Tengu

The tengu changed character over time, which is the most interesting thing about them. The name is written with characters borrowed from a Chinese "celestial dog" (tiangou), a portent of the sky, but in Japan the being became a creature of the mountains. In medieval Buddhist writing tengu are hostile: arrogant, deluded spirits, often the transformed souls of prideful or corrupt monks, who obstruct the Dharma and lead practitioners astray, a whole category of tengu-do, a fallen mode of rebirth for the spiritually vain. The early form was bird-like, with a beak and wings; over time the most familiar type acquired a red face and a long nose (the daitengu), while the karasu-tengu kept the crow's head.

Their mountain cult attached itself to specific, named peaks across Japan, of which Mount Kurama, north of Kyoto, is the best known, but Mount Atago near Kyoto and Mount Hiko in Kyushu carried comparable tengu associations of their own, each with its own local legends and its own resident tengu chieftain in popular telling. Mysterious sounds and disturbances in the mountains, falling trees with no discoverable cause, distant laughter, objects moved overnight, were widely attributed in premodern rural Japan to tengu mischief under the general folk category tengu-daoshi, "tengu felling," a documented belief distinct from, though related to, the more elaborate literary tengu of Buddhist and warrior legend.

By the later medieval and early modern periods the tengu had softened from demon toward guardian. They became associated with the yamabushi, the mountain ascetics of Shugendo, and are often depicted dressed as them; they came to be regarded as protective mountain spirits and as formidable masters of martial skill. The legend that the warrior Minamoto no Yoshitsune was taught swordsmanship as a boy by the tengu Sojobo on Mount Kurama is the best-known instance, and tengu remain patrons of the sword and of mountain training in the popular imagination. The trajectory, from Chinese sky-portent, to Buddhist emblem of spiritual pride, to mountain kami and martial teacher, is a clear case of a figure whose meaning is a function of its period, and reading any one stage back onto the others distorts it.

The Kurama legend names Sojobo specifically as the daitengu who taught Yoshitsune, and situates the training in the mountain's forests above the temple of Kurama-dera, a site that still markets itself on the association today; the story is first attested in later medieval and early modern retellings of Yoshitsune's life rather than in any contemporary twelfth-century record, making it, like much of the softened guardian-tengu material, a product of centuries of accumulated legend built up around an earlier, more hostile figure. The trajectory the earlier row of this article traces, sky-portent to Buddhist emblem of pride to mountain guardian, finds its clearest single illustration in exactly this story.