Tradition / Region: Buddhist Lore, Japanese Mythology
Alternate Names: Hyaku-headed Fish
Category: Fish
The Myth
Long ago, Shakyamuni Buddha traveled with his monks along the banks of a great river. There, fishermen hauled up an enormous fish from the water. It was so vast that hundreds of people were needed to drag it ashore. When the crowd gathered, they saw that the fish bore the heads of one hundred beasts—camel, cow, horse, boar, sheep, dog, and many more—each head crying out in suffering.
The Buddha approached the fish and spoke to it. He asked where the one who had guided it now resided. The fish answered that she had fallen into the hell of unending torment. Those who heard this trembled, and Ananda asked the Buddha what sin could have brought such a fate.
The Buddha then told of the fish’s former life.
In an earlier age, there lived a brilliant youth born into a learned family. Though gifted with wisdom, he followed his mother’s urging to deceive his teacher. When he failed to complete his studies, he returned to the monk who had taught him and repaid kindness with cruel words, mocking and humiliating the one who had guided him, likening his teacher’s head to that of an animal.
For these words, heavy karma was formed.
After death, the mother fell into hell, and the son was reborn as a monstrous fish, bearing upon his body the animal heads he had spoken in insult. Each head was the echo of a word once uttered in contempt.
When asked whether the fish could escape this form, the Buddha answered that even across vast ages and countless rebirths, such punishment was not easily shed. Words spoken in cruelty return in kind, and speech, like action and thought, shapes destiny.
Thus the Hyakutou is remembered—a living sermon of flesh and scale, drifting through the waters, bearing one hundred faces of suffering as the weight of its past words.
Gallery
Sources
TYZ-Yokai Blog contributors. (n.d.). ヒャクトウ (Hyakutou). In TYZ-Yokai Blog, from https://tyz-yokai.blog.jp/archives/1022878715.html
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