Who Is Raijin? The Thunder Kami in Shrines, Temples and Screens

Bend your knees in front of the thunder god's statue at Sanjusangendo in Kyoto and look up. The temple itself recommends it: from below, the rafters overhead resemble lightning, and the figure gains force. It is a neat piece of staging, and it hides a question. The fierce being we picture, ringed with drums, is a late image. The oldest written records speak of eight thunders on a corpse and of a serpent on a hill. This page follows how a sound in the sky became a kami, a temple guardian and a painted figure on gold, and it keeps those three apart.

A guardian in a Kyoto hall

Sanjusangendo's official page describes a pair of statues, Fujin and Raijin, both National Treasures of the Kamakura period. The wind god stands 123 centimeters tall and the thunder god 105. The temple traces both to the Rig Veda, where natural forces are personified. Fujin is tied to Vayu, who crosses the sky in a chariot drawn by several horses, and Raijin, it says, to Varuna, a water god. In Buddhism, the page adds, they protect the teaching, correct evil and keep wind and rain in order.

The look, however, is Japanese. The temple calls the form entirely Japanized and says it fixed the later image of the pair. Tankei, who led the statue-making when the hall was rebuilt, is said to have had a deep hand in them. The hall itself dates to 1164, burned about eighty years later and was soon rebuilt.

So here the thunder god is a Buddhist guardian inside a temple, listed apart from the twenty-eight followers of the Thousand-armed Kannon. He is not the subject of Shinto shrine worship. That difference matters below.

Before the drums: thunder in the oldest books

In the Kojiki, Izanagi follows Izanami to the land of the dead, lights a single light and sees maggots and eight thunder deities living on her body. Chamberlain's translation names them by place: Great-Thunder in the head, Fire-Thunder in the breast, and so on down to the feet. A variant in the Nihon Shoki, in Aston's 1896 translation, also gives eight. These chase Izanagi until he throws peaches at them, and the text presents that as the origin of the custom of warding off evil spirits with peaches.

Another passage shows a different face. In the seventh year of Emperor Yuryaku, the Nihon Shoki says, a strong man is sent to bring back the deity of Mimuro Hill and returns with a great serpent. Its thunder rolls and its eyes blaze. The frightened emperor covers his eyes, orders it released and gives it a new name, Ikazuchi, which Aston renders as "thunderbolt".

The Encyclopedia of Shinto sums it up. Ancient texts connect the thunder kami's appearance with serpents or a small child. From around the Kamakura period, pictures and sculptures begin to show a demonic form ringed with linked drums.

Rice, rain and calamity

The same entry explains why farmers cared. Thunder was heard as the kami's violent behavior, and a strike on the ground was read as its presence. The old word for thunder, kaminari, can be understood as the kami "sounding". The words for lightning flashes, inazuma and inabikari, contain ina, which means rice stalks. People believed lightning fertilized the rice plant, and rain invocations were held at shrines of the thunder kami.

The same power could destroy. In some regions, thunder during transplanting season prompted a rite of striking split bamboo, or fixing sickle blades to bamboo poles, as a symbolic expulsion. Kokugakuin's glossary adds that in some areas a rite called Raikosai is performed whenever lightning strikes.

A later layer came in the Heian period. Belief in vengeful spirits led people to read lightning as the curse of a wrongly accused courtier, Sugawara no Michizane. That produced the cult of Karai Tenjin, and the thunder kami came to be honored as one figure within the worship of Tenjin.

Kamigamo: a thunder kami's own story

Kamigamo Shrine in Kyoto is formally named for Kamo Wakeikazuchi, and the name contains ikazuchi, an old word for thunder. The shrine's own account is not about drums. Thunder rumbled in heaven and a red-painted arrow fell. A woman of the Kamo family took it from the river, laid it beside her bed and conceived a child. At his coming-of-age feast the child declared that his father was a heavenly kami, threw his cup upward and rose through the roof with a clap of thunder. Later, in answer to a festival held at his bidding, he descended as a kami onto the mountain behind the shrine.

The shrine names its sources: a fragment of a provincial gazetteer preserved in a later commentary on the Nihon Shoki, and an old Kamo record. It is a shrine's tradition, kept in a living place of worship. Its own timeline records that the grounds were listed as World Heritage in 1994 and that the buildings were ritually renewed a forty-second time in 2015, on a 21-year cycle ordered in 1036.

How to read a statue or a screen

The Kyoto National Museum describes Tawaraya Sotatsu's "Wind God and Thunder God" as a pair of two-fold screens in ink and color on gold-foiled paper, each 154.5 by 169.8 centimeters, dated to the 17th century and owned by Kennin-ji temple. They carry no inscription or seal, yet the museum states there is no doubt about the painter. Ogata Korin and, later, Sakai Hoitsu replicated them. The gold ground, the museum notes, gives the floating figures a sense of boundless space.

A short checklist before you call any image "the" thunder god:

• Who made the record: a court, a shrine, a temple or a painter?
• Is it a text or an image? Texts speak of eight thunders, a serpent or a child. The drum-ringed demon belongs to later art.
• Is the figure alone or paired? In the statues and screens it is paired with the wind god.
• Is a kami being worshipped, or a Buddhist guardian?

Common mix-ups

• "He has always looked like a drumming demon." The Encyclopedia of Shinto dates that look to around the Kamakura period.
• "He is only a menace." The same source calls him a guardian of rain and farming as well as a kami of calamity.
• "Raijin and Tenjin are one figure." They are not. Michizane's cult absorbed the thunder kami in the Heian period, which is a different thing.
• "The Sanjusangendo pair belongs to a Shinto shrine." The hall is a Buddhist temple, and the statues are protectors of its teaching.