Ksitigarbha (Jizo, Dizang): The Earth-Store Bodhisattva

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 8 June 2026 · Updated 10 November 2026

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Kṣitigarbha is a Mahāyāna bodhisattva whose Sanskrit name joins kṣiti, “earth”, with garbha, “womb” or “essence”: Britannica renders it “Womb of the Earth”, and the Chinese name means “earth store”. He is known above all for his vow to free beings suffering in the hells. In China he is Dizang, in Japan Jizō, in Korea 지장 (Jijang). He is usually shown as a shaven-headed monk with a ringed staff and a jewel.

He is “the saviour of the oppressed, the dying, and the dreamer of evil dreams”, in Britannica’s words. China made him overlord of hell and helper of the dying; Japan, a guardian of children, living and dead, and of travellers. See the Mahāyāna buddhas and bodhisattvas and what is a bodhisattva?

What does the name Kṣitigarbha mean?

In Sanskrit kṣiti is “the earth, soil of the earth” and garbha “the womb”, “the inside, middle, interior of anything” or “a foetus or embryo” (Monier-Williams). Since garbha can be rendered “womb”, “embryo”, “heart” or “essence”, Tibetan translators chose snying po, essence or heart, giving sa’i snying po, “Essence of Earth” in 84000’s English. Chinese took the word as a store: 地藏, in Japanese 地蔵 (Jizō), which JAANUS, a dictionary of Japanese art, glosses “earth repository”.

Early texts: India and Central Asia

Kṣitigarbha appears comparatively late. In their introduction to The Eight Maṇḍalas (Toh 105), 84000’s translators report Kimiaki Tanaka’s finding that he, like Vajrapāṇi and Ākāśagarbha, is absent from the early Mahāyāna scriptures, and that the oldest text naming the eight great bodhisattvas is a Chinese translation of 663 CE; they think the eight were probably known somewhat earlier. Britannica says he was “known in India as early as the 4th century CE”, though his cult does not seem to have been widespread there. The sūtra’s list of the eight ends with him:

84000’s glossary calls him “one of the eight great bodhisattvas and the personification of the Buddha’s merit”. Temple banners from Chinese Turkistan, on which he often appears, attest to his widespread worship in Central Asia.

Śāntideva’s Śikṣāsamuccaya quotes a Kṣitigarbha Sūtra, which its English translators index under sin and penance and under refraining from killing and theft. The first quotation reads:

The Ten Wheels. The Ten Wheels of Kṣitigarbha survives in an anonymous Chinese translation that CBETA’s catalogue places between 397 and 439 (Taishō 410), in Xuanzang’s version of 651 (Taishō 411) and in Tibetan (Toh 239). Zhiru’s study of the medieval cult re-evaluates its traditional dating in an appendix.

The Sūtra of the Fundamental Vows: the Brahmin girl

His story is told in the Sūtra of the Fundamental Vows of the Bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha (地藏菩薩本願經, Taishō 412). CBETA’s edition bears the name of Śikṣānanda, a Tripiṭaka master from Khotan, and dates it to 695–704. As the Buddha teaches his mother in the Trāyastriṃśa heaven, Mañjuśrī asks what vows lie behind Kṣitigarbha’s powers, and the Buddha recounts his past lives.

In one of them he was a Brahmin girl whose mother scorned the Three Jewels and at death fell into the Avīci hell. The girl sold the family house to make offerings at a past buddha’s stupas and, recollecting his name, found herself where the hells lie. A ghost king told her that her mother had been reborn in a heaven three days before, through her child’s offerings, and that the other offenders of that hell had been reborn with her. Waking as from a dream, she vowed, in the Buddhist Text Translation Society’s version: “I vow that until the end of future eons I will respond to beings suffering for their offenses by using many expedient devices to bring about their liberation.” That girl, the Buddha says, is now Kṣitigarbha. Like the other legends of Dizang, the story stresses filial piety.

In other past lives he puts his own buddhahood last. As an elder’s son he vows to liberate all the beings suffering in the six paths before he becomes a buddha (778b); as a king, never to wish for buddhahood until he has first saved those suffering for their offences (780c); and as a woman called Bright Eyes, to rescue the beings of every hell and of the three evil paths, reaching full awakening only after they have all become buddhas (781a).

