Taisha-ryū and Denrinbō Raikei

Taisha-ryū

Taisha-ryū appears in kan 1 of the Gekiken Sōdan (Bujutsu sōsho, koma 95, p. 170), positioned in the Kage cluster: the page runs Kubo-ryū (久保流) and Shinkan-ryū (心貫流) in the upper register, then Taisha-ryū (タイ捨流) and Tenshin-ryū (天心流) in the lower, so that Taisha-ryū sits between Shinkan-ryū and Tenshin-ryū; the 1716 Honchō Bugei Shōden (本朝武藝小傳) of Hinatsu Shigetaka lists its founder, Marume, among Kamiizumi’s disciples but does not name Taisha-ryū (see below). The orthography is unstable across the volume — たい捨流, タイ捨流, and 體捨流 all occur — and Mikami flags the instability himself. (Mikami Genryū 1790)

“Item. Taisha-ryū is said to issue from Marume Kurando (丸目藏人). Whether he is the same man as the Marume Kurando-dayū (丸目藏人大夫) recorded above or a different one is undetermined. The school-name too ought presumably to be written 體捨流 (‘body-discarding school’), but writing it in katakana is said to be a matter of transmission (片假名に書く事傳受也).”¹

Mikami places Marume in the Kamiizumi line and in Kyoto service. From the Shinkan-ryū entry, which immediately precedes Taisha-ryū in the upper register of the same page:

“Item. Shinkan-ryū (心貫流, also written 心拔流): a disciple of Marume Kurando — a student of Kamiizumi Musashi-no-kami, a hokumen no shi (北面の士; guardsman of the retired emperor’s northern quarter) resident at Nishi-no-oka in Kyoto — named Okuyama Saemon-dayū (奧山左衞門大夫) altered what his teacher transmitted, established Shinkan-ryū in its place, and passed it on.”²³

The Sōdan gives: from Kamiizumi, to Marume Kurando (Taisha-ryū), then Okuyama Saemon-dayū (Shinkan-ryū), the last founded by explicit alteration of the transmission (師傳を變じて). The Honchō Bugei Shōden independently lists 丸目藏人大夫 in its kan 1 table of contents among the kan 6 entries on Kamiizumi’s disciples (the entry itself prints 丸女藏人大夫), alongside Yagyū Muneyoshi, Hikita Bungorō, Nagawa Yazaemon, and Jingo Izu-no-kami — the same roster the Gekiken Sōdan gives in its own Kamiizumi entry. (Hinatsu Shigetaka 1716)

The Shōden entry itself, however, ties only one school name to Marume, and it is not Taisha-ryū. He mastered sword and spear under Kamiizumi, moved to the western provinces and had very many students, of whom Okuyama Saemon-dayū was the best, and “later the name of the school was changed to Shinkan-ryū; its branches survive today.”⁴ The Bujutsu ryūso roku (武術流祖錄) in the same collection gives the same account under the heading 心貫流, with 丸女藏人大夫 as its founder,⁵ and the Bujutsu keifu ryaku (武術系譜略) chart records Marume as a court hokumen guard who later retired to Nishi-no-oka with many students, and marks Okuyama below him as the one who named it Shinkan-ryū.⁶ In these three Marume’s school in the west is known only as Shinkan-ryū. Mikami is the only one of the four to name Taisha-ryū, he separates it from Shinkan-ryū, and he cannot say whether its Marume is the same man. The instability is therefore one of the school’s name as well as of its spelling.

Mikami adds that Marume Kurando is said to have been a man of Kuma (球摩/球磨, in Higo) — 丸目藏人球摩の人にて有しと云、いかが有べき — though he queries it himself. His 1790 information here is first-hand, from a chance meeting:⁷

“Some years ago [I] met one Miyahara Chūdayū (宮原忠太夫), a retainer of the lord of Hitoyoshi (人吉侯) who was travelling the provinces on musha-shugyō, and spent an evening in conversation on swordsmanship; on that occasion, asking about this school, [I] heard that Marume Kurando was a man of Kuma — how that may be [I cannot say].”

