as a deity who arrived in Japan to protect Tendai monks and their monasteries. According to Sujung Kim, the oldest reference to him in such a context occurs in a narrative from Onjōji ryūge-e engi (園城寺龍華会縁起) from 1062. Reportedly when the Tendai patriarch Enchin was returning from his five-year stay in China in 858, he sensed that he is in danger and started to pray, prompting Shinra Myōjin to appear to him as an old man in a boat and inform him that he is a deity of Silla who will protect his practice of Buddhism “until the Buddha Maitreya comes into this world.” A variant from the Taiheiki has him encounter both Shinra Myōjin and Fudō Myōō. Similar narratives about two other deities of similar character, Matarajin and Sekizan Myōjin, are also known. Most likely, the Shinra Myōjin version served as their prototype. In another narrative, Enchin visited a shrine on Mount Song and during a storm encountered a being with an old man's head and a snake's body, identified as a manifestation of Shinra Myōjin. Surviving sources from Enchin's times, including his fragmentary journal and an iconographic scroll he brought from China (Gobu shinkan) do not allude to Shinra Myōjin. Most likely the narrative about their encounter only developed in the late tenth or eleventh century. According to Sujung Kim, its precise origin and early development are difficult to study, but it might have reflected a preexisting folkloric motif. Christine Guth suggests that it might have initially been a way to acknowledge the role sailors from Silla played in Enchin's journey. After the Mongol invasions of Japan, a belief that Shinra Myōjin was a Japanese kami who conquered Silla developed, as documented in Onjō-ji denki. It states that he “became a king of Silla in order to wield Japanese power all over the world.” Bernard Faure argues that the change in the characterization of Shinra Myōjin in both Onjōji denki and another source documenting this tradition, Hachiman gudōkin, can be characterized as a display of “anti-Korean prejudice”, comparable to hostile attitudes also present in the narrative of empress Jingū. Sujung Kim connects the change to the development of the notion of transmission of Buddhism from India through China to Japan, originally developed in the Kamakura period, which marginalized the role of Korea in the process. She also notes that while anti-Korean, or specifically anti-Silla, sentiment was already present