Japanese Tales

by Royall Tyler

MAGIC, HEALING, AND RELIGION

  One thing that makes these tales unlike recently collected Japanese folktales, despite the continuity of many motifs, is religion. Medieval Japan was as steeped in religion as medieval Europe, and people thought in religious terms far more often than nowadays. Buddhism was dominant, but other religious or magical traditions were important too. None were mutually exclusive, at least not in any sense that might sound serious to a Christian or a Moslem.

  The magic and religion in these stories fall into four main categories: yin-yang lore, Chinese yoga, the cults of the native Japanese gods, and Buddhism. The first two can be dealt with fairly quickly. The native gods, however, will require fuller treatment, together with such preoccupations as spirit possession, dreams, healing, and the fear of pollution. I will save Buddhism till last, even though I will have to refer to it often before then, just because Buddhism looms so large. Magic, spirit powers, healing, etc. are, after all, subjects familiar to us in a general way from many cultures; and so is the quest for right conduct and salvation which finds its expression in Buddhism as in other religions. But Buddhist ideas, the names and roles of Buddhist divinities, and the other trappings of the Buddhist faith are too complex to treat consecutively until the other, lesser topics are safely out of the way.

  YIN-YANG LORE

  The yin-yang tradition came to Japan from China. In the West, most people know now that “yin” means the dark, moist, cold, passive, female principle of the universe, while “yang” means the bright, dry, hot, active, male principle. This is not wrong, of course, but it represents such a high level of philosophical abstraction that it has little to do with yin-yang lore as it figures in these stories. Yin-yang knowledge, intricate and practical, involved astrology, geomancy, purification, divination, and offensive or defensive magic.

  I have called the yin-yang masters in this book “diviners” because they appear most commonly in that role. They were often called in to fathom the meaning of puzzling events and to prescribe appropriate action (nos. 63, 164). They could also be asked to determine auspicious or inauspicious days and to interpret dreams. Purification rites come up in nos. 162 and 179. Both the government and private patrons considered such functions essential. The government’s table of organization included a Bureau of Divination, which employed the top members of the profession like Abe no Seimei (nos. 59, 60, and others) and Kamo no Tadayuki (nos. 162, 165). Although hereditary in certain families, the profession required long training. As already noted, such men also played a key role in the establishment of the official calendar.

  Yin-yang diviners practiced magic at the request of their patrons. In no. 59, for example, Seimei defends a young gentleman against a hired diviner’s curse. Such magic was lethal (no. 163). A common countermeasure against curses and other misfortunes, foreseen by the diviner thanks to his art, was seclusion. The potential victim had to shut himself up strictly at home, admitting no one and talking to no outsider. No. 14 describes the particularly horrid way a demon broke through a man’s seclusion, sensibly ordered by a diviner.

  CHINESE YOGA

  The Chinese tradition of ascetic self-cultivation entered Japan early, but was then overwhelmed by Buddhism. It is represented here by a few old stories. The ascetic’s goal was the eternal one of freedom from mortality and from the constraints of the body. A truly accomplished ascetic could shed his gross physicality and take on a new, spiritual body as an Immortal; and one nice thing about being an Immortal was that you could fly. One ascetic who thought he could fly made a big mistake (no. 90), but the wizard of no. 88 managed beautifully. (This wizard is known to have mastered Chinese yoga, but it is true that he mixed Buddhist esoteric practices with it.)

  In time the idea of the Immortal came, under Buddhist influence, to be associated with certain ascetic monks who were devoted to the Lotus Sutra (see below).

  THE NATIVE GODS

  Japan has always been full of gods. There are now shrines to them even on the roofs of department stores. In medieval times people often thought of Japan as the “land of the gods,” thus expressing a natural love for the beautiful Japanese islands and their human community.

  In the centuries covered by these stories there were countless cults to these gods, and some were very strong. On the whole, though, the worship of the native Japanese gods did not constitute a clear-cut religion. We are often told that the two main religions of Japan are Buddhism and Shinto, and that Shinto (“the Way of the Gods”) is the “native religion of Japan.” But Shinto has only existed as a self-conscious religion since the late nineteenth century, when it developed in response to a movement of political and religious ideas which is foreign to the world of these tales. The earlier cults of local, regional, or even national significance celebrated a great variety of divine presences in symbiosis with Buddhism.

