Yanluo

Also Known As: 閻羅王 Yánluó Wáng, “King Yanluo”; commonly shortened to Yan Wang / Yánwáng 閻王; from a Chinese transcription of Sanskrit Yamarāja, 閻魔羅社
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology, Buddhist Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Yanluo holds the register in which every living person’s name and allotted date of death is written, and the authority to reassign a judged soul to its next birth.
Role in Mythos: He presides over one court of the ten that make up Diyu, weighing the recorded deeds of the newly dead and sentencing them accordingly.
Relation to Humans: Every mortal comes before him or before one of his colleagues, and the meeting is conducted as a legal hearing rather than a reckoning with fate. Because the position is understood as an office rather than a nature, the sources allow that an upright human magistrate might one day be the one sitting behind the desk.

In the spring of 592 a neighbour’s mother in Chang’an looked out at the gate of the general Han Qinhu and saw an honour guard standing there, of the scale reserved for a monarch. She asked who they were waiting for. One of them said they had come to receive their king. Not long after, a man in the grip of a bad fever staggered to the same gate and asked to be admitted to the presence of the great king. The gatekeeper wanted to know which great king. King Yama, the sick man said. Han Qinhu’s household came out with a whip to drive him off, and Han Qinhu stopped them. In life a Supreme Pillar of State, he said, and in death King Yama. That is enough. He died within days, aged fifty-five, and the exchange was written into the official dynastic history of the Sui less than fifty years later, without editorial comment, as the sort of thing that happens to a great man at the end.

What that story assumes is stranger than the ghost story it looks like. It assumes the rulership of hell is a post. Somebody holds it, and when they stop holding it somebody else is appointed, and the appointment can go to a competent administrator who has recently died.

The name arrived from India. Yamarāja, the lord of the dead in the Vedic hymns, came east with Buddhist missionaries and Buddhist texts, and by the fifth century Chinese translators had rendered him into characters that a Chinese reader could pronounce. He kept his job description and lost almost everything else. The Indian Yama presides over a realm; the Chinese Yanluo presides over a docket. Between the two there is an entire civil service, because the tradition that received him already had a thousand years of practice imagining authority as paperwork, and it was never going to picture the afterlife as anything but a government office with a very large filing problem.

So he was given a face. He appears in temple statuary and in the painted hell scrolls with a broad red countenance, eyes forced open and slightly bulging, a beard reaching his chest, a dark official’s robe and a flat magistrate’s cap. Some images give him a crown instead, with the character for king on the front so there is no ambiguity about who is in charge. The effect is not demonic. It is the face of a district magistrate who has been in session for eleven hours and has heard every excuse a human being is capable of inventing.

Around him the apparatus works. Ox-Head and Horse-Face, two guards with the bodies of men and the heads of the animals they are named for, go up into the world of the living and come back down escorting whoever the paperwork specifies. In some accounts the Black and White Impermanence make the collection instead, a pale one and a dark one who fetch souls by the ends of a chain. A clerk stands at the side of the hall holding a brush and a bound book that lists every person alive and the day each is due. Incense smoke drifts. Somewhere below the floor of the courtroom there is noise. A soul is brought in, the pages turn, the brush touches wet ink and moves, and the sentence is read out in the flat voice of routine business.

The ten-court arrangement everyone now pictures is not as old as the god. It took shape between roughly the seventh and tenth centuries, in a body of Chinese Buddhist material with no Indian original, and its clearest surviving witness is a text called the Scripture on the Ten Kings. It never entered the official canon, and it survived because more than thirty copies of it were sealed up in a cave library at Dunhuang and found again in the twentieth century. The scheme it lays out maps the soul’s passage onto the actual Chinese mourning calendar: a court for each of the seven weekly memorials after death, then one at a hundred days, one at a year, one at three years. The living made offerings on those dates. The dead were being processed on the same schedule.

Yanluo holds the fifth of those courts, and the later tradition is oddly specific about how he got there. He had the first court once, the one that receives every soul. He was taken off it and moved down for being too soft. The complaint in the Qing morality tract that circulates this version is that he kept sending murdered people back to the world for another life, on the grounds that they had been robbed of the one they had, and that this was compassionate but administratively unsustainable. King Qinguang got the first court. Yanluo got the fifth, which handles the heart-gouging.

He is not undefeatable, and the stories are honest about why. His whole authority runs through a document. When the Monkey King is dragged before him in a drunken sleep, the first thing Yanluo does is not fight but apologise for a possible clerical error, since a great many men share a name. It buys nothing. Sun Wukong takes the register, finds his own entry, blots it out along with the entries of every monkey he can find on the page, and walks out. Nobody stops him. The god of death has been beaten by vandalism of his own file.

His powers follow from the same source. He knows the hour of every life because it is written down. He can lengthen a life or shorten one by amending the ledger, restore a soul that was collected in error, and assign a judged spirit to any of the six destinations of rebirth. His limits follow just as directly. He answers upward to the Jade Emperor, who appointed him and can overrule him. The bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha, who swore to go on emptying the hells until they are empty, walks through his jurisdiction unchallenged. A soul with enough recorded merit simply leaves. And in the end even the post was not safe: some later lists of the ten kings drop Yanluo entirely and put a real historical judge in the chair, the Song official Bao Zheng, whose reputation for incorruptibility was so total that people found it easier to believe he worked nights in hell than that he had ever taken a bribe.

The job is filing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Yanluo?

Yanluo, also called Yan Wang or Yánwáng, is the god who judges the dead in Chinese religion and Chinese Buddhism. His name is a Chinese transcription of the Sanskrit Yamarāja, the Indian lord of the dead, and he rules the fifth of the ten courts of Diyu, the Chinese underworld.

Why does Yanluo rule the fifth court instead of the first?

The tradition says he was demoted. He originally held the first court, which receives every incoming soul, and was moved down for excessive leniency after repeatedly sending murder victims back to the world for another life. King Qinguang took over the first court in his place.

What does Yanluo look like?

He is shown as a large man with a scowling red face, bulging eyes and a long beard, wearing the robes of a Chinese court official. His headgear is either a magistrate’s cap or a crown bearing the Chinese character for “king.”

Who works for Yanluo?

Ox-Head and Horse-Face, two guards with human bodies and animal heads, collect the newly dead and bring them before him, as do the Black and White Impermanence in some accounts. A clerk attends the court holding a brush and a book recording every living person’s name and appointed date of death.

Can Yanluo be defeated?

His authority depends on the written register, which makes it vulnerable. In Journey to the West, Sun Wukong is summoned before Yanluo, seizes the book and erases his own name and the names of every monkey listed with him, and Yanluo cannot stop him. He is also outranked by the Jade Emperor and bypassed by the bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha.