En no Gyōja

Here is everything history actually knows about En no Gyōja.

In the year 699, a mountain ascetic was exiled to the island of Izu Ōshima. The official chronicle gives the charge, and the charge is wonderful: he had been bewitching the people with his words.

That's it. A conviction for being dangerously persuasive.

Everything else — and there is a mountain of everything else — was built on top of that one line over the following thousand years.

He put demons on the payroll

The legends give En no Gyōja two servants, and they are not spirits or angels. They are oni — demons, the horned man-eaters of Japanese folklore — a married couple named Zenki and Goki, and he had them working for him as labourers.

They carried his things. They cleared his paths. In the standard iconography they flank him, one holding an axe and one a water jar, looking exactly like what they are: staff.

Stop and appreciate how unusual that is. The rest of this tradition deals with demons by killing them. Heroes get sent to mountains with poisoned sake and cut the demon king's head off in his sleep. Ascetics seal them under rocks. Priests argue them out of a possessed body.

En no Gyōja hired them.

He arrested a god

And then there's the story that gets him convicted.

He was building a stone bridge between two mountain peaks — an enormous project — and he had the local gods working on it. One of them, Hitokotonushi, refused to work the night shift, on the grounds that he was ugly and didn't want to be seen.

So En no Gyōja bound him with a spell and left him tied up.

A human being placed a god in contempt of court, and the tradition tells it approvingly.

The sequel is the best part. The bound god filed a complaint — slandered him to the court, the story says — and that is what got the ascetic exiled in 699.

So we have the same event, told twice, from two sides. The state record says: a man was banished for bewitching people with his words. The tradition says: a god he had tied up made a formal complaint about him.

The criminal conviction and the miracle are the same afternoon, described by the two parties involved.

Exile as a minor inconvenience

Being banished to an island didn't slow him down much. The legend has him flying back every night — from Izu to Mount Fuji and back before morning — so that the exile amounted to a change of address rather than a punishment.

Watch the legend get built

The best thing about En no Gyōja is that you can date the accretion, rung by rung.

699 — the official chronicle. A man is exiled. No magic, no demons, no flying.

Ninth century — a collection of Buddhist tales makes him a semi-immortal sorcerer with supernatural powers.

The medieval period — the full patriarch arrives: founder of Shugendō, Japan's mountain-ascetic tradition; opener of the sacred peaks of Kinpusen and the Kumano ranges; and, by attribution, the founder of dozens of mountain temples and pilgrimage routes across the country. If a Japanese mountain has a religious tradition, there is a decent chance somebody has credited him with starting it.

Three hundred years took him from "convicted of talking too well" to "the man who opened the mountains."

What his legend is actually for

Compare him to Kūkai, the other great legend-magnet of Japanese religion, and the division of labour is clear. Kūkai's thousands of legends are infrastructure — he struck the ground and a spring appeared, he brought the writing system, he dug the well. The civilizing touch.

En no Gyōja's legends are all about labour relations with the invisible. Demons on the payroll. A god formally sanctioned for refusing a shift. A human managing the mountain's population like a foreman.

That is the charter myth for everything the mountain ascetics ever claimed: not that the spirits can be destroyed, but that a sufficiently disciplined person can employ them.