Diyu

The first thing a dead person meets is a queue. Two escorts have already called at the bedside with a warrant, one figure tall and pale, the other short and dark, and walked the soul down a road where the daylight thins to the colour of old tea. At the end of it there is a gate, guards with the heads of an ox and a horse, and a hall where a clerk is running his finger down a page. He finds the name. He always finds the name.

This is Diyu, the earth prison, and the word is a translation. When Buddhist scriptures came into China in the first centuries of the common era they brought the hells of India with them, hot ones and cold ones stacked beneath the world, and Chinese translators needed a term. They built one out of the words for ground and jail. The dead of China had somewhere to go long before that. The oldest texts speak of the Yellow Springs, a dim wet country under the soil. By the Han dynasty people were burying their relatives with documents addressed to officials of the underworld, and the mountain god of Mount Tai was thought to keep the registers of who was due and when. So the imported hells did not arrive in an empty country. They arrived in an office, and the office absorbed them.

The result was settled by about the tenth century, in a short illustrated book called the Scripture on the Ten Kings. It was written in China and dressed up as a translation from an Indian original, and the copies that survive come out of the sealed cave library at Dunhuang. It lays out a timetable. The soul comes before the first king seven days after death, and before another every seven days after that, until the forty-ninth day. The eighth hearing falls on the hundredth day, the ninth after a year, the tenth in the third year. On each of those dates the family at home is supposed to hold a service and make an offering, and the scripture is frank that this helps. A reader today would call it lobbying.

Each king has his hall. Qinguang sits in the first and sorts the plainly good from the rest. Yanluo, the old Indian death god Yama under his Chinese name, holds the fifth, and the popular handbooks of the nineteenth century known as the Jade Records explain that he once had the first court and was moved down for being soft, since he kept letting people who had died unjustly slip back to life. The king of Mount Tai, the old keeper of the registers, was given the seventh. Somewhere along the way there is a great mirror that shows a person what they did, with no chance to argue about it, and a set of scales. The fifth court also keeps a terrace from which the dead can look back at their own village. What they see, the Jade Records say, is their family quarrelling over the furniture.

Behind the halls are the punishments, and here the painters did their best work. A common count gives eighteen hells and others run to hundreds. There is a hill planted with knife blades that the guilty must climb barefoot, a cauldron of oil with a fire under it, a yard of ice, a pool of blood, a frame where a body is sawn down the middle between two boards. Tongues are drawn for slander. Many of the tools are farm tools, the mill and the mortar and the pestle that every village owned, put to a new use. The crimes are village crimes too: false weights in the market, gossip, neglect of parents. Bodies come back whole after each torment so that it can be done again. It is meant to be read as a warning, and it is not subtle.

The best-known visitor was an emperor. In the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, Taizong of the Tang dynasty is summoned below to answer a lawsuit brought by a dead dragon king. He goes down carrying a letter of introduction to a judge named Cui Jue, a former colleague of one of his ministers, and the judge quietly adds two strokes of ink to the ledger, which lengthens the emperor’s life by twenty years. On the way out Taizong is mobbed by the ghosts of men killed in his wars and has to borrow money from a dead man’s account to pay them off. He returns to his body and repays the loan. The same book has the Monkey King dragged down in his sleep, where he seizes the register and blots out his own name and the name of every monkey he knows.

Those two stories mark the limits of the place. Its power is that the ledger is complete and nobody is left out of it, neither peasant nor emperor nor believer in some other faith. Its weakness is that it is a bureaucracy, and it has the faults of one. Clerks can be approached. Records can be altered. Sentences can be eased by a son’s offerings, by a monk’s chanting, or by a visit from the bodhisattva Dizang, who has sworn not to rest until the hells are empty. In the tale of Mulian a devout son walks through every court in turn to find his mother and bring her out.

The way out is the tenth court. The Wheel-Turning King there assigns each soul its next birth on one of six paths, god or human at the top, animal, hungry ghost or hell-dweller at the bottom. Before the gate an old woman called Madame Meng stands at her terrace with a pot of tea brewed in five flavours, and every soul must drink a cup. It wipes the memory clean. Then there is a bridge, and on the far side a child is crying in a house somewhere, with no idea where it has just been.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Diyu in Chinese mythology?

Diyu is the Chinese underworld, a realm beneath the earth where the dead are judged and punished before being reborn. The name means earth prison and was coined to translate the Buddhist hells brought from India. It is organised as ten law courts, each under its own king.

Is Diyu the same as hell?

Diyu is closer to a purgatory than to an eternal hell. Souls serve a fixed sentence for what they did in life and are then sent on to a new birth. No one stays in Diyu forever, and the living can shorten a relative’s time there with rites and offerings.

Who rules Diyu?

Diyu is ruled by ten kings, each in charge of one court. The best known is Yanluo, the Chinese form of the Indian death god Yama, who holds the fifth court. Qinguang heads the first court, the King of Mount Tai the seventh, and the Wheel-Turning King the tenth, where rebirth is assigned.

How do souls leave Diyu?

Souls leave Diyu through the tenth court, where the Wheel-Turning King assigns each one a new birth on one of six paths. Before leaving, every soul drinks the tea of Madame Meng, which erases all memory of the past life and of Diyu itself. The soul then crosses a bridge back into the living world.

Where does the idea of the ten courts of Diyu come from?

The ten courts of Diyu are first set out in the Scripture on the Ten Kings, a Chinese Buddhist text known from illustrated manuscripts found at Dunhuang and dating to about the tenth century. It combined Indian Buddhist hells with older Chinese beliefs about the Yellow Springs and the registers kept at Mount Tai. The Jade Records of the nineteenth century later spread the picture widely.

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