The famous line. The line most often quoted for him, “Not until the hells are empty will I become a Buddha” (地獄不空，誓不成佛; also 地獄未空), is not in the sūtra, though Bright Eyes’ vow comes close. It is a later Chinese summary of the vows: a search of the CBETA canon finds it only in later works, such as Chan masters’ sayings and the liturgy of the Flaming-mouth rite (Taishō 1320), where Dizang is invoked by it, often paired with a line on reaching awakening only when all beings are saved (眾生度盡，方證菩提).

Later chapters turn to death. Chapter 7 urges families to make merit for someone dying, hanging banners, lighting lamps, reading scriptures and reciting the names of buddhas and bodhisattvas within the dying person’s hearing, and to do good on their behalf for forty-nine days after the death (784a; see caring for the dying and Buddhist funerals). In chapter 11 an earth deity says the vows of Avalokiteśvara, Maitreya and others come to an end, while Kṣitigarbha’s span untold kalpas (787a).

Dizang in China: hell, the dying and Mount Jiuhua

In China he came to be seen as the overlord of hell, and he is called on when someone is dying. He works to free the dead from the punishments of hell’s ten judges, or kings; the fifth, Yanluo Wang, is the Chinese form of Yama, and in images the judges stand before him in deference.

Zhiru’s The Making of a Savior Bodhisattva (2007) rejects the “reigning model” in which a relatively unknown Indian bodhisattva was gradually sinicised into a Chinese deity of the underworld. In modern Chinese Buddhism, the book’s summary notes, Dizang is “especially popular as the sovereign of the underworld”, often shown as a monk wearing a royal crown (see Buddhism in China).

Mount Jiuhua. Mount Jiuhua in Anhui province is Dizang’s sacred mountain and a favourite pilgrimage site of Chinese Buddhists. It is counted among China’s four great Buddhist mountains, with Putuo for Guanyin, Emei for Samantabhadra and Wutai for Mañjuśrī. Its bond with Dizang runs through Kim Gyo-gak (金喬覺), or Kim Jijang (金地藏), a Silla prince (696–794) who practised alone there. The earliest record, Fei Guanqing’s account of Huacheng temple, has donors and monks gathering round him; miracles after his death led to his veneration, and by the Ming dynasty an imperial order recognised him as Dizang’s incarnation. His body is still kept on the mountain, and millions of Chinese Buddhists, many out of concern for their ancestors, come each year for its rites, among them chanting the Dizang jing, the Flaming-mouth rite (see hungry ghosts) and Ullambana.

Jizō in Japan: the dead, the roads and the Ten Kings

Records show Jizō worshipped in Japan in the Nara period. In the late Heian period his cult spread among ordinary people, as the one who enters hell and takes their suffering on himself.

Not the ruler of hell. In Japan, as Britannica puts it, Jizō “does not reign over hell (the job of Emma-ō) but is venerated for the mercy he shows the departed”. Yet the two were linked. The earliest example the Nihon kokugo daijiten dictionary gives for his name is a Nihon ryōiki passage (810–824) in which King Enra, that is Yama, says that in Japan he is called Jizō, and the Japanese apocryphal Jizō jūō kyō made Jizō the true nature of Enma, fifth of the Ten Kings. Jizō presides over the memorial held on the thirty-fifth day after a death, and one version of the Pure Land Amida triad has him and Kannon flanking Amitābha.

Roads. Stone Jizō images are very common and often stand by the roadside, at crossroads and at bridge ends. In the twelfth century Taira no Kiyomori set Jizō images at the six roads into the capital; worshipped beside the sae no kami, gods of the roads, Jizō came to guard travellers in this world and the next. Especially in Japan he appears in six aspects, one for each of the six realms: the six Jizō. See Buddhism in Japan.

Jizō and children: red bibs and the riverbank of Sai

Jizō’s special care for children is a Japanese development: Anne Page Brooks, citing Joseph Kitagawa, notes that he was never held responsible for children’s souls in China or India. Writing in 1914, the Dutch scholar M. W. de Visser could not say when the belief arose, since literature laid no stress on it, but recorded how it was lived:

In popular belief he guards children as they grow and saves those who die young, and a “child-raising” Jizō may be shown cradling a child. Small Jizō statues in red caps and bibs are a common sight in graveyards and by roadsides.