Teachers reported current at that time include: at Hitoyoshi, Kaga Keikichirō (加賀慶吉郎), said to be highly skilled. The school is also numerous in Hizen-Saga (肥前佐賀に此流多し), where Kawachi Gun’emon (河內軍右衞門), Takayanagi Heidayū (高柳平太夫), Tsuru Tomodayū (鶴友太夫), and Yokoo Yagobee (橫尾彌五兵衞) are named as those chiefly propagating it at present.

Mikami closes the entry with the only description of the school’s technique in these sources: “This school’s manner of fighting is to leap and wheel about, front and back, side to side, slashing upward and mowing sideways. It is very strange.”

The 1944 History of Imperial Kendo, Kōkoku kendō shi (皇国剣道史), by Ozawa Aijirō (小沢愛次郎), published by Tanaka Seikōdō (田中誠光堂), relates:

“Marume Kurando, the founder of Taisha-ryū, hailed from Hitoyoshi in the Kuma District of Higo Province. He initially served Sagara Iki-no-kami before traveling to Kyoto to become a Hokumen no Bushi (Imperial Palace Guard). Gifted in martial arts from a young age, he first studied under Tsukahara Bokuden and mastered the Shintō-ryū style; later, he became a disciple of Kamiizumi Ise-no-kami and fully grasped the profound mysteries of the Shinmyō-ken (Divine Sword) technique. After his master’s death, he opened a Taisha-ryū dōjō at Kiyomizu in Kyoto and actively promoted the school.”⁸

Denrinbō Raikei

Denrinbō Raikei (伝林坊頼慶) was a Ming-born martial artist from China who eventually became a senior Taisha-ryū disciple: he dueled Marume Nagayoshi’s disciple Oda Rokuemon Yūka at Nagasaki, lost, and so became Marume’s student. In Kan’ei 12 (1635) Denrinbō granted an inka to Nagata Morimasa, then became a Shugendō ascetic at Mt. Iwaya in Hizen’s Fujitsu district. He is credited with introducing kenpō (拳法) methods into Taisha-ryū.

The Hizen area was associated to Hikosan (英彦山), one of the “three great Shugendō mountains” alongside Haguro and Kumano-Ōmine, the spirit-mountain of the Hikosan Jingū. Hikosan was also a martial center, not merely devotional: as a yamabushi training ground it long emphasized martial cultivation, and at its peak is said to have held a large cadre of warrior-monks. (Suzuki Masataka 2015)

In the Edo period it was a monastic town until the Meiji shugendō-prohibition edict dispersed the yamabushi. Hikosan is traditionally the abode of a tengu called Buzenbō. That gives a historically plausible, well-grounded mechanism for a sword-and-mountain-religion overlap — the great Kyūshū Shugendō center genuinely trained in arms.

Hizen historians place Denrinbō at Iwaya-san among the hattengu (八天狗) cult, and tie the Nagata family he reportedly transmitted to as a hattengu-worshipping Ureshino lineage documented through the Ryūzōji house papers, which is a genuine archival footprint rather than school tradition. (Kuroki Toshihiro 1976)⁹

In terms of the school itself, Taisha-ryū’s opening form Enbi carries esoteric invocations — Marishiten and the rokkon-shōjō purification formula — and the school describes itself as a blend of Shintō, Buddhism, and mountain-worship. That ritual layer is observable in the transmitted kata regardless of any legend.

Nakano Narisaki’s Taisha-ryū kaichū (タイ捨流解紐, 1710) (Nakano Nariaki 1710) is a historical description of the art. Its author, a retainer who served as Nabeshima Mitsushige’s okuzukai and a grand-pupil of Kijima Keiemon in the Hizen Taisha-ryū line, wrote it in Hōei 7 (1710), lamenting that “the source of the transmission was being lost,” and set down even the oral transmission (kuden) as a plain, accessible exposition.

Hikosan Shugendō

The hattengu (八天狗) cult. Of the “eight tengu” of the great sacred mountains discussed in the Tengu and Gongen section above, the form relevant to Denrinbō is that of the Hizen area. The Hatten Shrine on Mt. Tōsen in Shiota was revered across Hizen in the Edo period as a fire-prevention deity, with its hattengu image kept in the worship hall. Its lower shrine sits at Ureshino, and its enshrined fire-deity Hi-no-Kagutsuchi is identified with Atago’s Tarōbō, the fire-tengu. So the cult invoked by the name “Hikosan Hattengu Benkei Musō”, an alias attributed to Denrinbō, is this fire-warding eight-tengu devotion, and the Nagata family he reportedly transmitted to were among its Hizen adherents.

