S P O T ／ SPOT-091

Chōgaku-ji Great Hell Scroll Opening

長岳寺 大地獄絵開帳ちょうがくじ だいじごくえかいちょう

For about forty days each autumn (October 23 to November 30), the temple of Chōgaku-ji on the Yamanobe-no-Michi — Japan's oldest documented road — unrolls a set of nine large painted scrolls in its main hall. The Daijigokue, or Great Hell Scrolls, date from the Edo period and depict, with extraordinary visual force, the full Buddhist cosmology of postmortem judgment: the Ten Kings of Hell presiding over their tribunals, the old hag Datsue-ba stripping the dead at the Sanzu River, the Eight Great Hells (boiling, knife-edged, crushing, screaming, twice-screaming, scorching, twice-scorching, and the endless avici), and finally the Pure Land of Amida. On weekend afternoons during the opening, the head priest performs etoki — the medieval Japanese practice of 'picture-explaining,' walking visitors through the scrolls as a vivid morality drama. Etoki is a living oral tradition that has nearly died out elsewhere; here it continues in the soft autumn light, with the same scrolls that Edo-period villagers stared at five generations ago. Combine with a walk along the Yamanobe-no-Michi past the imperial tumuli for one of Nara's most concentrated days of folk Buddhism.