it is admitted that they even do good. However, Marius de Visser’s study is largely based on the attempts by the medieval Buddhist religious establishment to denigrate and demonize tengu not only in their own eyes but in the popular imagination. Over the course of the succeeding centuries this policy seems to have been largely successful in the area of folklore. The comic long-nosed tengu fi gures are well-known and to be found all over Japan. Rarely does one come across more serious images connected with shrines or temples, doubtless a survival of the days before the Meiji reforms.Occasionally, the tengu have struck back at the Buddhist propa-ganda, as we can see in the famous mid-Edo period work by Chozan Shissai, Tengu-geijutsu-ron, fi rst published in 1729,192 but this is far from usual. Western scholars have tended to side-step numbers of early accounts of the tengu activities, probably because they saw them as mere fi gments of the literary imagination and not as important as the Buddhist-infl u-enced morality tales in, for example, the Konjaku Monogatari, a concept
arising no doubt from the popularist ukiyo-e woodcut illustrations of tengu by artists like Hokusai and Kuniyoshi in the nineteenth century.
A few of the tengu tales in the Konjaku Monogatari are translated but most are edited out as being of little interest or relevance. All in all, the west-ern reader, scholar or general, with an active interest in ‘things Japanese’
can only fi nd the tengu stories dressed up as fairy tales, but very rarely in their proper form or context. To study the original material one must be able to access classical Japanese. Only then can one feel that study is on a level playing fi eld.
Just occasionally, in the medieval accounts, we can fi nd hints of another, almost totally different, viewpoint of these beings, and this aspect at its fi rst appearance, indicates beliefs going back to the early Heian period at least since the tengu therein appear with every charac-teristic fully in place. This separate group of accounts or manifestations of the tengu was almost completely missed by Marius de Visser, despite his breadth of knowledge of Chinese and Japanese folklore, and should be deeply regretted since he was researching and recording in this fi eld whilst the beliefs were still very much alive. This area is, of course, the accounts remembered by the warrior groups and, in particular, those preserved by the master swordsmen of the classical bugei.
Also completely missed, or even rejected as irrelevant, were the well-known illustrations of tengu teaching the secrets of swordsman-ship contained in a few surviving o¯ -tora-no-maki scrolls already, by the mid-twentieth century, partly in the public domain. In the last century a small number of masters of the bugei, the sons or grandsons of former master-swordsmen, knew of their importance and meaning, but in this highly exclusive fi eld the secrets contained therein could only be revealed to those who had attained a suitably high level, and then were only passed on in oral transmission. There was little or no possibility of proper academic study, the transmission had always been ‘mouth to ear’
between a master and his worthy successor.
The last samurai to wear daisho¯ , the two swords, lived through Bakumatsu and, even if they were young men in 1877 when they became
‘gentlemen’ as opposed to their former status as two-sworded warriors, few would have attained the level required to receive the information and understanding we are discussing. In due process of time, and especially with the profound social changes that infl uenced the headlong modern-ization of Japan down to the present day, swordsmanship had paled to almost a shadow of its former self. From the viewpoint of the modern Japanese of today, and even in so conservative a fi eld as Kendo, under-standing of the tengu transmissions and their direct connection with the ancient female war-deity, Marishi-ten, is so remote that it is considered of little or no importance at all. Just a handful of senior masters preserve something of these now distant teachings and, like the master-kenshi of old, this knowledge will probably be lost within a decade or so. Perhaps
this is a deeply pessimistic view but, unpalatable as it might be, these are teachings that cannot and will never be understood or valued by those lacking the deep foundation of knowledge that can only come from many years of severe training under masters who ‘know’; as always in these traditions, it is far better that the teachings are lost than for them to be passed on, misinterpreted, debased, distorted and corrupted.
This is a warrior philosophy that is encountered from as far back as the mid-Muromachi period of the fi fteenth century; the integrity of the teaching transmission both in its bloodline descent through the genera-tions of a family or in the purity of its teachings must and will be pre-served at all costs.193 To realize that such levels exist or existed is one thing, to ‘reconstruct’ is quite another.
o O o
We saw that there was the closest resemblance between the emerg-ing yamabushi who, themselves, were the successors to the ‘Zenki’ and
‘Goki’, and the appearance and description of the tengu. In every respect, only with the smallest variation and then in the most minor ways, they were visualized as identical.