Buzenbō was regarded as the head of Kyūshū’s tengu and enshrined at Takasumi Shrine, where it punished the greedy by sending sub-tengu to abduct children or set fires, while guarding the devout. Its cave-shrine is the Buzen-kutsu, the eighteenth of Hikosan’s forty-nine ascetic caves, and the temple origin-record gives its honji as Dainichi Nyorai manifesting through his avatar Fudō.

Hikosan Shugendō is well documented. (Nakano Hatayoshi 1977) Beyond being one of the three great Shugendō mountains, it was opened by tradition in the early sixth century by the Northern Wei monk Zenshō and was a practice ground from En no Gyōja onward, organized around the Hikosan Sansho Gongen and the central temple Ryōzen-ji, with the surviving Hōheiden (its great lecture hall, rebuilt 1616) at its core.

The three-volume Shugendō canon preserves Hikosan’s ritual literature directly. Its second volume carries a Hikosan Shugen Secret-Formula Seal and Oral-Transmission Collection (彦山修驗祕訣印口決集)¹⁰, which sets out the mountain’s three-season peak-practice — the spring, summer, and autumn mine with their contemplations (三春・夏峯觀心・秋峯)¹¹ — and a Hikosan peak-consecration (彦山峰中灌頂)¹².

The same collection records the treading-open of the peak in the archaic orthography 日子山 (踏開日子山峯)¹³. This is Hikosan Shugendō attested from the inside — and it is a peak-practice manual, not a martial one. The mountain’s institutional record is ascetic, and its martial reputation is carried by individuals and legend.

Hikosan in the canon

The canon does more than preserve Hikosan’s manuals: it places the mountain inside its own sacred geography. The Liturgy of the En no Gyōja Assembly lists the six peaks that En no Gyōja trod out in austerities “for the sake of beings” — Kumano, Kongōsan (glossed Katsuragi), Hikosan (glossed “the Hiko peak of Chinzei”), Ishizuchi, Yuzuriha, and Haguro — and declares that they “manifest the myriad practices of the six perfections” and are “the beginning of the peaks of Japan.”¹⁴ The Record of En no Kimi’s Achievements restates the list as a correspondence. En had practised as Kāśyapa on six mountains of India and as the Fragrant-Accumulation hermit on six of China. In Japan his six were Ōmine, Katsuragi, Minoo, Hikosan, Haguro, and Ishizuchi, “whereby they make the meaning of the myriad practices of the six perfections.”¹⁵ A Tōzan catechism, the Secret Notes of Questions and Answers on the Two Peaks, counts “Hikosan of Tsukushi” among the seven “snow mountains” of Japan and adds, “this one En no Gyōja first trod.”¹⁶ The order varies, but Hikosan is the only Kyūshū mountain on these lists, and always one the founder opened in person.

Hikosan’s own lineage charts make the same claim from inside. The Dharma-Transmission Lineage of Hikosan Shugen descends from Mahāvairocana and Śākyamuni through Kāśyapa, Aśvaghoṣa, and Nāgārjuna to “En no Gyōja, root patriarch of Hiko-no-yama Shugen.” He is flanked by his two demon attendants, and a note says that in Keiun 2 (705) he “entered the peak in the three seasons and founded it.” The practitioners Gyokuren, Hōren, and Raun follow.¹⁷ The facing Dharma-Succession Register runs the esoteric line from Mahāvairocana through Kūkai to Shōbō. Among its later masters it sets two Hikosan names side by side: Shōun of the Kezō-in and Sokuden, called Akyūbō, both ranked senior great sendatsu.¹⁸

