Dazu Rock Carvings, Chongqing

Within the region around Chongqing, Dazu is famous for its historical rock carvings; among the Dazu rock carvings, the Southern Song sculptures of Baodingshan are the best preserved; and in the middle of the Baodingshan picture program, a hellish panorama stretches for twenty meters along the thirteen-meter-high cliff face. A local tantric Buddhist by the name of Zhao Zhifeng (b. 1159) devoted his life to this elaborate monument which is now a World Heritage Site, and one of the reasons Baodingshan is such a useful site is because Zhao Zhifeng divided the cliff face into particular themes such as Huayan Buddhism, visions of the Pure Land and, most significantly for us, the courts of hell. Uniformly seated in a row, the ten hell kings preside over all manner of physical retribution as sinners are beaten, boiled, crushed and dissected. The inscribed texts warn the viewer to embrace virtue and study the dharma lest this nightmare become realized for them. And amidst these horrors stands a life-sized Zhao Zhifeng himself with his eyes closed and his hand pointing back toward the carnage. On either side of him, an inscribed text repeats the basic motif of these hell scrolls: