Officials of the Afterworld: Ono no Takamura and the Ten Kings of Hell in the Chikurinji engi Illustrated Scrolls

Abstract

Takamurayama Chikurinji engi emaki is a two-scroll emaki preserved at Chikurinji, a Shingon temple in Nyūno, Hiroshima prefecture, and dated to the Muromachi period.The first scroll of Chikurinji engi begins with the story of the founding of the temple by Gyōki; Ono no Takamura's mysterious birth; and the early stages of Takamura's life as a courtier.This paper focuses on the second of the two scrolls, which recounts the death of Takamura's father-inlaw, his tour through hell, and his encounter there with Takamura, identified as the third of the Ten Kings of Hell.In particular, the paper looks into the development of Takamura's hell-legend, as well as the juxtaposition in the second Chikurinji engi scroll of early medieval motifs of hell with the cult of the Ten Kings.My comparison of the scroll with other medieval Japanese visual and literary sources, such as setsuwa, hell paintings, and sculptures of the Ten Kings and Enma, reveals that the emaki illustrates a representation of the afterworld that is typical of images from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

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