After Minamoto no Yoshitomo was defeated and killed in the Heiji Disturbance, his wife Tokiwa Gozen fled through the snow to Yamato with their three small sons, Imawaka, Otowaka and Ushiwaka. But hearing that her mother had been captured, Tokiwa gave herself up at Rokuhara and begged Taira no Kiyomori for her children's lives. Moved by Tokiwa's beauty, Kiyomori spared them on condition that they become monks.
The youngest, Ushiwaka, was placed at seven in Kuramadera, north of the capital, and studied hard under the master of Tokobo. Ushiwaka was clever, reading sutras by day and devoting himself to study, so that even his teachers admired him.
But around eleven, when he learned he was the son of Yoshitomo, of the main line of the Minamoto, his heart changed. He came to think, "Somehow I will destroy the Heike and fulfill my father's wish," and while pretending to study by day, at night he slipped out of the temple to Sojogatani deep in Kurama and trained alone in arms.
Sojogatani had once been home to many monks, but now it lay in ruins, a fearsome place where tengu were said to live. There Ushiwaka treated the trees as the Heike clan, naming a big tree Kiyomori and a small one Shigemori, and drew his sword and slashed at them. People of later ages told that Ushiwaka was taught the art of war by the great tengu of Mount Kurama (Kurama Tengu).
At sixteen, Ushiwaka met Kanauri Kichiji, a gold merchant from Oshu, and decided to seek the protection of Fujiwara no Hidehira in Hiraizumi. He slipped secretly out of Kuramadera and set off for the east with Kichiji. On the way, at the post station of Kagami in Omi, he performed his own coming-of-age ceremony and took the name Minamoto no Kuro Yoshitsune.
On Mount Kurama there still remain the "height-measuring stone," the "path of tree roots" and the Yoshitsune Hall, said to be linked with his training.