Zennyo Ryūō

By the third month without rain the pond at the Shinsen’en had pulled back from its own banks, leaving a rim of cracked mud that smelled of hot weed. Twenty priests knelt in rows before an altar in the Divine Spring Garden, reciting the Great Cloud Sutra into air that refused to move. On the seventh day something surfaced beside the altar: a snake five shaku long, carrying on its head a smaller snake the colour of beaten gold, no longer than a hand. The pair slid into the water and were gone. Only four of the twenty men saw it happen.

That is the Konjaku monogatarishū’s account of the summer of 824, and the small gold passenger is Zennyo Ryūō. Emperor Junna had ordered two priests to break the drought. One was Kūkai, newly given charge of Tō-ji; the other was Shubin, of Sai-ji across the city, and the rivalry between them had been building since Kūkai came back from China. The Kojidan tells it as a duel. Shubin went first and produced showers over Kyoto and nothing beyond it. Kūkai promised rain for the whole country, recited for seven days, got nothing, and sat down to work out why. What he saw in meditation was that his rival had used tantric method to capture every dragon of the inner and outer seas and shut them in a pitcher.

One had escaped the net. Kūkai reported to the throne that in the pond there was a dragon called Zennyo who pitied mankind, gold-coloured, about eight sun long, seated on the head of another dragon eight shaku in length. A messenger came from the palace with offerings. When the second seven days ran out the sky broke, and the rain came down so hard the pond overflowed its altar. Kūkai was raised to the rank of bishop for it. The Taiheiki, writing five centuries later, makes the story larger still: a new pond dug in front of the palace and filled with clean water, an invitation issued, a gold dragon eight sun long entering it on the head of a serpent more than nine shaku long, and three days of rain across the whole empire.

The oldest description of the creature predates all of these. The Goyuigō, a record of Kūkai’s last words set down after his death in 835, gives a golden snake of about eight sun riding the head of a dragon of nine shaku, roughly twenty-four centimetres of snake on nearly three metres of dragon, and later writers simply copied it forward. Painters took a different route. From the twelfth century the dragon king appears as a man: a Tang official in a Chinese robe, wearing a hat marked with the character for king, holding a plate of jewels, with a dragon’s tail sliding out from under the hem. The earliest surviving version, a hanging scroll a little over a metre and a half tall, was made by Jōchi, a monk of Mii-dera, and is dated to 1145. It belongs to Kongōbu-ji on Mount Kōya and is a National Treasure. A line drawing at Daigo-ji carries an inscription saying that Chinga copied the Kōya painting in 1201, which suggests how carefully people wanted to get this particular face right.

Behind the Kyoto story sits an older and stranger one, in the hills of southern Nara. Mount Murō is a cluster of long-dead volcanic peaks where cloud catches on the summits and rain runs off the slopes into the fields below, and its caves were held to be the mouths of a dragon’s house. A document of 937 records that a dragon king living there had vowed to protect the country and in particular the temple built at its foot, and was honoured with court rank for the gesture, exactly as a human official would be. The rank was real enough to be promoted: in 867 the court raised the deity of the Murō dragon cave from junior fifth rank lower grade to senior fifth. For a time the temple itself was called Ryūō-ji, the Temple of the Dragon King. Rain prayers were being offered at the cave by 818 and were still being offered eight centuries later.

The Kojidan gives this dragon a name, Zentatsu, and an itinerary that reads like an eviction history. He lived first in Sarusawa pond below Kōfuku-ji, until a palace lady drowned in it. He moved to a pool in the hills above Kasuga and stayed there until somebody threw a pauper’s corpse into the water. Then he went to Murō. A being that commands the weather of an entire country runs from a dead body.

The priest Nittai wanted to see him. He entered the cave and walked three or four chō through the dark, and came out under a blue sky, inside a palace, with a bright light showing through a jewelled window screen. When the screen lifted in a draught he could see a section of the Lotus Sutra lying open on a jewelled table. A voice asked who he was and where he had come from. When he said what he wanted, the voice told him he would see nothing in this place, and sent him back out to a spot three chō from the entrance. There the Dragon King rose out of the ground in robe and crown, and vanished. Nittai built a shrine on the spot, and afterwards, whenever sutras were read there, a black cloud would gather over the cave and spread across the sky until rain fell.

