884 elizabeth ten grotenhuis
six realms of rebirth. These unfortunate beings suffer from hunger or
thirst that can never be satisfied because they were lustful or avari-
cious during life, or because their descendants neglected to provide
adequate nourishment at the household altars. In the upper section of
this image, four hungry ghosts flank a front-facing ghost with a dis-
tended belly who holds a begging bowl in its right hand and a severed
foreleg in its left. This hungry ghost has found part of a body, perhaps
while wandering through a graveyard looking for food, but it cannot
eat the flesh and so remains famished. Below, another hungry ghost
lies pathetically on its back, belly distended. Hair is clearly visible on
all these ghosts, a remnant of life that seems to bridge the worlds of
the living and the dead.
Hair—or the lack of it—has specific connotations in the Buddhist
world. Buddhist monks and nuns shave their heads as a symbol of
their renunciation of the world and also, perhaps, to conserve vital-
ity. Bits of hair and nail parings believed to have been those of the
historical Buddha have been enshrined in stūpas or pagodas. The pres-
ence of the Buddha’s relics in these structures ensures the continuing
power and presence of the Buddha in this world. There are also many
examples of the donation of memorial locks of hair to religious institu-
tions. In Japan, hair is sometimes inserted into the cavities of Buddhist
sculptures.
The incorporation of human hair in Japanese Pure Land embroi-
deries did not begin until the Kamakura period, probably sometime
in the late thirteenth century. The practice then gained momentum
and became widespread in the Muromachi period (1333–1573), from
the fourteenth through the early sixteenth centuries, a time of experi-
mentation and fluidity before the onset of sectarian rigidity in the Edo
period (1615–1868). Most of the Pure Land human hair embroider-
ies—and there are scores of them—fall into two general categories, one
emphasizing figurative images and one emphasizing the written word.
The welcoming descent image is more popular by far than the other
type of figurative images that depict the historical Buddha Śākyamuni
and the transhistorical Buddha Amida standing side by side, facing the
viewer. In images of the two buddhas, human hair was customarily
used to work the hair of the buddhas and the edging on their robes.
The other category of Pure Land embroideries focuses on writ-
ten rather than figurative images. The most common written-word
embroidery presents the nenbutsu , the invocation comprising six
Chinese characters pronounced in Japanese as na-mu-a-mi-da-butsu—