The colophons show who fixed Hikosan’s esoteric apparatus in writing, and when. The Hikosan Shugen Secret-Formula Seal and Oral-Transmission Collection ends with grants dated Eishō 6 (1509) from Shōun to Akyū: one in the autumn, naming Akyū as “Sokudenbō, sojourner at Hikosan in Buzen,” and another in the eleventh month.¹⁹²⁰ A further grant to one Jōchin, dated Eiroku 1 (1558), is issued under Akyū’s name as “senior great sendatsu of the three peaks.” The Collection for the Swift Realization of Sudden Awakening in Shugen closes with a certificate from “Akyūbō Hōin, provisional junior sōzu, Sokuden, sojourner at the Kezō-in in the southern valley of Ryōzen-ji, Hikosan, Buzen.”²¹ Its model stele-tablets “of the Hikosan style” for the spring and autumn circuits carry the date Eishō 10 (1513), second month. They invoke Hōman Bosatsu and Hikosan Gongen as “protectors of this peak,” and they read the square-headed spring tablet as the Womb realm, “from cause to fruit,” and the sword-headed autumn tablet as the Diamond realm, “from fruit to cause.”²² The Secret Record of the Rules Transmitted for the Three Peaks supplies tablet formulas addressed to “Hikosan Daigongen, the harmonized radiance of the three shrines.”²³ Its colophon, dated Daiei 5 (1525), tells how its author left his sandals at the rock cave of Nata-dera in Kaga and hung up his staff on Hakusan’s Thousand-Armed Peak. When asked his name he “answered Akyū; in appearance he was just like a beggar.” He signs as “Akyū of the En clan, a latter-day follower of Hikosan.”²⁴

So between 1509 and 1525 a Hikosan-trained sendatsu was writing down the mountain’s peak-entry ranks, tablets, and seal-transmissions and carrying them as far as Hakusan. This was more than a century before Denrinbō received his inka in 1635. Not every Hikosan text in the canon is that early. The contemplation manual quoted below shares its pages with Edo-period transmission notes (one dated Meiwa 8, 1771), and the consecration scroll gives its dates only as “as above.” The doctrine they state, however, stands on apparatus already fixed in the early sixteenth century.

The Gongen of Hikosan

Kumano’s own origin legend begins at Hikosan. The Record of the Traces of the Kumano Gongen, bound with the Shō-Bodaisan origin texts, tells how in a kinoe-tora year of old the deity came from Mount Tiantai in China. It first “rained down on the Hiko peak of Chinzei in Japan,” in the form of an eight-sided stone three jō and six sun high. Five years later it crossed to the Yuzuriha peak in Iyo, and six years after that to the shore of Muro district in Kii. It then moved by stages to the Kamikura peak at Shingū and the Asuka shrine, and finally to the Ōyunohara at Hongū. There it hung as three moons in an oak tree until a hunter, tracking a wounded boar, saw it and was told: “We are called the Three Kumano Gongen.” Later in the same text the deity divides the land into four quarters for its saving work: Tsugaro in the east, “this mountain” in the south, Hikosan in the west, and the Kumano peak of Izumo in the north.²⁵²⁶ The colophon ascribes the record to the Kumano superintendent Raigon in Kanji 3 (1089). Hikosan here is Kumano’s first landing-place, not a later imitation of it.

Hikosan’s peak doctrine agrees with the legend. The Most Secret Seal and Oral-Transmission Collection describes a mountain of three summits. To the south stands the Zokutai-dake, the lay-form peak, whose gongen has Śākyamuni as its original ground. At the centre is the Nyotai-dake, the woman-form peak, whose ground is the Thousand-Armed Kannon. To the north is the Hottai-dake, the dharma-form peak, with Amida. The spring peak-entry, “called the forward peak,” runs from the Zokutai-dake to the Hōman shrine and is “the ground of the Womb-realm mandala of cause.” The autumn entry, “called the reverse peak,” runs from Fukuchi-yama, whose gongen is Kokūzō, to the Hottai-dake and is “the Diamond-realm mandala of fruit.” The summer peak lies between them as “the numinous peak where Womb and Diamond are practised together.” The text concludes that “the south, from the Zokutai-dake down to the Hōman shrine, is the Womb; the north, from the Hottai-dake down to Fukuchi-yama, is the Diamond; and this peak is the ground of their joint practice.” It was here, it adds, that “the patriarch En accomplished Kinbusen.”²⁷²⁸

