That’s all I gotta say. Well, not really. “Spider’s Thread”’s author point of view of Hell is quite colourful if you ask me. I think at this point, I’d rather have Kandata’s Hell in black and white… hmm… that makes it even scarier.

It’s defnitely not buddhism. At least buddhism tells me that you cannot just go to heaven by clinging onto a spider thread, ie. repent for all your killings by just saving a spider. That’s just too convenient. But then it works in christianity though.

In the source story of this a Buddha is stroling along paradise and comes upon a flowerpond through which he can look down to hell.
There he sees Kandata and takes pity in him, because of his one good deed (sparing the spider) and thus orders a spider to let down a thread into hell. The thread was, even though it always seemed to snap every minute, made so that it would hold Kandata at every time, as long as he retained a part of goodness.
The rest we saw in the episode, too, he prefered to be a selfish idiot and pushed the other souls down the thread…which made him loose his chance.

I think the original moral was something like ‘You have to retain at least a piece of goodness, no matter how terrible your existence may become.’

I think this could be considered almost compulsery reading throughout Japan, or at least most Japanese fill in the blanks when you see the glistening spider and the round window to a brighter place up above.
But of course…for people with Christian background like most of us it’s a bit different.

In contrast, the reform movement called Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) Buddhism, which contains most of the modern traditions of which Zen and the Tibetan tradition are the most visible in the Western World, has a large focus on teaching the laity, although even here there is a strong emphasis on monastacism. The biggest difference is the Boddhisatva vow that all Mahayana Buddhists take in which the aspirant vows not to enter Nirvana until all sentient beings have been saved.