Dying right after giving birth to your son is irritating,
but imagine afterwards falling into a pool of blood in hell where you are tortured by
demons for an eternity.
How mad would you be at your son for having such a big head?
But don’t worry you’ll get your revenge. The kid’s gonna have terrible birthdays.
In medieval Japan, there was a Buddhist belief that women who died
during childbirth went to the Blood Pool Hell.
Some even said not only women who died in childbirth, but all women went to this hell after death.
It was a lake of menstrual and birthing blood. A gruesome fate.
Even the Christians looked over and were like, “Man, that’s wild” before burning in their lake of fire.
The blood pool had these insects that tunneled into your flesh and sucked your blood.
They feasted on your insides and slurped up your bone marrow like pate.
The women were shackled as demons forced them to drink the blood multiple times a day.
If they refused, the demons would beat them with iron rods like husbands.
So what did women do to deserve such punishment?
The Japanese always wanted to keep things pure.
Basically, anything that made them say “ew” was impure.
Women had that bloody ewwy stuff coming out of them every month.
They said menstrual and birthing blood spilled from women’s bodies and touched the ground,
offending the earth gods.
When women washed their bloody garments in the river, it polluted the water.
The same water that people drank from and Buddhist priests used to make their tea.
And no one wants menstrual tea that often.
How dare women.
They can’t just go around spreading their dirty bodily fluids everywhere without charging for it.
That’s bad business.
Now it did seem wrong that women were born sinful just because they had bodies with leaky pipes.
They didn’t do anything to deserve sin. That was unfair. What were they, Christians?
Well, some wrinkly brained Buddhist monks came up with an answer:
Women must have done some horrible deeds in their past lives,
some Walter White, Homelander s--t,
so they had to be punished in this life by being reincarnated as women.
Otherwise, they would’ve been born as men, obviously. Men’s bodies are not dirty at all.
Sutras are Buddhist scriptures. There are a lot of them.
The one that invented the idea of the Blood Pond Hell is called Ketsubon-kyō 血盆經, the Blood Bowl Sutra.
It was written in China in the late 1100s or early 1200s,
then came to Japan one or two centuries later.
Its popularity exploded in the 1700s like period blood in your underwear.
At first, the sutra and other views about how the female body had cooties circulated inside temples,
to convince monks to keep their hands away from that sweet female flesh.
At some point that kind of talk escaped the halls of the monastery to wander the streets of the actual world.
Even before the sutra became well known, they already had this idea floating around
that it was a sin for a pregnant woman to die before giving birth.
Early in medieval Japan, people were like, “Oh no, she died giving birth? What a family tragedy.”
But later it became, “Oh no, what did she do to cause this to happen?”
So how did this sutra become a bestseller?
You may be tempted to say that it was misogynistic men forcing this disgusting idea upon women,
and smile as feminists throw flaming bras at your feet. But it’s not true.
While history is full of men doing crazy stuff to women,
in this case, it was women who spread the message.
A bunch of cults around the Blood Bowl Sutra popped up,
cults mostly made up of women.
They seemed to really like hearing about how they were going to suffer.
Stories of hell and torture were big hits back then, among men and women.
Nuns in the Edo Period went around Japan carrying scriptures and paintings
that looked like shots from the Saw movies, preaching the good word.
They offered salvation for the right price.
Crowds of women gathered to hear their sermons. Ooh, what kind of torture will I suffer?
Why was this sutra so popular with women? We’re not sure.
Maybe because women liked the idea of being saved from their sins.
Maybe because it gave them more freedom during their periods.
Every month, when a woman bled, she had to stay away from social events.
But there were blood bowl sutra talismans that she could wear to wipe away her pollution,
allowing her to visit holy places and have fun at festivals and religious rituals.
Men died in the battlefield, women died in the birthing room.
The most common cause of death for medieval Japanese women was childbirth.
The second most common cause of death was living in medieval Japan.
The Blood Bowl Sutra was used in rituals to save these dead women, but over time people started using it for more.
At first, the sutra was used in rituals for mothers who died in childbirth,
to save them from the worst swimming lesson ever.
Buddhist monks and nuns recited the sutra for dead mothers.
It was the duty of her family, especially her children, to make sure she didn’t fall into the blood pool.
A lot of these rituals involved the community.
In one ritual, they tied a rope off the side of a bridge,
and people walking by would pull on the rope and make a prayer.
In another ritual, they painted some red dye on a white cloth, or even used a cloth with actual menstrual or birthing blood.
They also wrote some Buddhist scripture on it, and hung it across sticks next to a river,
where strangers walking by could pour water on it.
Over time the red color and the writing would be cleaned.
This kind of tells us that the community also saw it as their
responsibility to save women from the blood pool.
Eventually, these practices were used for dead women in general,
whether they died giving birth or not.
Over time, people started using the sutra even before the mother died,
like preventative religious medicine.
Women copied the sutra while praying to figures like the bodhisattva Jizō, one of the main protectors of women in childbirth.
This was supposed to save you in case you died.
And then, people started using the sutra not just for salvation in hell, but for benefits in this life.
Women wore these talismans inspired by the sutra so they could be around people
and attend festivals even while on their periods. What freedom!
The talismans cleansed whatever pollution was leaking out of them.
Pregnant women also wore them to prevent any problems with the pregnancy or the delivery.
When women died, people buried the sutra with them for protection.
There were a bunch of places in Japan that claimed to be connected to the blood pool,
like this place in Beppu, Japan.
People would throw copies of the Blood Bowl Sutra into these sacred places as part of religious rituals,
which is lucky for us because we’ve found scraps of sutra on the banks of these ponds.
I hope they did some good for those women.
For more Buddhist talk, check out these videos.
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Joey Wall, Chibienyo, Red Threadish, and Chi_the_yaoi_god oh god.
Alright I love you, and spread the knowledge!