The proto-yamabushi seem never to have made any pretence to be other than ‘protectors’ or ‘guides’ to the Taoist hermit ‘magicians’ who bravely (or through dangerous ignorance) sought solitude in the wilds.
As time passed and the next wave of recluses arrived through the eso-teric aspirations of the Buddhist sects to commune with nature, the uncouth ‘Zenki’ and ‘Goki’ had adopted something of the mannerisms and beliefs of their Taoist masters, already having an ancestral back-ground that preserved shamanic practices and, importantly, consider-able warrior skills with hand weapons. They knew and had absorbed the sankaku-shinko¯ for a long period at fi rst hand, and developed their spiritual skills through undergoing the same severe privations required by the ‘craziest’ of the hermits. It is no surprise that with the advent of the Buddhist mikkyo¯ , these mountain men would accept some of the new practices, too. The term ‘yamabushi’ expressed in kanji correctly means: ‘one who lies on his (left) side in the mountains’.194 That they did not embrace completely the Buddhist mikkyo¯ of the Tendai or Shin-gon but remained separate, is a matter of little surprise. These men had been fi ercely independent and descended from a small group of tribes that had preserved both their shamanic and martial skills; they were hardly likely to change and adopt a more sedate sedentary manner of living. There is a very old and slightly blunt cynical saying in classical Kendo which states, in effect, that: ‘The swordsman reaches enlightenment through hard training; the monk reaches enlightenment sitting on his backside.
Both ways take the same lifespan but, (adding the rider) the former is far more enjoyable.’ One can be quite certain that the equivalent sentiment was prevalent in those ancient times.
With the pressure exerted by the Court seeking always to channel every aspect of society into regular forms, the ‘compartmentalism’ that became so clear later when the Tokugawa bakufu came to power, it was inevitable that these proto-yamabushi should be drawn together as a group and under the control or ‘umbrella’ of some named patriarch.
In this case, the legendary En-no-Gyo¯ ja perfectly fi tted the bill despite being long dead, but we need to remember that this ‘regularizing’ into the main recognizable branches of Shugendo¯ did not take place until the eleventh or twelfth century, fi ve hundred years later than the lifetime of the supposed founder.
THE APPEAL OF MARISHI-TEN
The female sun-deity, Ma¯rı¯cı¯, developed in China as a branch of Buddhism, possibly deriving from ancient beliefs connected with the horrifying triad of deities, Ka¯lı¯, Durga¯ and Candı¯ in India. The original source may lie much further back into the Bronze Age or Iron Age, spreading, again, from Central Asia, as we can see a very similar European group of three fi erce deities in ancient Ireland.195 Be that as it may, her cult spread through China then to Korea and may have been known in Japan by the end of the Kofun period, the early-sixth century.
If this is the case, it was probably brought to the archipelago by the Buddhist-infl uenced Taoist mystics. Whatever the actual spread into Japan might have been, what this deity offered her followers was pro-tection from a variety of threats including the dangers attendant on travel, from bandits and from enemies in general, fl ood, fi re, poison-ing, malicious female spirits (da¯kini), and supernatural demons and ghosts (ra¯ksa). Undoubtedly, the dha¯rani-sutra spells chanted or mut-tered by these hermit-magicians appealed to their attentive ‘protec-tors’, we can soon discern in the nascent Shugendo¯ as it formed at the end of the Heian period that its two main important characteristics offered protection through appeals to Marishi-ten and the art if invis-ibility. It was these two benefi ts that held a great attraction to war-riors. The Buddhist mikkyo¯ , on the other hand, was directed to bring-ing all sentient bebring-ings to enlightenment; worthy, of course, but not so appealing to men whose lives were spent with danger constantly at their side.
When we come to the Gempei struggles of the late-twelfth century, we fi nd great numbers of shugenja and Tendai so¯ hei,196 warrior-monks, offering their services to the Minamoto side; bands of them coming from many different centres across Japan, especially from the Chugoku and Shikoku bordering the Inland Sea. There is an inter-esting modern group of statues at the To¯ kei-jinja at Kii-Tanabe,
When we come to the Gempei struggles of the late-twelfth century, we fi nd great numbers of shugenja and Tendai so¯ hei,196 warrior-monks, offering their services to the Minamoto side; bands of them coming from many different centres across Japan, especially from the Chugoku and Shikoku bordering the Inland Sea. There is an inter-esting modern group of statues at the To¯ kei-jinja at Kii-Tanabe,