The best-known story is set on the riverbank of Sai (賽の河原, Sai no kawara). Children who died before their parents pile stones into small stupas there, demons knock them down, and Jizō comes to save and protect them. Japanese encyclopaedias call it a medieval folk belief with no source in the scriptures, traced to the Lotus Sūtra’s teaching that children who heap sand into stupas in play gain merit.

Mizuko kuyō

Jizō is also central to mizuko kuyō, memorial rites for a mizuko, literally “water child”. Japanese dictionaries give the word two senses, a newborn baby and a fetus, especially one miscarried or aborted; Helen Hardacre uses it more broadly for fetuses, infants and young children who die from any cause. Temples enshrine mizuko Jizō, images set up to dedicate merit to them.

Scholars differ on the rite’s age and meaning. Brooks (1981) wrote that it had been practised “for at least two centuries”; Hardacre dates its development from the 1970s, and images of Jizō holding a mizuko spread rapidly across Japan from the late 1970s. William LaFleur’s Liquid Life (1992) focused on abortion and Buddhism. Hardacre’s Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan (1997) linked the rite’s rise to, among other causes, the postwar increase in abortions, the economic difficulties of some religious institutions and a tabloid campaign about spirit attacks (tatari). Her reviewer George Tanabe, reading her data, finds the link with fear of spirits “unclear (or clearly tenuous)” and concludes that it “is not a major rite”.

This section describes practice and scholarship; it is not advice. For reflections on loss, see Buddhism and grief, Buddhism and death and our grief companion.

How Kṣitigarbha is shown

He is most often shown as a shaven-headed monk, though with a halo and the tuft of hair between the eyebrows (ūrṇā). He carries a staff to force open the gates of hell and a flaming pearl (cintāmaṇi) to light up the darkness. In Japan early images hold the jewel in the left hand while the right makes the wish-granting gesture (see mudras); from about the mid-Heian period he holds jewel and staff, which has since become the standard form. A Goryeo painting at the Cleveland Museum of Art shows him holding a staff to announce his presence and a wish-fulfilling jewel that symbolises his vow to relieve suffering.

In the Matrix (Taizōkai) maṇḍala of Japanese esoteric Buddhism, though, he takes bodhisattva form, holding a sun disc and a lotus topped with a banner, and esoteric images give him a jewelled crown (see Buddhist mandala); Goryeo and Dunhuang paintings show a hooded Jizō.

The Mahāvairocana Sūtra, put into Chinese by Śubhākarasiṃha and Yixing in 725, has Kṣitigarbha speak a mantra, written in Chinese transliteration as 南麼三曼多勃馱喃 訶訶訶 素怛弩 莎訶 (Taishō 848, 14b13–15; numbering and reading marks omitted), and in fascicle 4 gives a second with the hand seal called 地藏旗印 (27c21–23). We report the text and do not teach the practice (see Buddhist mantras).

Korea and Tibet

Korea. The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Standing Ksitigarbha (1300–1350), titled 지장보살, shows him as a youthful monk; it is one of only ten fourteenth-century paintings of Kṣitigarbha known to exist. In the museum’s fifteenth-century Joseon bronze triad he takes the place usually held by Mahāsthāmaprāpta beside Amitābha and Avalokiteśvara, a grouping in vogue in Korea in the 1300s and 1400s (see Buddhism in Korea).

Tibet. In Tibetan he is ‘phags pa sa’i snying po, one of the eight “heart sons” of the Buddha. He has remained mainly a figure of the Mahāyāna sūtras: few tantric texts include him, so he has no fixed form like Avalokiteśvara’s or Mañjuśrī’s, and he is rarely if ever shown alone, appearing almost always among the Eight Great Bodhisattvas below Amitābha in Sukhāvatī or with Śākyamuni. Tāranātha describes him yellow, holding a fruit and a jewel above a lotus (see Tibetan Buddhism).

How the traditions differ

China, Japan and Tibet. China made him overlord of hell; Japan, where Enma judges the dead, made him a guardian of roads and of children; Tibet honours him as one of the eight more than on his own.

Theravāda. A search of SuttaCentral’s English translations of the early texts for his name returns nothing: a search result, not proof of absence. The Pāli discourses do name a future buddha, Metteyya (DN 26). 84000’s translators note that the eight great bodhisattvas did enter Sri Lanka’s protective chant (pirit) tradition, named in the Sarvārakṣaka mantra (see Theravāda Buddhism).