Dayisun Tenger

A horse stands harnessed under an open sky, and the man on its back is dressed for a fight he has not yet started. Helmet, armour, a bow resting in its case at his hip, arrows in the quiver, a sword. He is not a khan and he is not a hero from a song. He is one of the tngri, the heavenly powers of the Mongols, and the only thing his name tells anyone is what he is for. Dayisun means enemy. He is the god of the enemies.

That sounds more sinister than it is. Dayisun Tenger does not belong to the enemy. He deals with them. The Mongols counted ninety-nine tngri above them, a crowded heaven with a power for nearly every concern of a herding and riding people, and a handful of those powers were horsemen. Dayisun Tenger is one of that mounted company, and his office is protection in war. His name turns up in three forms that say much the same thing: Dayisun, the enemy; Dayisud, the plural, the enemies; and Dayičin, the warrior.

Nobody recorded where he came from. There is no birth, no parentage, no tale of how a sky power took up arms. He is simply there in the prayers, already mounted, already asked for. What the record holds is worship rather than story: texts of invocation, read aloud by someone who needed him, calling him down to guard the speaker’s people and scatter whoever threatened them. A reader standing in the cold with the page in his hands, wind pulling at the felt behind him, asking a rider in the sky to come between the camp and its foes. That was the god doing his ordinary work.

The work had a harder edge. Captured enemies were sometimes sacrificed to him. No surviving account lingers on how or how often, and none needs to. A raid ends, the prisoners are counted, and one of them is not kept for ransom or for labour. He is given to the power that was asked for the victory. The exchange is plain enough. A god who is paid in enemies is expected to deliver enemies.

Then the religion around him changed. From the late sixteenth century the Mongols took up Tibetan Buddhism in earnest, and the old war gods were neither thrown out nor left alone. They were kept, tidied, and given Buddhist paperwork. Dayisun Tenger got some of the best. The Fifth Dalai Lama, the most powerful churchman in Tibet in the seventeenth century, composed invocations to him. A god who had taken prisoners of war as offerings was now addressed in the measured language of a monastery, and some of what is said about him afterwards is likely the church’s colouring rather than the steppe’s. Tibet had its own class of enemy gods, armed protectors who ride out against a person’s foes, and the Mongol rider and the Tibetan ones sat comfortably side by side.

His appearance is the least personal thing about him. The Mongol war gods share a wardrobe. Painted or described, they come as mounted warriors with helmet, armour, cased bow, quiver, sword, and a horse hung with fine trappings, and telling one from another can be close to impossible. Sülde Tenger, the god bound up with the army’s standard and its fighting spirit, is regularly taken for him and he for Sülde. The shaman deity Dayan Deerh rides in the same gear and is told apart only by his headdress, a crown of feathers and mirrors where the others wear a helmet. Paintings of such riders have been claimed for Geser Khan, for Chinggis Khan, and for the Chinese war god Guan Di, sometimes all three for the same canvas. These gods traded faces easily. Dayisun Tenger has no mark that is his alone.

What survives of his cult on paper is small. A fragment of a manuscript on the worship of the Dayisud Tngri, kept in an ethnographic museum in Antwerp, is among the few physical witnesses, and it is a fragment. Paper burns, monasteries were emptied, and a war god’s prayers were never the texts most carefully saved.

His power is narrow and exact. He guards, he fights, he breaks the people who come against those who call him. He does not make the grass grow or the mares foal, and no one asked him to. His limits follow from the same narrowness. He has no story to carry him, so he lives only as long as someone recites the text. He has no face of his own, so he can be absorbed into Sülde, or Geser, or any other rider in armour, and nobody watching the painting would know. And he depends on enemies. A god named for them has nothing to do in a quiet year.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Dayisun Tenger?

Dayisun Tenger, also written Dayisun Tngri, is a Mongolian war god with a protective role. He is one of the mounted deities among the ninety-nine tngri, the heavenly powers of Mongolian religion. People called on him to guard them against their enemies in wartime.

What does the name Dayisun Tenger mean?

Dayisun is the Mongolian word for enemy, and tenger or tngri means a heavenly god, so the name means roughly the god of enemies. He is also called Dayisud Tngri, using the plural, and Dayičin Tngri, using the word for warrior. The name describes his job, which is dealing with the foes of the people who worship him.

Were people sacrificed to Dayisun Tenger?

Yes, captured enemies were sometimes sacrificed to Dayisun Tenger. The record does not describe how the sacrifices were carried out or how often they happened. They fit his role as a war god who was asked for victory and protection.

What does Dayisun Tenger look like?

Dayisun Tenger may appear as a warrior on horseback. He shares the standard look of the Mongolian war gods: helmet, armour, a bow in its case, a quiver of arrows, a sword, and a richly harnessed horse. He has no feature that belongs to him alone, which is why he is often confused with Sülde Tenger.

How is Dayisun Tenger connected to Buddhism?

Dayisun Tenger was kept as a protector after the Mongols adopted Tibetan Buddhism from the late sixteenth century. The Fifth Dalai Lama composed invocations to him. Some features of the god as he is known today probably come from that Buddhist reworking rather than from older Mongolian belief.

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