  Philosophically and organizationally, Buddhism was far more highly developed. A handful of important shrines tried with limited success to keep Buddhism at arm’s length, but most were as much dominated by their associated Buddhist temples as the emperor was by the Fujiwara regent. Not that this domination involved force. Many legends tell how the native gods accepted Buddhism gladly, listened eagerly to its teaching, and sometimes even claimed Buddhist-sounding titles.

  All this helps to explain why the stories talk more about Buddhist divinities than about the native gods. Although the court honored the gods, it was so steeped in Buddhism that it did not think deeply about them. The Kasuga God, the clan god of the Fujiwara, upheld Buddhism with affecting conviction (no. 31). In fact, his shrine was thoroughly dominated by Kōfukuji (no. 45 and others), the oldest ancestral temple of the same Fujiwara clan. The God of Fire and Thunder (no. 101) is very different, but he still insists that Buddhism moves him deeply and has so far deterred him from destroying Japan completely.

  The Kasuga God and the God of Fire and Thunder were major divinities. So was the divine presence at Kumano, a great pilgrimage center whose name alone appears in these stories. Others were more remote. No. 30 shows how gentlemanly a provincial god could be, but the mountain gods Kōya and Nifu, eager to help found a great Buddhist temple, are impressively rugged (no. 26). The war between the mountain god and the wizard (no. 88) is one of Japan’s most famous legends. Nos. 77 and 188, with their legends of human sacrifices offered to monkey gods, conjure up a world that must have seemed almost as strange to the original readers of these stories as it does to us.

  Some gods had animal forms. In addition to monkeys, these stories include a dog (no. 29) and a snake and centipede (no. 187). Animals could also be divine messengers: the deer for the Kasuga God; the monkey for the Hie God (no. 41). The fox is associated with Inari, a god of plenty, and that is probably how the fox gets into the rite that starts no. 47. Later in the same story, the fox itself is a god. (Fox spirits, who occupy a lower level than gods, are discussed below.)

  Humblest of all, perhaps, were the road gods (nos. 159, 178). Their direct descendants can still be seen along the roads in some parts of Japan. Now as then, most road gods “have a man part and a woman part,” as no. 159 puts it. The road god in both stories appears as an old man, the single most likely form for a native god to take when appearing to a human.

  All the gods thrived on human attention and in fact required it. Naturally they received offerings of food and drink, as well as rites and festival observances. But in these stories the gods especially enjoy music and dance. The divine applause described in no. 48 was one accepted sign of a god’s pleasure. The God of Good Fortune’s lust for music (no. 47) seems demented; but the Kasuga God nicely disposes of the idea that music has nothing, or nothing important, to do with genuine religion (no. 45).

  COMMUNICATING WITH THE GODS

  Not only did human beings address the gods, but the gods spoke to humans. Shamanistic possession is now banished from the religion that identifies itself as Shinto, but in the world of these stories it was quite normal. So was a keen interest in divinely inspired dreams.


  A god might deliver an oracle through a human medium. Hitokotonushi, the name of the god who opposes the wizard in no. 88, means “Master of the Single Word” and suggests the practice of giving one-word oracles, yes or no. In the story, though, Hitokotonushi accuses the wizard at length through one of the emperor’s own attendants. This sort of spontaneous possession of a household member by a god occurs in no. 31, and also in no. 163 where a man discovers, thanks to “an oracle delivered in his own home,” that an enemy is plotting to kill him. However, there were plenty of professional mediums, too. Some worked in healing, as explained below under that topic. Others belonged to the staffs of major shrines like those of Kasuga or Hie. In no. 41 a Hie Shrine medium is seen delivering oracles to a crowd of pilgrims.

