I posted recently about the law of Karma, and remembered today that I had been meaning to post about how it is illustrated in one very well visited place in Hanoi.
In the old presidential compound next to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum, there's a Buddhist temple (well, I think it's a reconstructed one - I don't think it was always there) which looks like this from the outside:
On the inside, it has, shall we say by way of understatement "a lot going on":
Now, I was particularly interested in how Vietnamese temples seemed to mix up Buddhism and Confucian elements to an extreme degree, but that's not the main point of today's post.
In the temple courtyard, there are several posters up illustrating example of the Law of Karma:
which is something I don't recall ever seeing before.
The illustrations alone are eyecatching for their often lurid nature. Cow demon in Buddhist hell features more than once, for example:
And some of the sins were very specific, and modern:
I thought it a little amusing about how quite a few were about not rocking the clerical boat, so to speak:
Just how much trouble have they had with someone "pretending to be a monk to destroy the Buddhism", I wonder.
Being community minded earned good marks:
As did not betraying the government:
Computer viruses get a mention, as does etiquette around Buddha statues:
And doing the right thing by"saints" is important, and even gets rewarded by good looks:
Now, I don't know who is behind this project, and it's a little hard to tell if the illustrations were designed to cause amusement, or not.
It didn't take me long to work out what the illustrations reminded me - the lurid comic books of Jack Chick, which were around when I was in high school (and are very well known in America - his death in 2016 attracted many obituaries):
.png)
Anyway, I don't have anything deep to say about it - in part because I find it hard to tell how seriously the locals in Vietnam (or elsewhere) would take these examples. But it's interesting, nonetheless.
No comments:
Post a Comment