What Is the Blood-Pond Hell — From the Blood Bowl Sutra to Beppu's Hot Springs

The damned sinking, inch by inch, into a dark-red pool of blood — the "Blood-Pond Hell" is among the most vivid scenes ever drawn in hell scrolls. This article traces its meaning and origin — reaching as far as the Blood Bowl Sutra and Beppu's hot springs — from a Buddhist and folkloric view.

What is the Blood-Pond Hell

The Blood-Pond Hell is the traditional place where the damned are sunk into a pool clouded red like blood and made to suffer. Struggling but unable to climb out, swallowed by the red water — this figure has been drawn again and again as a stock scene of the hell scrolls.

The red of the blood is said to reflect the blood one caused to be shed in life, and the weight of the lives one wounded. The Blood-Pond Hell is thought to be not merely a fearsome pool, but a visible form of the principle of cause and effect: that deeds of wounding others remain as the color of that blood. For where it sits within the wider map of the hells, see also What Are the Eight Great Hells.

Its origin and how it was told

The image of the blood pond grew within the view of hell set out in the scriptures and within the didactic tales that surround it. The scene of sinking into red water joined with old dreads around life and blood, giving rise to varied traditions region by region. Such tellings are said to reflect, in vivid color, the view of life and death of each era and its notions around blood.

There are various accounts, but common to all is the gaze that grasps the red of blood as a symbol of "a weight that must be atoned for."

The Blood Bowl Sutra and notions about women

Unavoidable in speaking of the Blood-Pond Hell is a text called the Blood Bowl Sutra (Ketsubonkyo). A small sutra of just over four hundred and twenty characters, it is said to have been preached to save women held to have fallen into hell through the impurity of blood. It spread in Ming- and Qing-era China and took on a distinct development in Japan from the Muromachi period on.

In the Japanese Blood Bowl Sutra, the blood of childbirth was at first the issue; in the Edo period menstrual blood was added, and in time it came to be preached that "any woman at all falls into the Blood-Pond Hell." This was a doctrine born of the fusion of an old notion of blood defilement — that the blood of birth and menstruation pollutes the gods of land and water — with the Buddhist view of women as unclean.

It must be added, for clarity, that such teachings are historical, heavily reflecting that era's notions of blood impurity and its view of women. They are scarcely believed today, and the tradition is said to survive only in a very few places, such as Shosenji temple in Chiba. It is a passage worth grasping, as fact, for understanding the history of the Blood-Pond Hell.

The picture-preaching of the Kumano nuns

Those who carried the tales of the Blood Bowl Sutra and the Blood-Pond Hell from village to village were women religious called the Kumano nuns (Kumano bikuni). Holding up a single painted scroll, the "Kumano Kanshin Jikkai Mandala," they preached the scenes of hell and paradise to the people by picture-preaching. Within that mandala, the figure of a woman sinking into a blood pond is clearly drawn. This work of conveying the underworld not through letters but through picture and voice became a great force in rooting the image of the Blood-Pond Hell widely among ordinary people.

The 'Blood-Pond Hell' of hot springs

As represented by the "Blood-Pond Hell" of Beppu, Oita, hot-spring sites across the land have springs bearing the name of hell. Beppu's is a pool dyed red by iron-oxide-rich hot mud welling up from the strata; it is designated a national scenic site and even called Japan's oldest natural "hell." Records show the custom of the "Beppu hell tour" already existed in the Edo period. These are not hell itself, but names that overlay hell's ferocity onto an earthly landscape. For the difference between hell and paradise, see also The Difference Between Hell and Paradise.

Yurusen's world and the blood pond

Yurusen is a private app for filing "the people you cannot forgive" into a ledger of judgment and passing verdicts. When we put into words a memory of being wounded by someone, we quietly gaze on the very thing the Blood-Pond Hell has always conveyed — the weight of wounding and being wounded.

The forms of those fallen into hell are gathered on the Wraith Codex page. Go and find, there, the "type" that sinks into the red pool.