A Primer on Japanese Hell Imagery and Imagination - Occidental ...

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Monumenta Nipponica 63:1
preachers of Pure Land faith. Other less common patterns can be traced to different
sects. 91
Fully developed honji suijaku thought, as illustrated in medieval suijaku mandalas,
posited systematic one-to-one correspondences in local cultic contexts.
The cosmologies resulting from each grouping of honji identities repositioned
local cults as central and universal. Some equations within a cult may have
changed over time, reflecting political, ritual, or other needs, but each honji suijaku
system balanced its honji to comprise a fixed mandalic universe, connected
to a specific place or sect. Perhaps assignments of honji to the ten kings performed
a similar function, associating ultimate jurisdiction over the afterlife with
particular sectarian contexts.
Alterations made when copying a continental set of ten-king scrolls now in
the Seikadô Bunko Art Museum, thought to be from the fourteenth century, also
suggest the development of this iconographic universe in Japan. In the original,
a small figure of Jizô floats above Enma, but the set has no other honji-like divinities.
Sixteenth-century Japanese copies belonging to Sôjiji (Wakayama
prefecture) add honji above the other kings. Only three hanging scrolls of the
copy set are extant, but they show the expansion and distribution throughout
other scrolls of images of the six realms; the Seikadô original only indicates the
six realms in the final scroll. Hell also occupies far more compositional space
compared to the original. Takasu Jun labels such innovations rokudô jûô
zu (“paintings of the six realms and the ten kings”). In a set of such
paintings at Chôgakuji (Nara prefecture), he notes, the ten kings, each
with its honji, line up across the top of the scrolls, representing the process of
judgment through time (see color plate 8). Vast scenes of hell and the six realms
below the kings evoke a spatial cosmology, subject to the temporal framework
of judgment, and the scrolls conclude with a bridge leading from Abi hell directly
to a raigô (“greeting”) by Amida and his entourage, welcoming sinners to
the Pure Land. According to Takasu, these images do not merely patch together two
traditions; they reconfigure and reinvigorate them as a mandatory circuit through
hell that ends in salvation—and that audiences can experience vicariously. 92
The inclusion of honji above the kings attest that wisdom and compassion
underlie their seemingly harsh verdicts. As correspondences of originals to manifestations
settled into standard formulae, the importance—and size—of honji
increased. This can be seen in the Jôfukuji set (figures 4 and 5) and reached an
extreme in a fourteenth-century painting of a colossal Jizô appearing to stand
directly on top of Enma’s head. 93 In another, later medieval cult, three buddhas
associated with esoteric Buddhism joined the ten honji of the kings. Eventually
the suijaku completely fell away from the iconography, leaving only images of
91 Yajima 1990, p. 72; and Shimizu 2002, pp. 191–92. Also see Shiju hyaku innenshû, pp. 61–73.
92 See Takasu 1992; Takasu 1993; and Takasu 1999–2000.
93 For a reproduction, see Nakano 1992, p. 65.