Open a portal to the underworld at these Buddhist ‘hell parks’

30.10.2023 - 19:41 / nationalgeographic.com / Art

Not all Buddhist temples are Zen-like experiences with manicured gardens and meditative art. In countries like Thailand and Singapore, travelers can visit Buddhist “hell parks.” Once used to warn parishioners about the punishments that awaited them after a life of sin, hell gardens are now more like B-movie horror theme parks.

Guests creep past life-size plaster dioramas and gruesome statues that show demons torturing humans who were reborn into the lowest Buddhist realm of existence. In some depictions, screaming sinners are boiled alive in peanut oil in a giant wok..

Today, families come to popular parks such as Hell’s Museum in Singapore for a kitschy good time (think bug-eyed selfies as they pretend to be chopped in half). But these gruesome illustrations of the afterlife historically had spiritual importance, and they provide a deeper understanding of perceptions of death and the afterlife in Asian cultures.

Buddhism, like Christianity and other religions, often uses art to relay information to worshippers, especially illiterate ones. According to John Skutlin, whose anthropological work in Japan has covered views of devils and hell across cultures, “conceptions of the afterlife have long been mined by artists for their rich imaginative potential. Buddhism, with its roots in Hinduism, is no exception.”

Buddhist texts and art traditionally depict the cyclical nature of the universe as a wheel containing six worlds. “While the upper levels are surely magnificent, it is the lurid depictions of the lowest realm of hell—known as Naraka—that have produced the most shocking and fascinating artworks,” Skutlin says.

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In early Buddhist texts, Naraka is described as a dark underworld ruled over by Yama, the god of death and justice, according to the Hindu Vedas. Around the first century B.C., the concept of multiple hells within Naraka took hold with increasingly creative and gruesome descriptions of the agonies within each. The Devaduta Sutta, for example, details a level called Excrement, where torturers with needle mouths bore holes into your marrow.

Artistic depictions of Buddhist hell also grew more vivid over the centuries. In Tibet, Yama became a monstrous figure with a fanged red face and crown of skulls, while a 13th-century Japanese scroll shows demons wielding hammers and tongs in a sea of fire. “These graphic depictions served as both spectacle and as inducements to live a moral life, or else suffer ghastly consequences,” Skutlin says.

In line with this tradition, some small temples in Japan, Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam erected educational dioramas of scenes from Buddhist hell, often with elements of local