Page 209 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

208 cat. 114
Scenes of Hell, c. 1849,
two hanging scrolls
from set;
ink and color on paper,
3
each 157 x 87 (6i /4 x 34 V 4),
Chótokuji, Tokyo

multitude of Buddhist sins undergo forms of torture that would exhaust even Dante's imagination.
The function of these paintings, as illustrations in the sermons of popular preachers, helps to explain
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their degree of dramatic and even violent excess. Although there is little new here in terms of doc-
trinal content, the fascination with the fantastic and the grotesque, the sheer pleasure taken in the

spectacular, belongs very much to the urban culture of display that distinguished the era.
A similar sense of cosmic drama and visual extravagance is found in the Rakan sculpture from
Rakanji (cat. 115) and in Kano Kazunobu's Five Hundred Rakan paintings (cat. n6).The cult of the Five
Hundred Rakan was an Edo phenomenon. Although the iconography was known to Japanese artists of
the Kamakura (1185 -1333) and Muromachi (1392 -1573) periods who studied Song-dynasty Chinese
paintings, the cult gained momentum in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The term
ralean (Sanskrit: arhat) refers to a disciple of the Buddha, and the group of five hundred indicates those,
described in the opening chapter of the Lotus Sutra, who achieved instantaneous enlightenment upon
hearing the Buddha preach at India's Vulture Peak. The popularity of the cult was due to a compounded
exoticism. These legendary sages of ancient India, their curiously foreign features and respective