The pantheon · The Six Realms of Rebirth
Dizang
地藏 · Dizang (Wade-Giles: Ti-tsang)
Buddhist
Bodhisattva of the Great Vow
The bodhisattva who vowed to empty the hells before accepting buddhahood, revered across East Asia as the compassionate guide of beings trapped in the lowest realms of rebirth.
- Portfolio
- salvation of the dead · vows · protection of travellers and children · the hell realms
- Observance
- In East Asia his festival falls on the thirtieth day of the seventh lunar month, near the Ghost Festival, when rites for the dead and for beings in the lower realms are performed.
How to recognise them
Unlike most bodhisattvas he is shown as a shaven-headed monk rather than a crowned prince. He carries a ringed staff (khakkhara) whose jingling rings warn small creatures underfoot and force open the gates of hell, and holds a wish-fulfilling jewel that lights the darkness of the underworld. He is often seated on a lotus or a lion-like mount.
Dizang (Ti-tsang, 地藏) is the Chinese name for Kshitigarbha, whose Sanskrit name means 'Earth Store' or 'Earth Womb.' He is famous above all for a vow recorded in the sutra devoted to him: he will not become a buddha until every hell is emptied and all suffering beings are saved. Because that task is effectively endless, his compassion is read as effectively without limit.
East Asian devotion links him to the story of a monk who descended into the underworld to rescue his mother from torment, and Dizang became the great patron of the dead. Families invoke him during funerals and memorial rites in the belief that he can ease a departed relative's passage through the realms of rebirth and lighten the weight of past deeds.
His association with the underworld places him within the same imaginative territory as the syncretic Ten Kings of hell, but the two are different in kind. The Ten Kings are judicial officials modelled on an imperial bureaucracy; Dizang is a Buddhist bodhisattva who works to release beings from that system rather than to administer it. He stands at the gate as a rescuer, not a warden.
Nearby
Written from
- The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism — Stephen F. Teiser, 1994
- Sutra of the Great Vows of Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva (Dizang Pusa Benyuan Jing)
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