The refusal is the pattern. Another account has the monk Keien meet a beautifully dressed noblewoman on a bridge, her face turned away, who politely asks him for the mudrā that makes a person a Buddha at once. He teaches it to her. She remarks that it is the same one used by the seven former Buddhas, and when he asks to see her face she answers that her shape is so terrible no man can look on it, and that she cannot refuse him either. She rises into the air and extends the little finger of her right hand. It is a claw more than ten shaku long, throwing off light in five colours. Then she is gone.

Whether Zennyo is female at all comes down to one brush stroke. The name is written 善女龍王 with the character for woman, and 善如龍王 with the character meaning “thus” or “like”, the one used to render Sanskrit terms into Buddhist Japanese. Nishida Nagao argued that the woman-character was a copyist’s error and that the original was always 如; the standard esoteric dictionary declines to adjudicate and says either may be used. Every one of the six known paintings of Zennyo in human form shows a man. The dragon is also not, despite the obvious temptation, the eight-year-old nāga princess who attains buddhahood in the twelfth chapter of the Lotus Sutra, and not the Chinese girl Zenmyō who threw herself into the sea and became a dragon to escort a Korean monk’s boat home. No one has been able to link them.

What Zennyo can do is narrow and enormous. He brings rain, not over a district but over a country, and he can be called into any body of clean water that has been properly prepared and properly petitioned. He guards treasure, which is standard work for a nāga: a small lacquered reliquary at Murō-ji, dedicated to him in 1591, holds five relics traced to the lineage of the Eight Patriarchs of Tō-ji.

What he cannot do is tolerate pollution, and he does not confront it. He leaves. He is also entirely dependent on human intermediaries, since the rain comes only when someone with the right training asks in the right form, and the water that overflowed the altar at the Shinsen’en answered nine days of recitation rather than a single prayer. Shubin’s pitcher makes the more awkward point. A dragon king is a thing that can be caught, and Zennyo stayed free of that jar by standing outside Shubin’s reach rather than by being uncatchable. Kūkai seems to have understood how thin the hold was, because once the rain had come he built a dragon out of straw, declared that it was the dragon king, and sent it back to Lake Anavatapta in place of the real one so that the real one would stay.

Something of that survives at the mountain. On the fifteenth of October the villagers at Murō still twist straw into two shapes about five feet long and push maple leaves into the braided cords to serve as scales. One is hung in a tree by the river in front of Ryūketsu Shrine, where the priest reads prayers over it and offers sake, and the other goes into a tree on the temple grounds. Without being told, an onlooker would not recognise either shape as a dragon. Nobody at Murō calls the festival a rain ceremony now, and rain prayers on the mountain stopped being offered some time ago.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Zennyo Ryūō?

Zennyo Ryūō is a dragon king of Japanese Buddhist tradition who controls rain. He is associated above all with Mount Murō in Nara prefecture, where he was believed to live in a mountain cave, and with the Shinsen’en garden pond in Kyoto, where the priest Kūkai is said to have summoned him in 824.

What happened at the rainmaking contest of 824?

Emperor Junna ordered Kūkai and his rival Shubin to end a three-month drought by ritual. Shubin’s rite produced rain only around Kyoto, and according to the Kojidan he had trapped every other dragon in a pitcher. Kūkai petitioned Zennyo Ryūō, the one dragon beyond Shubin’s reach, and after nine days of recitation a storm broke over the country. Kūkai was promoted to bishop as a result.

Is Zennyo Ryūō male or female?

The sources do not agree, and the ambiguity comes from the writing rather than from the stories. The name appears both as 善女龍王, using the character for woman, and as 善如龍王, using a character meaning “thus”. Nishida Nagao argued that the woman-character was a scribal error, and all six known paintings of Zennyo in human form depict a man, though the Genkō Shakusho tells of the dragon appearing to the monk Keien as a noblewoman.

What does Zennyo Ryūō look like?

The oldest account, the Goyuigō of the ninth century, describes a gold-coloured snake about eight sun long riding on the head of a much larger dragon of nine shaku. In painting the dragon king is shown instead as a man in Chinese court robes and a crown bearing the character for king, holding a plate of jewels, with a dragon’s tail visible beneath his hem. The earliest surviving example was painted by Jōchi in 1145 and is a National Treasure held at Kongōbu-ji.

Why does Zennyo Ryūō keep moving between bodies of water?

The Kojidan explains that the dragon abandons water that has been polluted by death. He left Sarusawa pond after a palace lady drowned there, then left a pool above Kasuga after a corpse was thrown into it, and finally settled in a cave on Mount Murō. The pattern is one of withdrawal rather than retaliation.

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