Genshin drew largely on earlier Buddhist literature for his depictions of the nether-realms, but there are some innovative tones to the portrait he presents. This paper attempts to identify a relation between the Ojoyoshu's ranking of sins and its assignment of sinners to specific hellish realms, and the struggle that Genshin was involved in at the Enryakuji during his day. On reading the Ojoyoshu one sometimes has the impression that Genshin had specific individuals in mind when he was assigning sinners to specific realms of the nether-world. In a Noh play, the han'nya mask depicts the intense anger, shame, or jealousy of its wearer. Dojoji, Adachigahara, and Aoinoue.
Extreme emotion can often transform a human being into a demonic entity.
Most remarkable about this transformation is the fact that the shite manages to embody the transition from negativity to positivity in the portrayal of human emotion without ever taking off the han'nya mask. The Japanese word han'nya derives from the Sanskrit term prajna, meaning wisdom. While vijnana is a consciousness directed toward the analysis of phenomena, prajna refers to a more intuitive element, employed by a practitioner to achieve Buddhahood. Getting beyond yugen, we need to rethink the nature of the non-dichotomous soteriology of certain Noh plays, in which sanity and insanity, salvation and despair are inextricably intertwined, and can be expressed in the same facial expression. The tradition of depicting foreigners as oni has actually been a long one in Japanese history, beginning in the late Heian Period.