Tengu (天狗): The Mountain Being Who Calls Your Name

What is Tengu?

On the mountain between Mie and Shiga, above Suzuka, a tengu lived, and on moonlit nights the charcoal-burners going up to their kilns heard its flute and its singing. A man who had gone up to shoot game spent the night in a charcoal hut, and in the dark a clear voice called Ōi! He answered it. At once the mountain went wild: pebbles rained on the roof. The young men with him locked arms and chanted the nenbutsu, and the hut shook, and somewhere close a great tree snapped. In the morning they went outside. There were no pebbles on the ground. No tree was broken.

That was recorded in 1973, and it is the tengu in its most characteristic form: a presence on the mountain that is heard, that answers when answered, and that leaves nothing behind to prove it was there.

What does tengu mean?

The name is written 天狗: ten, heaven, and gu, dog. The heavenly dog. The word came from China, where it named a meteor — a dog-shaped streak of fire across the sky — and in Japan it attached itself to something else: the beings of the high forest who could fly. The dog never shows in the pictures. What shows is the bird.

Appearance

Two faces, and both are old. The first is the bird-man, now usually called karasu-tengu, the crow tengu: a beak, feathers, obvious wings, the body of a man in a hawk’s armour. The second is the daitengu, the great tengu — a red face, a human body, an enormously long nose, high wooden clogs, a fan of feathers, and the white robes and small black cap of the yamabushi, the ascetics who train in the mountains. The long nose became the face everyone knows, and it arrived late; the earliest tengu wore a beak.

The ascetic’s clothes are borrowed. Tengu imagery took the signs of mountain religion because both lived on the same peaks. Real yamabushi are not tengu, and their practice is not the frightening thing in these stories.

Behavior and abilities

• They fly. Wings, sudden winds, a figure high in a cedar.
• They carry people off. In Hinohara, in the hills west of Tokyo, as told in 1983, a child of about seven went off alone to a place where nobody went, and was found because the sandals had been taken off and set neatly side by side. The child said a tengu had taken them.
• They make sounds. A flute, a song, a voice calling your name, the crash of a falling tree.
• They leave no trace. The Suzuka hut in the morning.

None of this makes the tengu simply evil. In one story it is a kidnapper; in another a proud master who teaches a boy swordsmanship; in another the guardian of a mountain whose anger depends on how people behave on it. Its nature is powerful and unstable, and it belongs to the mountain rather than to the village.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

No single one is recorded, and the stories do not agree on whether one is needed. The men in the Suzuka hut chanted the nenbutsu and lived; the hut also kept shaking until dawn. The nearest thing to a rule is in the opening of that story: a voice on the mountain called, and a man answered it, and that was when the mountain went wild. Our short leaves it there. Not answering the call is a ghost-story warning rather than a law of tengu lore, and it is also, on an empty mountain at night, fairly good advice.

Documented tradition and later imagery

Documented tradition. A tengu above Suzuka heard playing a flute and singing on moonlit nights, that called Ōi! to a hunter in a charcoal hut, rained pebbles, shook the hut and broke a great tree, with no trace by morning (Mie–Shiga, 1973); a child of about seven taken by a tengu above Hinohara and found by a pair of neatly placed sandals (Tokyo, 1983); and the long medieval history of tengu as bird-men, disruptors of Buddhism and proud mountain masters, from which the long-nosed face emerged.

Later imagery. Popular media standardise the tengu as a red-faced man with a long nose, a magic fan, a sword master’s skill and a fixed rank in a fantasy hierarchy. Each piece has roots. The package is modern, and it leaves out the beak, the valleys that each kept their own tengu, and the thing the charcoal-burners knew: that on the mountain, the sensible answer to a voice in the dark is silence.