Today's Maya Dreamspell Yōkai Oracle

Tengu

The tengu is a yokai and quasi-divine being said to dwell in the mountains of Japan, a lord of the heights inseparably bound to the yamabushi ascetics of Shugendō. Its forms fall broadly into two lineages. One is the long-nosed tengu, with a ruddy face and high nose, clad in the garb of a mountain ascetic, bearing a feather fan and one-toothed high clogs; the other is the crow tengu, with a crow's beak and wings, and beneath them follow lesser kin such as the leaf tengu and the wood-chip tengu. What was once conceived as a bird like a black kite hardened, over the medieval period, into the image of the long-nosed mountain ascetic. The tengu is at once a demon that obstructs the Buddhist Law and, once subdued, a guardian deity who protects it—this dual nature is the essence of the tengu. The notion that an arrogant high monk falls and becomes a tengu was bound to the Buddhist "way of the tengu," and was depicted as satire in late-Kamakura picture scrolls. Within mountain worship, on the other hand, the tengu was revered as guardian of the mountain and master of martial and magical arts, a being that tests or guides the practitioner. From Mount Kurama and Mount Atago in Kyoto onward, each of the sacred mountains of the realm was said to have its own great tengu, and the early-modern Tengu Sutra counts their number at forty-eight.