  Shrine mediums were women, as were most other professional or spontaneous mediums. Young boys sometimes gave oracles, though none do in this book. Of shamanic men, most seem to have been monks like the one who has the great vision in no. 101, or like the monk described in no. 88 as “the vessel of the God of Hakusan.” Many monks were involved with spirit possession as healers, often acting in partnership with a woman medium.

  An absorbing or outstandingly apt oracle was uncommon. What people sought instead, at both shrines and Buddhist temples, was dreams. The Buddhist divinities did not possess mediums, but they and the gods could speak or otherwise signify their will in dreams.

  The common procedure was to do a seven-day retreat at a temple or shrine, in the hope of getting a sign from the divinity in the form of a dream. If none came, you could do a second seven-day period or even a third. The dream seems always to come just before the last dawn of the retreat (no. 45). In no. 174, a young man prays at a temple for relief from poverty, and by acting on his dream message he becomes rich.

  A medieval Japanese story may not identify a communication from a god or a Buddhist divinity as a dream, but may describe it instead as though it were a normal, waking event. (In most such instances the circumstances still make it clear that the communication is a dream, and sometimes another version of the story may say so plainly.) This suggests that dream experience and waking experience were not always sharply distinguished from each other, and that dream experience could be accepted as perfectly authentic. Some sacred dreams, although unsought, carried great weight. In a fascinating example (no. 197), a monk dreams that a certain temple has a black ox and that this ox is actually a buddha. The dream starts a mass pilgrimage (it really happened) to worship the Buddha-Ox.

  Besides sacred dreams, these tales contain other kinds of dreams which show how fascinating people found the theme. Examples are the complementary dreams dreamed simultaneously by both members of a couple (nos. 130, 134), and the extraordinary Buddhist morality dream of no. 198.

  HEALING

  The literature of the time rarely acknowledges that the Japanese had acquired from China (as well as undoubtedly developed also on their own) knowledge of medicine and drugs. The physician who appears briefly in no. 125 must have known about such things, but his treatment is not even mentioned. Instead, the emphasis is on spiritual rather than physical processes, and especially on exorcism.

  Several stories contain a passage like this one (no. 72): “Then Emperor Daigo happened to become very ill. All sorts of prayers and rites tried on his behalf brought him no relief. Finally an official remembered the holy man of Mount Shigi …” The first thing to do, apparently, was to bring in one or more Buddhist monks (depending on the patient’s means) to perform rites and chant sacred texts. A rite alone could work, for a healer once cleansed an entire province of an epidemic with his masterful performance of an elaborate ritual (no. 127). Usually chanting was essential too. When the chancellor was ill (no. 71), “all the best-known monks crowded into his mansion, which rang with the din of their chanting.”

  In most cases, spirits are involved on both sides of the struggle between the healer and the sickness. In no. 70 a Buddhist divinity, invoked by chanting monks, drives away a horde of nasty spirit-children. More often, though, the healing spirit is not a standard divinity but a protector spirit personally linked to the healer. A famous example is the Sword Guardian (no. 72), a spirit controlled by the holy man of Mount Shigi.

  As for the evil spirits who cause sickness, their nature and motivation are usually shadowy. Although one story (no. 74) features a remarkable account of a healing session from the afflicting spirit’s standpoint, we learn nothing about why the patient should have been singled out for torment. The afflicting spirit has only been dragooned into service by a minor god, and the minor god is apparently acting on behalf of a bigger god whose reasons are unfathomable. In these stories, the only kind of afflicting spirit with a relatively clear identity is a fox.

  Fox spirits still make people ill in Japan. The reasons why they possess people may be hard to make out, especially when you doubt (as a modern reader or observer can hardly help doing) that foxes really are autonomous entities, external to the possessed person, who just move in when they feel like it. In these tales, two motives are given. The first is exceptional: a man sends a fox to deliver a message to his household, and the fox obeys by possessing the man’s wife and speaking through her mouth (no. 83). The second is more common: the fox explains that it has possessed the patient only because it hopes to be given some food (nos. 124, 206).

