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Visions Of Hell, John Wilson

Honors Program Theses and Projects

This creative thesis addresses paintings and other visual representations of different Buddhist Hells and responds to them through written poetry. Visions of Hell is a compilation of eight poems inspired by several of the many Buddhist Naraka, or Hells. These “ are not the traditional “Hells” one might imagine today, if anything, they were closer to our notion of Purgatories. Each hell is reserved for specific types of sinners —the type or crime dictating the appropriate hell to inhabit. However, this causal relation, typically present in works of Buddhist art, is not used in the poems. This compilation narrates the …