There may indeed be "more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of" in human philosophy, as Hamlet told faithful Horatio, but when it comes to hell, the human imagination needs little prompting. From Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" to the Bible itself, hell and its tempting concomitant, sin, have always been set more vividly before our eyes than virtue and its heavenly rewards.
"Paradise and Hell Depicted," a new exhibition of Buddhist paintings showing at the Idemitsu Museum of Art until June 2, shows that this preoccupation with the more fearful of mankind's purported afterlife alternatives isn't the exclusive preserve of fire 'n' brimstone Christian preaching.
Indeed, those visitors familiar with Western depictions of hell and its tortures will recognize much in this handful of exquisite early Buddhist works, produced during the Nara to Muromachi periods (eighth-16th centuries). The two scrolls of "Ten Kings of Hell and Scenes of Punishment" show the tortures of the damned: Sinners burdened with stones are forced to climb over a molten lake, others are frozen into a sea of ice; some are pounded in a mighty pestle by powerful demons, yet others are ingeniously dismembered.