Title: Daikyougoakuzue (Illustrated Guide to the Five Evils of the Great Sutra), 1848. On Impurities and the Afterlife, Vividly Illustrated, with a Complete Kusozu Cycle
Author: Shousan; Illustrated by Hatta Kanehiko
Publisher: Kyoto
Condition: Very Good
A late Edo Period, mid 19th century edition of Shousan’s Daikyougoakuzue, an Illustrated Guide to the Five Evils of the Great Classics.
This text revolves the concept of Kleshas, also known as mental states which cloud the mind, and can manifest in negative actions. The key impurities, also known as poisons or hinderances, are as followed: The Impurity of Age, The Impurity of Desire, The Impurity of Living Beings, the Impurity of Thought, and the Impurity of View.
As such, this text explores what can happen to those who tread upon these impurities, and fail to walk off that path, thus damming themselves to Naraka.
There are 48 full-page woodblock illustrations throughout, with many scenes of the various realms of the afterlife, including some grisly scenes in the Hell Realms, with various souls being tortured in different, excruciating ways.
The first volume also begins with a fully illustrated series of the Nine Stages of Decay, with the series of images known as Kusozu in Japan.
A Buddhist meditational practice, one must imagine and observe the gradual decompostition of a dead body. The setting for the nine stages is outdoors, where a corpse would be left exposed to decay in a field, graveyard, or charnel ground.
The history of the meditation on this process of bodily decay in fact originates with Early Buddhism, in India, before coming to Japan. Early lists can be found in the "Sutra on the Samādhi Contemplation of the Oceanlike Buddha," and the "Discourse on the Great Wisdom".
Buddhist monks in Japan would use this contemplation on a decaying corpse as a monastic practice to reduce their sexual desires or reduce one’s attachment to their own body.
The nine stages are as such: Distention, Rupturing, Exudation of Blood, Putrefaction, Discoloration and Desiccation, Consumption by Wildlife, Dismemberment, Reduced to Bones, Reduced to Ashes.
As the stages would imply, the depictions are morbid and gruesome but serve as an important meditational practice in regard to death.
The colophon states this set was printed in the fifth year of the Koka Era.
Three volumes in quarto, (22.5 x 15.5 cm), 53, 36, 29 leaves
These volumes are in very good shape, with some rubbing and wear to the binding. There is some soiling throughout, and many of the pages are worn.