The Hikosan Shugen Secret-Decision Consecration Scroll then lays Kumano’s three shrines directly over these peaks. The Shōjōden of Hongū, with Amida as its ground, “rests on the Hottai-dake of the Hiko peak of Chinzei.” Shingū’s Yakushi, “Śākyamuni and Yakushi as one body,” rests on the Zokutai-dake. The Nachi Hiryū Gongen, the Thousand-Armed Kannon, rests on the Nyotai-dake.²⁹ The scroll sets the three shrines as the three kalpas of practice, and it gives the practitioner a rite called “the great matter of the Three Kumano Gongen.” In that rite, “these three shrines are our three buddha-natures”: the Hottai Gongen of Hongū as dharma-body, the Zokutai Gongen of Shingū as reward-body, and the Nyotai Gongen as response-body. In a further teaching on “the four deities of the gongen,” the first, Myōtoku Enman, is placed in Magadha and is Shōjō Daibosatsu (Amida) in Japan. The second, Hokushin, is Kumano Gongen (Yakushi). The third, Daiten, dwells in the Himalaya. The fourth, Hakudai, is the Nachi Gongen (Kannon). Together they guard the four quarters and the four seasons.³⁰ The same scroll places the twelve Kumano Gongen on the practitioner’s tokin cap and maps the three poisons onto the peaks: greed on the Hottai-dake, anger on the Zokutai, and delusion on the Nyotai, the “middle-way peak of true reality.”³¹

The Record of the Hikosan Peak-Entry gives the same triad on the ground. Its lodging list includes the Ganjaku-dake, the same Ganjaku that names the castle in the Kojirō tradition below, as “Three Shrines Gongen, original ground Amida, Yakushi, Kannon.” The Kinbusen Zaō Gongen and the Hakusan Daigyōji of Fukuchi-yama also appear on the route.³² Another passage names “Hikosan Daigongen” together with the Zaō of Kinbusen as gongen whose divine body is the offering-wand.³³ In short, Hikosan presents its gongen as a Kumano triad in Kyūshū. That triad is read onto three summits, keyed to the two mandalas, and walked in the spring and autumn peak-entries. This is ritual ground, not martial ground, and it is the setting for the Denrinbō and Hattengu material in this chapter.

Contrasts to Dewa Sanzan

Dewa Sanzan most certainly did field a standing warrior-monk force; if anything it was larger than Hikosan’s. (Iwahana Michiaki 2017) As a flourishing Shugendō center, Dewa Sanzan held a large cadre of warrior-monks at its peak and gave up its arms in response to Hideyoshi’s sword hunt. Haguro had warrior-monks from the Kamakura period onward.

Armed clergy were the rule, not the exception, for any large medieval mountain-temple complex: Enryaku-ji’s “mountain monks,” Kōyasan’s Kōya-shū, Kinpusen’s Yoshino daishu, Negoro, the Ikkō strongholds, and others all maintained sizable forces for the same structural reasons: extensive tax-privileged estates to defend, policing rights over their domains, chronic sectarian disputes, and the absorption of local warrior-class men into the clergy. The shuto rank that formed the core of these forces was drawn largely from lesser nobility, warrior, and estate-official families, men who already had martial training.

Hikosan fits that general pattern and was not peculiar in having a militia.

At Dewa, Mogami Yoshiaki prayed at Yudono for recovery from illness, and his sister Yoshihime — wife of Date Terumune and mother of Date Masamune — prayed to Yudonosan to be granted children. So the thread to the most famous Tōhoku warrior, Masamune, runs through his mother’s Yudono pilgrimage rather than through Masamune himself. Yoshiaki was the head of the Yamagata Mogami, the Ushū-tandai house that became a roughly 570,000-koku great daimyō after Sekigahara — i.e., the mountains’ chief regional patron — and the patronage continued institutionally, with Mogami Yoshitoshi building a hall in 1618. Going back further, the connection to the warrior order is medieval: in the Kamakura period the complex’s warrior-monks are attested petitioning the bakufu over jitō interference, recorded in the Azuma Kagami. In the Edo period the fame became less about any one warrior and more about scale — under Shōnai-han administration and bakufu prestige the pilgrimage boomed into “Ise in the west, the Oku pilgrimage in the east.”

