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6 Funerary Zen Sōtō Zen Death Management in Tokugawa Japan Duncan Ryūken Williams ‘‘Funerary Zen’’ emerged in the late medieval and early modern periods as a combination of Chinese Chan/Zen, esoteric, and Pure Land Buddhist elements, along with localized death ritual practices. These funerary practices found an institutional base in the government’s temple certification policy of the Tokugawa or Edo period (1603–1868), which required that all families register at a parish temple. At the same time the practice of funerals and memorial services for deceased relatives cannot simply be understood as a response to a government directive but must also be seen as a part of a deep human need for ritualizing death. Death rituals were the central practice at Sōtō Zen parish temples, which flourished from the late sixteenth century to number more than 17,500 temples by the mid-eighteenth century. Beyond the funeral proper, Zen priests performed death rites throughout the year. Memorial services were routinely performed for a period of thirtythree years following a death. Services were also performed for various classes of deceased persons, such as ‘‘hungry ghosts,’’ ‘‘the ancestors,’’ and women and children who had died during childbirth. Large festivals for the dead, such as the summer Obon Festival for the ancestors or the segaki festival for hungry ghosts, marked important moments in the temple’s annual ritual calendar. This preoccupation with ritualizing death was intimately tied to the emergence of the Sōtō Zen school during the late medieval and early modern periods. This article traces this historical development as well as the major themes in funerary Zen. We begin with a some substantial excerpts from an 1857 account of the origins of the Ketsubonkyō (The Blood Pool Hell sūtra), a text introduced by Hank Glassman in Chapter 5. Sōtō Zen priests in the Tokugawa period used the Ketsubonkyō to save women who had purportedly 207 fallen into a special hell, the Blood Pool Hell, to which all women were said to be destined after death. According to this account, in the year 1417, a thirteen-year-old girl, a parishioner of the temple Hosshōji, fell ill as a result of possession. She urgently requested her parents to summon the abbot. Speaking through the girl, the possessing spirit said to him: . . . I am the daughter of Kamakura Hōjō Tokiyori and a nun named Hosshō, the first abbess of Hosshōji. This is why my father Tokiyori, who constructed Hosshōji, named it so. Even though I was ordained as a nun, taking pride in my family background, I did not keep the three disciplines of body, speech, and mind. Not keeping the precepts or doing good, I spent each day foolishly. Unfortunately, time waits for no one, and after six years I passed away. Since the road to hell is not distinguished by whether one is rich or poor, I am currently suffering immensely in the Blood Pool Hell, having descended there upon death because of the evil I committed during my life. This evil karmic destiny caused me to be reborn as a snake with sixteen horns, constantly suffering the ‘‘three heats’’ and falling back into the Blood Pool Hell. . . .1 Once one has been born as a woman, whether one is the daughter of an aristocratic or a daimyō [leading warrior] family, no woman can escape this hell. This is because all women have the pollution of menstrual blood or the impure blood of childbirth. This blood defiles not only the earth and water deities but also all buddhas and kami. For this, a woman falls into the hell of immeasurable suffering after death. The sufferings in this hell involve, first of all, the six times a day we come out of the pool to drink blood. If we refuse to drink it because of its horridness, several frightening demons come and torture us with metal rods before we get thrown back into the blood pool, screaming to no avail. In the blood pool, countless insect-like creatures with metal snouts come to pierce the skin and get into the flesh to suck out the blood before grinding into the bone to feast on the marrow. There are no words that could describe this pain. However, at times, large five-colored lotus flowers appear from within the blood pool, saving some woman or another. Seeing them, one gets envious. Those are women who fell into hell, but, because of...

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