Sōjōbō

Sōjōbō is the most celebrated of the daitengu, the "great tengu" who stand at the top of these beings' hierarchy. That hierarchy is best understood as tradition understood it: not a ladder one climbs, but a destiny one is dealt. Medieval Buddhist literature holds that whoever dies consumed by pride falls into the tengudō, the way of the tengu, and that there the wise become daitengu and the ignorant kotengu, the small tengu. The condition is settled at the moment of death, according to what one was in life, and not by any later ascent. The term itself came from China, where tiāngǒu named an ill-omened "heavenly dog", and its first Japanese appearance is in book XXIII of the Nihon Shoki (720), where a monk explains that the object crossing the sky with a roar in the year 637 is no shooting star but a tengu. Edo-period tradition set Sōjōbō within a company of tengu kings who rule the mountains of the country (Tarōbō of Mount Atago, Jirōbō of Mount Hira and others), and of them all the lord of Mount Kurama, north of Kyoto, is the most famous.

Sōjōbō is portrayed with a humanoid figure and a ruddy face, the long prominent nose that tells daitengu apart from the beak of the karasu-tengu, the white hair and beard of an old man, the habit of a mountain monk, the small tokin cap the yamabushi tie to their forehead and tall wooden geta. He wields a long sword and carries the ha-uchiwa, the feather fan with which, legend says, he raises gales. He is credited with a mastery of the sword no man attains, the power of flight, command of wind and storm, the faculty of reading the virtue or the hypocrisy of whoever stands before him, and authority over the lesser tengu of his mountain, who serve him as messengers and scouts. The woodblock print fixed him thus, and from there comes the image recognised today: not that of a monster, but that of a formidable old master.

The legend that made him famous ties him to Minamoto no Yoshitsune. The hero-to-be, still a child and still called Ushiwakamaru, was entrusted to the monks of Kurama-dera after his father's death; the tale has him slipping out at night to the valley of Sōjōgatani, where the king of the mountain's tengu taught him the swordsmanship that would later make him unbeatable. The story deserves a date: the historical Yoshitsune lived in the twelfth century, but the episode of the training with the tengu is a later medieval elaboration, which set in the nō play "Kurama Tengu" and which the printmakers of the Edo period and of the nineteenth century, Yoshitoshi among them, turned into a celebrated scene. Nearly everything one sees of the character today comes from there. Sōjōbō does not take just anyone: he picks exceptional disciples, humbles arrogant warriors, and is bound to shugendō, the ascetic way of the yamabushi that mixes Shinto worship, esoteric Buddhism and Taoist elements. His seat is still Mount Kurama, where the valley that bears his name is shown to walkers to this day.