Who Is the Tengu? From a Barking Star to the Mountain Ascetic

The chronicle gives the day: the twenty-third of the second month, in the year 637. A great star crossed the sky from east to west with a noise like thunder. People argued about the sound. Then a Buddhist priest named Bin gave it another name, the Celestial Dog, whose barking is like thunder. That passage is the earliest record scholars cite for the word tengu. It has no long nose, no wings and no mountain. The figure we picture today, red-faced and dressed as a mountain ascetic, took shape over many centuries. This page follows that change and asks, at each step, what kind of book is speaking.

A star that barked

The passage sits in the Nihon Shoki, a court chronicle completed in 720. W. G. Aston's English translation of 1896 gives the priest's words as follows.

It is not the falling star, but the Celestial Dog, the sound of whose barking is like thunder. Priest Bin, in W. G. Aston, Nihongi (London, 1896), vol. 2, Book XXIII, Jomei, 9th year, 2nd month, 23rd day, pp. 167-168.

Two details matter. The characters say "heaven" and "dog," yet Aston notes that the small phonetic marks beside them read "Celestial Fox." Kagawa Masanobu, a folklorist and museum curator who writes on yokai for Nippon.com, adds that Bin (he spells it Min) had studied in China, where the same characters named a comet or meteor taken as an omen of war. So the first tengu was a sky sign, borrowed from Chinese lore, and not a creature of Japanese mountains. In a footnote Aston already describes the tengu of modern Japanese superstition as a winged figure in human form with a very long nose, which shows how fixed the picture had become by 1896.

From omen to mountain figure

What kind of source is speaking?

Each row has a different author and purpose. The chronicle reads the sky for the court. The Konjaku tales were collected in a Buddhist world, where the tengu is a danger to the pious, and Kagawa notes a later belief that proud priests were reborn as tengu. The war epic uses the tengu as an omen of chaos. Edo prints and netsuke, made to be sold and worn, show the figure as people then pictured it.

We read Aston, Kagawa's article, the Encyclopedia of Shinto entry, the two temple pages and the museum record directly. We did not open the Tale of Genji, the Konjaku or the Taiheiki, and we know them only through Kagawa and a general survey. Where a claim rests on that, this page says so.

Mountain ascetics and the long nose

The Encyclopedia of Shinto describes Shugendo as a religion built on ascetic training in the mountains, taking form between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Kagawa links the tengu closely to those practices. Tengu are shown in the clothes of the mountain ascetics called yamabushi, with a feathered fan and large wings, and in the Edo period, he writes, the birdlike monster turned into a human-looking figure with a long nose. What caused that change is not clear. A story that one famous painter first drew the long nose after a dream cannot be checked.

The long nose also invites a guess. Aston's translation of the same chronicle describes a deity at the crossroads of heaven whose nose is seven hands long, and who names himself Sarutahiko. Some modern surveys treat him as a model for the tengu. The chronicle never calls him one, and Kagawa does not use him, so this is a later suggestion.

Kurama and Takao

Two mountains show the tengu in living tradition. The official history of Kurama-dera in Kyoto dates the temple to 770 and tells of a legend that the boy Ushiwakamaru, later known as Minamoto no Yoshitsune, studied the Buddhist way by day and was taught the art of war by tengu at night. The page shows an illustration, restored from a votive plaque of unknown date, that sets a crow tengu beside a long-nosed one. The temple's principal figure is Bishamonten, not a tengu.

Takao, west of Tokyo, is kept by the temple Takaosan Yakuoin. Its official page says tengu are attendants of Iizuna Daigongen, that they have power to remove disaster and bring good fortune, and that people honor them as deified. It adds that the mountain is a root training ground of Shugendo, where the yamabushi's figure is often identified with the tengu. The same page calls Iizuna Daigongen a transformed body of Fudo Myoo. This is worship, and it deserves care.

How to read a tengu image

• Look at the face. A beak and wings belong to the older, birdlike strand. A long nose belongs to the Edo picture.
• Look at the dress. Mountain-ascetic clothing points to Shugendo.
• Ask what the tengu does. A foe of monks suggests medieval Buddhist tales. A guardian suggests Edo belief and later temple practice.
• Ask who made it, and for whom: a chronicler, a priest, a printer or a shrine.
• Ask whether it is honored today. If so, treat it as practice, not as a tale.

Common mix-ups about the tengu

• "It was always long-nosed." The first record has no nose at all. Birds of prey come next, and the long nose settled in the Edo period.
• "It is only a mountain goblin." Early Buddhist sources fear it, yet by the Edo period Kagawa describes it as close to a mountain kami. Takao honors it today.
• "It is always proud." Today the phrase "acting like a tengu" means being conceited. Kagawa says that in the Edo period the tengu was more often the one scolding people for arrogance.
• "It is a fox in disguise." The phonetic marks in the chronicle read "fox," and Kagawa notes that from about the tenth century tengu were believed, like foxes, able to bewitch people. Yet the tengu became a bird-and-priest figure, while the Kitsune kept its own tradition.