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

HIRASAWA: The Inflatable, Collapsible Kingdom 27
thirteen buddhas ( jûsanbutsu ) for mortuary rites, without visual references
to judgment or hell. 94
The late medieval period, reflecting in part the impact of the Mongol invasions
of 1274 and 1281, saw a heightened sense of what was indigenous and an increased
interest in the guardianship of Japan’s kami. Repudiating the fruits of
centuries of self-imposed cultural colonialism, some intellectuals began to
reverse traditional honji suijaku hierarchies, recasting native kami as “originals,”
with buddhas and bodhisattvas as their mere manifestations. This deliberate
localizing of supernatural power extended even to hell. In one story, a Japanese
deity vows that sentient beings in Japan would fall into a Japanese hell so that
they might be saved from foreign hells. 95 Another story relates that the Kasuga
deity similarly provides devotees with a hell under Kasuga meadows and
assists people suffering there, thanks in part to Jizô’s honji relationship to one
of its shrines. 96
Enma’s Jizô identity may lie behind an Edo-era tale of an old woman with an
eye disease who brings her favorite food, konnyaku, to a sculpture of Enma at
Genkakuji . Enma rewards her faith and generosity by exchanging one of
his eyes for hers. Corroborating the story, one of the image’s crystal eyes is
clouded over as if by a cataract, and believers with eye ailments still pile gifts
of konnyaku before the image twice a year. 97 Enma’s willingness to take on our
hardships further interferes with ostensible presumptions of spontaneous administration
of the laws of karma and inevitable retribution.
Sundering Hell
Some of these vagaries, exceptions, and double identities may seem anomalous
or contradictory, but they were, in fact, important components of larger conceptions
of hell. One of the fifteen Shôjuraigôji rokudô-e scrolls is based on a
story in Ôjôyôshû (citing the no-longer-extant Youposai jie jing , Jp.
Ubasoku kai kyô) where a man condemned to hell snaps his fingers three times,
utters praise of the buddha, and is released. 98 In the image, hell’s cauldron cracks;
its waters cool; lotuses bloom, lifting sinners out of hell; and the man is escorted
94 This may initially have been a Shingon innovation, designed to compete with Pure Land rites.
Early jûsanbutsu seem to have added three representations of Dainichi; in the early fifteenth century,
these became Dainichi, Ashuku, and Kokûzô, an esoteric arrangement from the Womb mandala.
See Yajima 1990. Takeda Kazuaki traces the general evolution of this imagery as follows:
ten kings with ten buddhas; ten kings with eleven buddhas; eleven buddhas (the kings vanish);
and finally, thirteen buddhas. Takeda 1997. On the cult of thirteen buddhas, see Watanabe 1989.
95 “Shintô zôzôshû” (manuscript). The text in the second part of “Shintô zôzôshû” is also found
in Sannô shintô hiyôshû, a collection from 1579. For a published version of the passage referred
to here, readers may refer to Sannô shintô hiyôshû, p. 392.
96 See the thirteenth-century Shasekishû 1:6; p. 71; and Morrell 1985, pp. 85–86.
97 See Matsuzaki 1991, pp. 195–98. The image, situated in a temple in Bunkyô ward,
Tokyo, is known as Konnyaku Enma (a pun on konnyaku , a gelatinous, rubbery food made
from a root, and kon’yaku , “to suffer” or “disaster”) or as Migawari Enma.
98 Ôjôyôshû; T 84:76ab.