Embracing Death and the Afterlife: Sculptures of Enma and His Entourage at Rokuharamitsuji

Abstract

This dissertation investigates a sculptural group of Enma and his entourage that was once enshrined in an Enma hall located within the Kyoto temple Rokuharamitsuji precinct, and hopes to highlight the role that significant yet understudied sculptures played in the development of the cult of Enma and the Ten Kings in premodern Japan. Rokuharamitsuji is of great importance to study the cult of Enma and the Ten Kings not only for its rare early sculptures of Enma and his two assistants created in the thirteenth century when the cult began to flourish in Japan, but also for the later addition of a seventeenth-century Datsueba sculpture, which reveals the evolution of the cult through its incorporation of Japanese popular belief. This study examines how the Rokuharamitsuji sculptural group presented images of hell within a designated space and conveyed messages of salvation to their beholders, responding to the environs of the salvation-oriented temple. It demonstrates that historical, geographical, and cultural attributes of the temple’s surrounding area, namely Rokuhara (a field of skulls), strengthened the belief in Enma and the Ten Kings and contextualized the cult in combination with another belief in Datsueba.