Yamabushi is written 山伏 — one who lies down in the mountains. The word names a practitioner of Shugendō, the mountain discipline, and it is a job description rather than an order of monks.
The reason this matters for a site about the uncanny is simple and is usually skipped. The fear attached to a yamabushi’s grudge is not a fear of magic. It is a fear about a particular social position, and the position can be documented.
This note is about that position. It does not deal with any individual case.
A Japanese dictionary of folklore carries several separate headings for the yamabushi, and read together they sketch somebody who did not fit the categories a village had available.
He was not resident clergy with a parish. He was not a villager with land. He travelled, and he arrived carrying things — in one entry, a settlement in Ōmi where diviners and yamabushi lived together and went out distributing the talismans of various temples and mountains and performing prayers.
So the standard encounter with a yamabushi was a transaction with a stranger who had come in from somewhere else, who possessed a technique, and who would be gone again. The note here on the itako deals with the other kind of specialist a village could call on, and the contrast is the point: the itako was from the region and known. The yamabushi was from the mountain and was not.
The social function is recorded more plainly than one might expect.
Under its entry for the arimasa — the man who knows things — the same dictionary records that in Tsugaru the village’s knower was consulted on questions of the kind people take to a diviner, and notes that this appears to have been largely a sideline of yamabushi and Shugendō practitioners. The word is still used in those villages for the local man who knows.
That is a precise description of a niche. If something has gone wrong and nobody can say why, you go to a person who is in the business of saying why — and the person in that business was, in practice, often a mountain ascetic with a circuit.
Which puts the yamabushi at exactly the point in village life where blame gets assigned. He is the one who names the cause. A man in that role will be right sometimes, and when he is not, or when he asks for more than people want to give, the resentment runs both ways.
Two further entries show the same figure being put to work by people with more power than he had.
The first is about intelligence. The dictionary records that in a certain lord’s time the yamabushi of that Ōmi settlement were dispatched to the various provinces as informants, to learn the state of order and disorder in each.
Consider what made that possible. A man who can walk into any province carrying talismans, be received in houses, be asked questions and asked to pray, is already a travelling collector of local information. His religious function was his cover, and somebody noticed.
The second is stranger and belongs with it. At a castle in Iyo, a yamabushi mound was raised on a spur of the castle hill as a protective charm for the castle, and an iron effigy in armour with bow and arrows was buried in it — the entry adds that this was modelled on an older mound of the same kind in the Heian capital.
A yamabushi-shaped thing was put into the ground on purpose, to defend a fortification. The figure was useful enough, and frightening enough, to be installed as masonry.
The fourth entry is the one that makes the whole subject legible, and it is three lines long.
In a district of Musashi there is a mound called the mound of ten. It is there, the dictionary says, because when a shrine’s vermilion seal was destroyed by fire, seven Shugendō practitioners who had been entrusted with it were buried in the pit of yamabushi punishment.
The phrase is the thing to notice: not a pit in which some yamabushi happened to be buried, but the pit of yamabushi punishment — a standing noun for a standing practice. And a mound afterwards, named by a number, still being pointed out when the gazetteer was compiled.
There is no need to narrate anything further. A category of person existed who could be put into a hole as a group for the loss of a document, and whose burial place then became a landmark. Everything that was ever feared about such a man’s grudge follows from that sentence and requires no supernatural premise at all.
Set the four uses side by side and the pattern is not one of a powerful man feared by weak villagers.
He was dispatched by a lord as an informant, which means he was expendable to the lord. He was buried in a mound as a charm, which means his likeness was property. He was put into a pit as a group with six others over a lost document, which means he had no standing to appeal. And he was consulted as the village knower, which means the village needed him and did not trust him.
A person who is useful, mobile, unprotected and blamed is exactly the person whose resentment a community will expect to be dangerous — not because he has powers, but because nobody has any way of settling with him afterwards.
The notes here on Sugawara no Michizane and on the head of Taira no Masakado deal with the opposite case. A wronged minister can be given a shrine and a rank, because rank is the currency he was deprived of. A travelling ascetic buried in a pit cannot be compensated at all. There is no office to restore, no title to grant, and in several of these records no name recorded.
For completeness, since the austerities are usually romanticised: the dictionary’s entry on yamabushi ordeals at a northern mountain describes foul-smelling plants burned in a brazier so that the smoke fills the hall, and provides for the case of a man choking to death in it — he is carried out, revived if possible, and the ordeal resumes for five more days, then five more, then five more.
It also records a practice in which a new man is lowered into a ravine on a rope of twisted wisteria and the rope is cut partway down.
That is the training. The man who arrived at a village door had been through some version of it, and both parties knew it.
The vengeful dead were given their own division in the 1913 compendium of oral tradition that supplies several records on this site, and the note here on the spirit of a first wife describes that chapter and its arrangement. The note on the one-wheeled cart describes the compendium’s method. Neither is repeated here.
Our note on the tengu deals with a different mountain figure, and it is worth keeping the two apart: the tengu is a being that was never a man, and the yamabushi is a man that villages were not sure how to count.
People set down that a wandering ascetic had come, and that afterwards something happened in the house or in the village. Those records exist in some number. They are short, they report the sequence of events and not the inner life of anybody.
Five records of that kind became the five stories in There Is No Column For It. The book is at /books/there-is-no-column-for-it/.
The readings in “The Village Knower”, “He Was Used as an Instrument” and “And He Was Punished in Pits” are KWAIDANOTE’s own.
Found an error? Write to kwaidanote@gmail.com — corrections are made on this page and dated.