  These last two stories show clearly how a monk and a woman medium worked together. As the monk chanted sacred texts and spells, the medium went into a trance. Meanwhile the protector spirit or spirits who served the monk would force the afflicting power to move into the medium, where the monk could question it. After asking what it was and why it was there, he might go on to scold it for its mischief. Finally he would send it away and the medium would regain consciousness.

  AFTER DEATH

  If healing fails, the patient may die. There are several deaths and corpses in these stories, although no births. A corpse may pollute the place where it lies and the people who come into contact with it, and the spirit of the deceased may appear as a ghost.

  Proper treatment of the dead has always been vital in Japanese religion. First, the body had to be properly disposed of. (No. 133 evokes horribly the fate of an untended corpse.) This could be done by cremation or by disposing in one way or another of the whole body. Toribeno, the Capital’s major burning ground, appears in several stories (nos. 15, 131). In other instances the corpse was carried to a charnel ground, often a ravine near the foot of the mountains where it might be abandoned, or at best buried in a shallow grave. In two stories (nos. 27, 46) the body is hung in a tree. It could also be left in a cave (the saving spirit in no. 148 speaks from such a cave) or even on the top floor of a city gate (no. 65). For the living, these spots belonged to another, alien world of which the hellish, volcanic landscape of Tateyama (nos. 147, 216) is an extreme example.

  Proper care of the spirit took more devotion than disposal of the body. Buddhist rites had to be performed daily for the first seven days after death (no. 216), then every seventh day thereafter until the forty-ninth day. The schedule of observances thinned out after that, but it ran on another year or two for the individual spirit. When it was over, the spirit joined a family’s collective ancestors, who were honored jointly.

  Without this care spirits were miserable, and could easily linger on as harmful or unhappy ghosts. In any case, people who died violently or in acute distress were likely to become ghosts (no. 133). In extreme cases, an unhappy ghost could become a harmful god (no. 28). The God of Fire and Thunder (nos. 101, 103), a model of this kind, was originally the statesman Sugawara no Michizane. Michizane died heartbroken, in unjust exile. When his ghost started causing disasters, he was first posthumously promoted in rank, then a major shrine to him was built in Kyoto and his worship developed into a widespread cult.

  Death was a difficult issue for most native gods, who abhorred any taint of blood, sickness, or death. No doubt the people of pre-Buddhist Japan found ways to deal with t
his problem. Buddhism seems to have met a need, however, since so much of its teaching was concerned with the fate of the soul after death, and since in principle its divinities felt no such revulsion. In fact, the care of the dead became in time the fundamental task of Buddhism in Japanese society. Buddhist monks conducted mortuary rites, Buddhist ascetics practiced in the mountains which were the “other world” of the ancestral spirits, and Buddhist temples grew up in association with the places where the dead were disposed of. In no. 46 a woodcutter hears groans from a coffin hanging in a tree and goes to warn “the priests of the temple nearby.” The temple may have had this sort of connection with the place.

  The native gods’ attitude toward death is beautifully illustrated in no. 41. A monk is making daily pilgrimages from Kyoto to the Hie Shrine, over a low mountain pass to the east of the city. On his way home one day he finds a young woman weeping because she cannot dispose of the corpse of her mother who has just died. The villagers will not help her because they are busy with preparations for a festival in honor of their local god; if they touch the corpse, the god will be angry and misfortune will strike the whole village. The monk generously helps carry the body away. Now, however, he is polluted himself and must either break off his pilgrimages or risk the Hie God’s wrath. Though afraid, he decides the next morning to make his pilgrimage as usual. On arrival he keeps well away from the sanctuary building. When the god nonetheless orders him (through a medium) to approach, he is so terrified that he almost faints.

  This fear of pollution was so deeply ingrained in the Japanese that it influenced the Buddhist establishments themselves, even though it had no canonical basis in Buddhist teaching. When thieves manage to rob a temple of its big bronze bell (no. 143), the key to their success is their certainty that the monks of the temple will not go near a dead body. Likewise, the temple monks in no. 174 are afraid that the hero of the story will die of starvation right before their altar and in so doing pollute the temple. This fear was not confined to shrines and temples, for a courtier polluted by direct contact with death could not appear at court, as no. 132 suggests.