The Inflatable, Collapsible Kingdom of Retribution: A Primer on Japanese Hell Imagery and ImaginationCaroline Hirasawa

Excerpt

Imaginations of hell appeared in Japanese literature, painting, and performance beginning in the classical period. Gruesome depictions and accounts of an infernal afterlife cautioned laymen to lead upstanding lives, promoted rites on behalf of sufferers, and exhorted monks to obey the precepts. Narrations of an infallibly fair process of judgment reassured and threatened that, whatever we may get away with in this world, mechanisms ensuring perfect justice await us in the next. Postulations that we determine our own misery in hell guaranteed redress; an experience of the pains we inflict on others in life rebounds in the afterlife.

Such explications ascribed management of the process of retribution to both external and internal forces. Numerous characterizations of damnation in the Buddhist canon set out threats combined with moral instruction; they describe 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.