The religious motif starts with the widow who has lustful feelings for a young monk who takes lodging at her house. Her role can be seen as Eve, giving into her temptations and thus trying to make the young monk down with her. She snuck into his room and told him that she wanted to take him as her spouse. In most situations, a man who is attracted to women has no restrictions to meeting and marrying a person with whom he finds a connection. However, monks preserve their mind, body, and soul for Kumano. He rejects her advances, and that makes her only try harder. She lays with him and continues to embrace him and fondle him. The interaction between the two characters is an excellent representation of religious motifs in conjunction with the worldviews.

The widow, holding the worldviews is lonely and holds no reservation for acting on her lustful ideas. The monk is the religious representation, resisting personal desires to comply with his higher calling. The monk tried everything to soothe her position, but it was only the promise to comply after he has completed his journey that allowed her to stop her aggression that night. The monk feared the women, and what she stood for. The human flesh is weak, and he knew to comply with his religious purposes he had to avoid being put into the situation. The use of roads is another religious theme. Often people take the path that is more traveled because it is easier than the alternate route. But the monk took another route; one the lady did not expect, so he was able to slip past her without her seeing him. Religiously, a person is given choices on their decisions, roads, and they are to take the road that leads them to their god, no matter how difficult that path may become.

The women died when she realized he had escaped her. She turned into a forty-foot snake, full of poison. The snake holds religious representation, as the snake is a metaphor for Satan in several Biblical examples. Because of the monk’s broken promise, the women’s heart was filled with evil and sought revenge. Revenge is a worldview that allows personal desire to control actions, void of religious considerations. The temple also represents the church or even the body of a believer. The gates are shut because they are controlled by a higher power, but that does not stop evil, or the snake in this story, from getting through the gates. The snake found the young monk and burned him with her hot, poisonous breath. The fire represented hell, and the snake is a symbol of evil.

The monk returned as a larger snake in a dream and said he gave into the woman’s request. He begged to be released from the torturous life he was now living. Evil is consuming, and a man who dedicated his life to a religious position would find it difficult to live a life of sin. The monk as a snake shows that he is now a worldly member. The end of the story dictates that monks are justified by refraining from women because of the evil in their hearts. However, the worldview is not that woman are necessarily evil, but the man’s desire for the woman can be greater than their religious ability to refrain from worldly temptations. Much like the Biblical characters, Adam and Eve, Adam gave into Eve’s temptation to eat the apple, and the holy position of the Garden of Eden was never the same.