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

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Monumenta Nipponica 63:1
judgment and retribution as occurring in actual places, precisely located in
Buddhist cosmologies, and the experience of punishment as physical. The same
range of sources simultaneously describe hell as provisional. They explain that
delusions arising from attachment, evil deeds, and the resultant karma cause us
to hallucinate or fabricate an entire kingdom dedicated to the task of ascertaining
and administering suitable punishment. We can appropriate or enlist the power
to disassemble hell’s foundations in our minds, thereby vanquishing the entire
bloodcurdling apparatus. These visceral and transcendent conceptualizations
coexisted and competed. As the most extreme example of the suffering incurred
by existence, hell repeatedly was engineered and displayed in texts and images
that attested to its concrete substantiality—and then was systematically eclipsed.
Occupying a relative position within a larger system, hell was always tied to salvation,
but its relationship to salvation shifted over time. This evolution was not
linear. Old forms persisted, died out, and reappeared with new force.
In spite of this continual reconfiguration, consistent premises governed imaginations
of this realm. Distinctions were made between what monks studied and
what they taught to save others, but fundamentally clerics and commoners shared
the same ambiguous paradigms. Hell’s terrors were a standard component of the
worldview of monastics, while, as hell increasingly passed into the public domain
during the Edo period, dynamic, transcendent responses to hell ideology flourished
in the print culture produced and avidly consumed by lay commoners.
Hell’s familiarity bred subversive uses of its structures and led to other spirited
appropriations. Some popular reinventions even came to rival the sophisticated
doctrinal and ritual formulations of generations of Buddhist intellectuals.
Geography
Originating in India, conceptions of hell picked up new attributes and finer delineation
as they migrated across China and Korea. Although the chronological
development of notions of hell in Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist thought on the subcontinent
is difficult to determine, the sparse descriptions in early texts clearly
contain seeds of later elaborations. 2 In Chinese translations of Indian sutras and
commentaries that circulated widely in Japan, hell functioned as part of an
immense cosmology. Its contours vary greatly from text to text; here we will
concentrate on characterizations from the often-consulted fourth- to fifth-century
Buddhist encyclopedia, Apidamo jushe lun
(Jp. Abidatsuma
kusha ron, hereafter Jushe lun). 3
Seven rings of mountain ranges divided by seas surround an enormous mountain
called Myôkôsen (a.k.a. Shumisen ). A vast ocean encompasses
the outer, seventh range. This sea, bounded by an eighth rim of mountains called
Tetsurin’isen (also Tetchisen ), contains four continents in the car-
2 On hell’s early development, see Sadakata 1990, pp. 144–60.
3 On the cosmology described in Jushe lun and Apidamo dapiposha lun
(Jp. Abidatsuma daibibasha ron), see Sadakata 1973. On descriptions of hell’s location in other
texts, see Ishida 1985, pp. 58–65.