What Is the Mountain of Needles — The Sword-Leaf Forest of the Crushing Hell

"There is a mountain of needles in hell" — it's a saying most of us hear at least once as children. The image of being made to climb a mountain of blades barefoot has long been passed down as a symbol of hell's torment. This article traces its origins and meaning, back to the very hells set out in the scriptures, from a Buddhist and folkloric view.

What is the mountain of needles

The mountain of needles is the tradition of the damned being made to climb a peak bristling with countless needles and blades. With every step the feet are torn, yet they cannot stop climbing — and that suffering has been told as one of the defining scenes for the severity of the place called hell.

In Buddhist teaching, the torments of hell are received in accord with one's conduct in life. The mountain of needles, too, is thought to be not a tale merely to stoke fear, but a visible form of the principle of cause and effect: that the recompense for wounding others returns, one day, to one's own body.

"Mountain of needles" is a folk name — which hell in the scriptures

In fact, "mountain of needles" is not a formal hell-name set out as such in the scriptures. Torments of mountains of blades and forests of swords are most often told of in the Crushing Hell (Samghata), one of the eight great hells set out in the texts. Sword-trees and blade-mountains are also counted among the sixteen minor hells attendant on the great ones.

In folk belief, apart from distinctions among individual hells, the name "mountain of needles" came to be widely loved as a plain image standing for hell itself. Even to those who could not read, a single mountain of blades could convey "the terror of hell" — and that plainness let the folk name take root. For the whole map of the hells, see also What Are the Eight Great Hells.

The Crushing Hell and the sword-leaf forest — lured by beauty

The Crushing Hell is said to be where those who piled up killing, theft, and lust fall. Within it stands a forest called the "sword-leaf forest," where every single leaf is a blade.

Its torment is not merely being made to climb. Atop the blade-leafed trees, an illusion of a beautiful person appears and beckons. Lured, the damned climb, and the blade-leaves cut them all over. When at last they reach the top, the same illusion now appears below the tree, and they try to descend and are cut again — those bound by the attachment of lust are said to climb and descend endlessly, bleeding without end. The Crushing Hell is also said to hold a torment of being crushed between iron mountains that close in from both sides.

The Ojoyoshu and hell scrolls — how the image was handed down

It was the Ojoyoshu, written by the Heian-era monk Genshin, that is said to have made such scenes of hell widely known in Japan. Vividly detailing the torments of hell, this work greatly influenced the hell scrolls that followed.

In time, mountains of blades and forests of swords came before people's eyes again and again, through hell scrolls and the picture-preaching of the Kumano nuns. The mountain of needles took deep root within temple picture-preaching and didactic tales as an icon that taught the recompense of good and evil.

What the mountain of needles conveys

Why has such a painful scene been handed down at all? Because the tales of hell were not mere horror stories but mirrors for reexamining how we live. When one pictures the mountain of needles, one cannot help but look back on oneself and ask, "Have I wounded anyone with a blade of my own?" Just as the sword-leaf forest mirrors the attachment of lust, the mountain of needles, too, has gone on telling — in the very form of pain — the law of cause and effect: that a deed which wounded another returns, one day, to the soles of one's own feet.

Yurusen's world and the mountain of needles

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 the behavior that wounded us, we quietly reexamine the very thing the mountain of needles has always conveyed — the weight of harm and its recompense.

The forms of those fallen into hell are gathered on the Wraith Codex page. Go and find, there, the "type" that climbs the mountain of needles.