Beaks on the Bishops

By 1296 the tradition had a satirical use for itself. The Tenguzōshi, a set of illustrated scrolls from that year, goes through the major Buddhist establishments of the day and draws their senior clergy with hawk-like beaks — the tengu's beak, on named institutions, in a period when those institutions held land and armed men. Japanese tradition had spent two centuries saying that arrogant priests become tengu; the scrolls simply stop waiting. A monster invented to explain arrogance turns out to be a convenient way of naming it in public.