Oni

Summary

The oni in Japanese belief are fearsome beings who come from the other world, from the mountain, from beyond the sea or from the house of the dead, bringing disease and death, and sometimes blessing as well. Their familiar picture today, with two horns on the forehead, fangs in the mouth and a loincloth of tiger skin, is a late one, taken from the demons of hell in Buddhist art.

Their earliest appearance in written history is in the Nihon shoki. In the seventh year of Empress Saimei, 661, the empress died in the palace of Asakura in Kyūshū, and when her body was carried away in the evening an oni wearing a great hat appeared on the top of Mount Asakura, looking down on the funeral procession, and all the people exclaimed in wonder.

The Izumo Fudoki, the record of the province of Izumo written in 733, explains the name of the village of Ayo in Ōhara district: a man was tilling a field in the hills when a one-eyed oni came and ate him. His father and mother were hiding in a bamboo grove, and the bamboo leaves moved, and the man, as he was eaten, said: "ayo, ayo", it moves, and the place was named Ayo.

The Nihon shoki also calls oni the people who would not obey the king's authority, among them a northern people called Mishihase, who were feared and with whom goods were exchanged without words at what was called the "oni market". The same book notes that peaches drive oni away, as Izanagi threw three peaches at the army that pursued him from Yomi, the land of the dead.

In the Middle Ages the oni became the subject of many stories, the best known being that of Shuten-dōji, the drinking lad, told first in a fourteenth-century picture scroll and then in a short tale of the Muromachi period. In it an oni lived on Mount Ōe in Tanba and came down to the capital to carry off girls and plunder wealth, and the emperor ordered the general Minamoto no Raikō to kill him. Raikō set out with his followers, Sakata no Kintoki among them, dressed as wandering monks, after swearing an oath to three kami, Hachiman among them; the three kami met them in the form of three old men and gave them a liquor they called "oni poison" and a helmet. They entered the cave; Shuten-dōji was a boy by day and at night became an oni some ten feet tall. They made him and his followers drunk, Raikō cut off his head, the head flew through the air at Raikō and the helmet protected him, and they brought out the stolen girls.

The oni are driven out every year in the tsuina rite, which came from Tang China and was held on New Year's eve: the participants read out a ritual proclamation and chase men in oni masks with bows and clubs of peach wood. It moved to setsubun, the day before the first day of spring, and since the Muromachi period (1392–1573), it seems, people throw roasted beans from their doors, saying: "oni out, good fortune in".

The idea these stories turn on is that the oni is everything that lies outside the village and is not known: the dead who have not found rest, the mountain no one climbs, the stranger who does not speak the people's language, the plague no one sees. He is driven out at the turn of the year so that the year begins clean, and in the stories he is killed by trickery and liquor, as Susanoo killed the serpent Yamata no Orochi. Yet the outside also brings blessing: at the New Year festivals men in oni masks come to the houses in Akita, and in other shrines an oni dances who drives out evil and blesses the ground, so the oni is feared and worshipped at once, which makes him one of the kami in some of his forms and his expulsion one of the matsuri. Encyclopedia of Shinto, oni.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method, since the project's essays do not read the oni. The Chinese graph 鬼 is read in China as the spirit of a dead person, and in Japan it was read oni. The tenth-century dictionary Wamyōshō says: "it is said that oni is a corruption of 隠 on, hidden, because the oni hides and does not wish to show its form". In Arabic this is jinn: Lane says that janna is said of night when it veils and covers a man, and that the jinn are so called because they are feared but not seen. Its sister word is kinn, a place of concealment such as a cave, and anything that covers. The sense is one in both tongues: the feared being who is not seen. The n is n, and the j or k at the start falls away, as letters of that place in the mouth fall in the Juthoor tables.

Linguistic Root

Baxter and Sagart's Old Chinese gives the graph 隱, "to conceal", as Middle Chinese ʔɨnX, with a glottal stop at the start, and Old Chinese *ʔə[n]ʔ. From this word comes Japanese 隠 on. If the Wamyōshō is right, oni is a word of Chinese origin with a vowel added.

The Arabic reading matches n with n and reads the Chinese glottal stop where the Arabic j or k has fallen. Lane gathers every sense of covering under j-n-n: night that covers, the embryo hidden in the womb, janān, the heart, because it is hidden in the breast, and the jinn, because they are not seen; he adds that they were so called before Islam because they hid themselves from the eyes. This is what the Wamyōshō says of the oni.

The limit of the reading is that the word passed through Chinese, whose glottal stop is not a sound of the j and k place, that the Wamyōshō gives the derivation as one view among others, and that the eighth-century texts read the graph 鬼 as siko or mono, so that oni is absent from the Old Japanese lexicon.

Key Mythic Narratives

The oni and its horns

The Heibonsha concise encyclopedia says that the oni's picture with an ox's horns, a tiger's fangs and a tiger-skin loincloth came from Yin-Yang lore, which made the north-east, the direction of the ox and the tiger in the Chinese zodiac circle, the "oni gate" through which demons gather. The Nipponica encyclopedia adds that the picture also drew on the demons of hell in Buddhist books and on the Indian rākṣasa, who became rasetsu in Japan.

The oni of the stage

Zeami, the founder of the Noh theatre, says in his Fūshikaden that oni on the stage are of two kinds: an angry spirit that possesses a human being, and a demon of hell. A jealous woman becomes after death a female oni called hannya.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Ravana, king of Lanka in the Rāmāyaṇa, is a rākṣasa, one of the shape-changing beings usually translated as demons, and the picture of the rākṣasa came to Japan with Buddhism and was one of the sources of the oni's image. Ravana carries Sita off to his island as Shuten-dōji carries the girls of the capital off to his mountain, and both are killed by a hero who comes to their stronghold.

In Norse belief the giants live in Jötunheimr, at the edge of the world between the human enclosure and the sea, and the gods built the wall of Midgard against them. Like the oni, they come from outside, from mountain and sea, and are driven off and killed; yet the gods marry among them and take their wisdom, as the oni brings blessing in some of his forms.