Kyōrinrin: The Discarded Scriptures of a Returned Curse

What is Kyōrinrin?

Kyō is a Buddhist sutra. Rinrin means stern and imposing, and it also sounds like the ringing of a bell. Kyōrinrin is the solemn, ringing sutra.

It appears in the middle volume of Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro, Toriyama Sekien’s 1784 collection of household objects turned into yokai, in a run of entries built from the tools of Buddhist temples.

The plate

The whole body is scripture. Rolled sutra scrolls make the limbs; more scrolls are bound upright on the head with a cloth band, like a crown. Folded accordion-style scripture fans out into something like a skirt. The face is made of the torn paper itself, the rips forming eyes, a mouth, and teeth. In its hands it holds a copper bowl-gong of the kind struck during chanting, with a scroll’s wooden rod sticking out like the striker. Around it, scrolls, folded books, and a sutra desk lie scattered on the floor.

The caption

Sekien begins by asking why venerable scriptures should be in such a state. Then he offers an answer, as he does throughout this book, as something he supposed in a dream: perhaps these are sutras read and then discarded by Shubin, the monk upon whom “curses and poisons returned to the one who sent them.”

The phrase comes from Buddhist scripture, and Sekien’s readers would have known the story it points to. In the Taiheiki, the fourteenth-century war chronicle, Shubin is a court monk who loses face to Kūkai — Kōbō Daishi — in a contest of powers before the emperor. Out of resentment he traps the dragon gods of the land in a water jar to bring drought, but one dragon escapes, and Kūkai’s prayers bring the rain. The two monks then turn their rituals on each other, and Shubin’s curse comes back on Shubin.

So the scrolls in the plate are not simply old, unread books. In Sekien’s supposition, they are holy words that were used to wish harm on someone, and then thrown away by the man that harm returned to.

Behavior and abilities

• It is made of scripture. Every part of the body is sutra or scripture.
• It holds a bowl-gong. The instrument of chanting, without anyone to chant.

The caption records no action at all. It explains where the scrolls came from, not what they do.

Weaknesses and countermeasures

None are recorded. The closest thing to a rule in the caption is the one in the phrase it quotes: a curse returns to the one who sends it.

Documented plate and later imagery

Documented plate. Toriyama Sekien, Hyakki Tsurezure Bukuro, 1784: a figure built from sutra scrolls and folded scripture, scrolls tied upright on its head, a torn-paper face, holding a bowl-gong, among scattered scriptures. The caption suggests these are sutras discarded by Shubin, on whom his own curse returned.

Later imagery. Kyōrinrin is now usually described as the spirit of scriptures that went unread — books left in storage, resentful at being ignored, rising up to be studied. That is a natural reading of a creature made of sutras, and it leaves out the one person the caption names.

Our illustration gives it a sharp paper beak, our reading of the torn face. The plate’s own suggestion is darker than neglect: these words were used for something, and they remember what.