Jaki.

Jaki (邪鬼) is often represented not as a towering oni king, but as a smaller twisted demon pinned beneath the feet of the Four Heavenly Kings or gate guardians in Buddhist sculpture. The scale matters. Jaki is the image of evil already overpowered, forced into a crouching or writhing body that makes defeat visible. Yet the figure remains active enough to show the pressure needed to keep chaos down.

In the broadest sense, jaki can mean a harmful or malignant spirit that spreads calamity, especially disease. In Japanese Buddhist art, however, the figure becomes concrete: the little demon trampled under divine feet. That image stages an interaction between evil and protection. Jaki exists so the victory of the guardian can be seen, and so worshippers understand what sort of forces the temple and the Dharma hold back.

The term has an old lexical history in East Asian religious vocabulary, where evil spirits and harmful demons were named through Buddhist, Daoist, and onmyodo-inflected discourse. In Japan the word could refer broadly to harmful spirits, but Buddhist statuary gave it a specific visual afterlife. Once guardian kings and Nio were shown subduing small demons beneath them, jaki became one of the clearest embodiments of conquered malignancy in temple space.