Teratsutsuki

When Buddhism won its war in Japan, the losing side got a yokai.

The war

In the sixth century, Japan had an argument about whether to adopt Buddhism.

It was not an academic argument. It was a faction fight between two clans, and it ended in a battle.

The Soga were for it. The Mononobe were against — they held that the native gods would be offended, and that plague was already the proof.

In 587, Mononobe no Moriya, leader of the anti-Buddhist faction, was killed by Soga no Umako's forces, with the young Prince Shōtoku on the winning side.

And Buddhism became the religion of the Japanese state.

And Moriya came back as a woodpecker

The teratsutsuki — "temple-pecker."

Moriya's vengeful spirit, in bird form — or in some tellings, flocks of them — hammering at the temples Shōtoku built to celebrate the victory.

Shitennō-ji above all, which was raised in thanks to the Four Heavenly Kings for the win.

So the losing side's dead leader spends eternity pecking at the woodwork of the buildings put up to commemorate his defeat.

It's a magnificently reduced revenge

Think about the scale of what he lost.

He lost a war of religion. He lost his clan's position, his life, and the argument about what kind of country Japan was going to be. The tradition he defended was subordinated permanently.

And what he gets back is: he is a bird, damaging some timber.

Theology as pest control.

The old religion's rage, having failed at the scale of the state, reduced to a maintenance problem at the scale of a rafter.

Which is not sympathetic to him — it's a victor's story, told about a defeated enemy, and the diminishment is the point.

And the saint answered in kind

The Genpei Seisui Ki carries the resolution.

Prince Shōtoku transformed into a hawk and drove the woodpecker off.

And "since then, the teratsutsuki no longer made its appearance."

The state-founding saint, meeting the heretic's bird as a bird — and the hierarchy is unmistakable. A woodpecker is a nuisance; a hawk eats it.

Shōtoku doesn't pray it away or exorcise it. He simply becomes the thing further up the food chain and the problem stops.

It has a twin

Put it beside the iron rat — the priest cheated of his promised ordination platform, who starved himself to death and came back as rats that ate the rival temple's scriptures.

Two institutional grievances. Two men who lost a religious-political fight. Two verminous returns.

And both attack the buildings and the contents rather than the people: scriptures gnawed, timbers pecked.

Which suggests the shape of the grievance. Neither one wants revenge on individuals. They want to damage the institution's continuity — its texts, its fabric, its ability to persist — because that's what was taken from them.

Losers of religious politics don't get shrines. They get beaks.

Sekien's second volume is basically a shadow chronicle

Worth noticing where this sits.

Sekien catalogued the teratsutsuki in 1779, and look at what else is in that volume: the nine-tailed fox at the imperial court. The woman who became a demon out of jealousy at Uji. The iron rat. This.

That book is, functionally, a history of the Japanese court told through its losers — the people the official record disposed of, coming back as animals.