Hounji Temple: A Dragon Bone, a Tengu Claw and Yang Guifei’s Mirror

According to the story associated with Hounji, a mysterious woman once appeared before a Shinto priest and entrusted him with a mirror, telling him that it should be taken to Chichibu.

The priest eventually left it in the care of an old man.

Years later, when Dōin arrived with the Kannon associated with Yang Guifei, the old man came forward and handed him the mirror.

Then he explained who he really was.

Here the story becomes something you can look at through glass. The dragon has departed, but the teeth remain.

They also invite an obvious question: what is the bone actually from?

A shark jaw has been suggested, but I could not find a published scientific examination confirming that identification.

The tengu claw was another matter.

Tengu are supernatural beings from Japanese folklore, often associated with mountains. Finding one of their claws in Chichibu would therefore have been unusual, but at least geographically appropriate.

In 2022, the temple’s priest offered a less supernatural explanation.

The tengu claw is probably a shark tooth.

Speaking to the Sankei Shimbun, the priest said it was thought to be a fossil tooth from megalodon, a giant shark believed to have lived around 20 million years ago. That seems to leave the animal with a rather serious problem of location. Why a shark, here in the mountains?

Around 15 million years ago, the Chichibu Basin lay beneath the sea. Fossils of sharks, whales, turtles and other marine life survive in its deposits—traces of a landscape very different from the wooded hills surrounding the temple today.

Whoever first looked at this strange triangular object and called it a tengu claw was probably wrong.

But impressively wrong.

The priest is more generous. “People imagine the mysterious within the limits of what they know,” he said. “To people at the time, it was unmistakably a dragon or a tengu.”

What looked like evidence of a mountain monster might instead be a trace of Chichibu’s ancient sea.

The Saigoku pilgrimage has 33 temples. Bandō has another 33. Chichibu has 34.

33 + 33 + 34 = 100.

The arithmetic fits on one line. The walking does not.

Together, these circuits form the Japan Hundred Kannon pilgrimage. The 1536 inscription provides evidence that the three were already being linked by that time.