Yama in Culture
- "Enma face" (閻魔顔, Enma-gao?) is an idiom used to describe someone with a fearsome face.
- "If you lie, Lord Enma will pull out your tongue" (嘘をつけばと閻魔さまに舌を抜かれる?) is a superstition often told to scare children into telling the truth.
- A Japanese kotowaza states "When borrowing, the face of a jizō; when repaying (a loan), the face of Enma" (借りる時の地蔵顔、返す時の閻魔顔?). Jizō is typically portrayed with a serene, happy expression whereas Enma is typically portrayed with a thunderous, furious expression. The kotowaza alludes to changes in people's behaviour for selfish reasons depending on their circumstances.
- Saimyō-ji, a Shingi Shingon Buddhist temple in Mashiko, Tochigi, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan, is the only temple where one can see a statue of a laughing Enma.
Read more about this topic: Yama (Buddhism And Chinese Mythology)
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)