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Codifying Horror: Visual Jurisprudence and the Didactic Drama of Sin in the Kamakura Hell Scroll (96793)
Session: On Demand
Room: Virtual Video Presentation
Presentation Type:Virtual Presentation
This paper examines the 12th-century Japanese Hell Scroll (jigoku-zoji) as a socio- legal instrument within Kamakura Buddhist art. It argues that its visceral imagery codified moral precepts and karmic retribution as lay jurisprudence for illiterate populations. The visualisation of Buddhist ethics through gruesome punishments functioned as a material extension of the period’s legal-religious syncretism, mirroring the bakufu’s hybrid governance that combined statutory codes with moral didacticism. Hell Scroll’s stylistic shift from Heian idealism reflects doctrinal imperatives and the strategic use of horror as social control, the latter reinforcing shogunal authority through fear of divine judgement. Its synthesis of Pure Land scripture, Shinto motifs, and Chinese aesthetics served as embodied legal pedagogy, translating abstract karmic laws into visual deterrents. This analysis situates the scroll within broader discourses on the visual jurisprudence of material culture. Where art objects enforce normative systems through affective, rather than textual, means, the piece’s didactic function illuminates historical intersections of religious art, moral codification, and state power, inviting comparison with Chinese Diyu tu and later Edo- period rokudō-e to trace transcultural legal-visual syncretism. Ethnographic methods applied to nodal sites such as Osorezan shed insight on the material, artistic, and religious networks of performative legality. The formalisation of typographical punishments in visual tropes functions as standardised legal pedagogy at the interface between canonic and vernacular Buddhism. Such approaches bridge Buddhist art history with a growing body of critical legal scholarship on affective governance contingent on “ocular resources for justice” and expand the discipline’s engagement with normative visuality.
Authors:
So Yin Tam, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
About the Presenter(s)
So Yin Dilys Tam is a PhD student at The University of Chicago focusing on the nexus of art history and law.
Connect on Linkedin
https://hk.linkedin.com/in/dilys-tam-212193181
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