The Ascetic’s Initiation: A fragment of "The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan"

Tengu, Toriyama Sekien, ca. 1732

On an afternoon in November 1963 I went to the Kurama temple with the intention of walking over the top of the mountain and down the other side to Kibune. A little way down from the summit I heard from among the trees a strong hard voice reciting what sounded like mantras. I left the path and followed the voice, until in a clearing in the forest I saw an enormous cryptomeria tree, its huge trunk girdled about with the belt of straw rope, and before it, with her back to me, a woman seated on the ground reciting.

The hard base voice continued for several minutes, through a number of invocations which were unfamiliar to me, while the woman sat perfectly motionless with a long rosary in her hands. Suddenly I heard some words I understood. Over and over again she called upon the daitengu and the shōtengu, the large tengu and the small tengu, at the end of her invocation turning towards the forest and clapping her hands.

Venturing to approach her, I asked if there were still a good many tengu to be found on the mountain. She turned to face me, a brown face peculiarly like an old bird, with an expression fierce yet remote and a pair of extraordinarily glittering eyes, brightly sparkling like steel.

‘If you do gyō like me you can see them’, she replied abruptly.

I asked again if the kami in the great tree was very strong.

‘Ask it anything you like. The tree is more than a thousand years old’, she replied, and without another word and without looking behind her she plunged rapidly down the mountainside until she disappeared among the dark green trees and yellow leaves.

Only after she had gone did I remember that the tengu were traditionally believed to have brightly glittering eyes, and hence realise that the woman was extraordinarily like a tengu herself.

Blacker, Carmen. The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan, 1975. London: George Allen & Unwin, 2005.