Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore why narratives and practices focused on the Blood Bowl Sutra, a short, apocryphal text that damns women to a special hell for the sin of polluting the earth with uterine blood, may have appealed to men and women living in the tumultuous years of the Sengkoku era.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore why narratives and practices focused on the Blood Bowl Hell may have appealed to men and women living in the tumultuous years of the Sengkoku era. The short, apocryphal Blood Bowl Sutra (血盆経 Ketsubonkyō, Chns. Xuepenjing) was composed in China sometime around the tenth century. Versions of this text, which damns women to a hell comprised of uterine blood for the sin of polluting the earth with the blood of menses and childbirth, appeared in Japan as early as the late Kamakura period but did not gain currency until the Sengoku era. By the early sixteenth century, graphic descriptions of tortures endured by women in the Blood Bowl Hell appeared in vernacular literature such as otogizōshi and in the paintings utilized by the itinerant Kumano bikuni. Over the course of the sixteenth century, ideas about the Blood Bowl Hell spurred the development of dozens of cults throughout the Japanese islands. These cults offered women and their loved ones the opportunity to counter uterine blood pollution with talismans and merit-making rites.

We know that shrines had been actively promoting their own avoidance protocol regulations (bukkiryō) during the late medieval period, thereby spreading knowledge that ultimately aided in the intensification of uterine blood and other pollution taboos. But is also worth observing the broader political background of increasing concern with pollution. Some scholars have suggested that the spread and intensification of rigid pollution regulations in the Sengoku period stand in great contrast to the uncertain political conditions of the period. May it have been the case that discourses of pollution were especially comforting during periods of political violence and upheaval, when social systems were under great pressure? Expanding on the work of Mary Douglas, some anthropologists, such as Karen and Jeffrey Paige, for example, have suggested that menstrual taboos intensify during times of political instability. Perhaps heightened concerns about the containment of pollution--concerns that made the Blood Bowl Sutra so attractive during this period--emerged in reaction to the social and political volatility of the time. This presentation will explore that possibility.