The Dewa retreat circuit is itself a death-and-rebirth structure — Haguro for the present world, Gassan for the dead and the afterlife, Yudono for rebirth, so that to complete the pilgrimage was to be “reborn.” (Togawa Anshō 1978) That ritual rebirth is the realization the mountains offered any pilgrim, warrior included; there isn’t a recorded individual warrior-enlightenment story similar to that of Aisu Ikō at Udo.³⁴³⁵

Destruction of Hikosan

Hikosan was a combatant in the multi-power Sengoku Kyūshū wars and was destroyed in battle for it. Its lords were the Buzen Sasaki, it allied with Akizuki Tanezane, and in the tenth month of 1581 it was burned by Ōtomo Yoshimune’s forces over a month of fighting, losing many cloisters and much of its strength; it declined further under Hosokawa Tadaoki’s rule. In contrast Dewa’s force was dissolved administratively — disarmed through Hideyoshi’s sword hunt rather than annihilated — and the complex survived to be reorganized under Tendai control in the Edo period.

Hikosan’s militarism got it burned while Dewa’s was absorbed peacefully into the Toyotomi-Tokugawa settlement. Why this happened lies in Kyūshū’s frontier politics, not in one mountain being armed and the other not. Warrior-monks were standard equipment for these complexes, and Hikosan’s distinction is in the violent end its frontier alliances brought, not the presence of a militia itself.

The warrior-monk forces of both complexes were armed clergy organized as mass levies: naginata, bows, infantry numbers, fielded as a body. That is a different institution from a ryūha, which is a named lineage with a founder, a fixed curriculum of kata, transmission documents, and licensing. The ryūha system in that sense is largely a bushi-class development of the late Sengoku and Edo periods; the sōhei phenomenon predates it and runs on a different logic.

Shugendō-influenced Ryūha

Neither Hikosan nor Dewa had a specific ‘school’ in the koryū sense — they had standing militia.

Shugendō sources bear this out by describing yamabushi practice purely as ascetic discipline — the four-seasons peak-entering, the death-and-rebirth austerities, the ten-realms training — never as a martial transmission. Where martial technique does sit in that milieu, it sits as something other than codified ryūha: bōjutsu, for instance, survived among clergy as self-defense and among tengu-and-Shugendō folk performance like lion-dances and planting rites, not as a named, licensed lineage.

The two worlds do meet — just at the level of legend and of individuals rather than institution. First, named ryūha sometimes claim the yamabushi-and-tengu milieu as an origin charter. The tengu-as-sword-teacher motif is the obvious vehicle — the Kurama Sōjōbō teaching the young Yoshitsune, with Hikosan’s Buzenbō among the attending tengu — and in Hikosan’s own case there is a local theory that Sasaki Kojirō learned his heihō from the Hikosan yamabushi.³⁶ But that is a ryūha said to have emerged from the milieu and been carried off by a swordsman, explicitly flagged as a theory, not the complex operating a school.

A Nara example is Hōzōin-ryū sōjutsu, created by In’ei, abbot of the Hōzōin sub-temple of Kōfuku-ji. But that is the personal invention of one cleric that then spread as a bushi art, not the institutional curriculum of Kōfuku-ji’s warrior-monks, and nothing comparable is attributed to either Hikosan or Dewa.

Several Edo period traditions were inspired by Kuramadera. Taisha-ryū is a bushi ryūha that acquired Shugendō coloring through individuals — such as Denrinbō taking on a yamabushi identity and a hattengu devotion — rather than the school belonging to Hikosan shugendō itself.

The intersection of ryūha and Shugendō martial culture is biographical or legendary, rather than institutional. Similarly, in Aisu Ikō’s earlier visit to Udo, shugendō cosmology may have played an important part in the dreams, visualisations, or visitations experienced by kenshi in their founding moments, but those retreats were not part of the formal Shugendō institutional strata.

In contrast, in Kumano-Ōmine there is Kukishin-ryū, an early Edo period bōjutsu tradition, which adopts an increasingly bold shugendō connection based on family history and identity. Its practice is most likely bōjutsu or bō no te derived from Shintō-ryū and Araki-ryū, and its origins were embellished as part of Taishō-era nationalism in the twentieth century.³⁷

End Notes