Meng Po

Also Known As: 孟婆, “Granny Meng” or “Old Lady Meng”; also Meng Po Shen 孟婆神, the Goddess Meng Po, and Meng Po A-nai 孟婆阿奶; her broth is Meng Po tang 孟婆汤, elsewhere mihun tang 迷魂汤, the soup that muddles the soul
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She brews and administers a five-flavoured broth that strips a soul of every memory it carries out of the underworld.
Role in Mythos: She keeps the last gate of the Chinese afterlife, making sure nothing crosses from one life into the next except the soul itself.
Relation to Humans: Every person who has ever been born is held to have drunk from her cup on the way in, and will drink from it again on the way out. The tellings that turn on her are always about the exceptions, the child who speaks at birth or the adult who remembers a house they never lived in.

One hundred and eight small rooms ring a terrace barely wider than a monk’s cell, and in each of them a cup has already been filled. What is in the cup smells like wine and is not wine. It has been decocted out of ordinary herbs, gathered above ground in the ordinary daylit world, and it comes in five flavours: sweet, bitter, acrid, sour, salt. Which one a soul is handed appears to be nobody’s decision in particular. The result does not vary.

The place is called the Terrace of Drunken Oblivion, and it stands in front of the Tenth Court of the Chinese underworld, out past the six bridges, at the point where the bureaucracy of the dead has finished with a person and is ready to put them back. A single passage runs east from it, a foot or so across, and everything that leaves the land of the dead leaves down that corridor. The woman who runs the terrace was appointed to it by the Jade Emperor and has held the post ever since.

She was born in the Western Han. As a girl she worked through the Four Books and the Five Classics, and then she took up the Buddhist sutras and chanted them with a seriousness that ate the rest of her life. Somewhere in all that reading she stopped thinking about the past and stopped anticipating the future, which is a small joke the record does not appear to notice, given what she was later given to do. She spent her years telling anyone who would listen not to take life and to eat vegetables. At eighty-one her hair had gone the white of a crane’s feathers while her face stayed smooth as a child’s, and she was still a virgin. She did not seem to know her own given name. She knew her surname was Meng, so people called her Granny Meng and left it at that. Then she went into the hills to cultivate the Way, and was reportedly still there in the Eastern Han.

The job found her because of a leak. Certain people, born with an unusually thin membrane between one life and the next, had begun to recall what they had been before. They used it. They played tricks with it, spilled the private business of the dark realm into daylight, and went looking for the families they had belonged to in a previous existence, which produced exactly the domestic chaos anyone would predict. The Jade Emperor’s solution was administrative rather than dramatic. He made the old woman a goddess of the shadow world, gave her a terrace to build and clerks to command, and closed the leak at the source.

The system is not gentle, though it is efficient. A great deal or a mouthful, it makes no difference; the amount is not the point. Souls who turn stubborn and refuse the cup find hooked blades rising out of the floor to snag their feet and hold them where they stand, and then a copper tube is driven into the throat and the broth goes down anyway. Nobody gets past her. She is not cruel about it. She is staff.

What the drug leaves behind is oddly specific. Some trace of it travels up into the living world in the body of the next child, and shows itself in small involuntary leaks: saliva in someone who thinks too much, sweat in someone who laughs too much, a running nose in the anxious, tears in the angry, spittle in the frightened. Each soul carries one part, or two, or three. Those who lived well come back with sharper eyes and ears and stronger limbs than they had. Those who lived badly come back with their wits and vitality already draining, a warning issued in advance and rarely read as one.

After the cup there is the bridge. It is a floating span of bitter bamboo lashed together with hemp rope, and the water underneath it runs red and fast between rock walls. Halfway across, a soul looking up sees four lines written in enormous pale characters on the red cliff opposite: to be human is easy, to act human is hard, to be born human again may be hardest of all, and none of it is difficult for anyone who can keep mouth and heart saying the same thing. While they are still reading, two enormous figures come out of the far bank and onto the surface of the water. One wears a black gauze official’s cap and a brocade coat, carries paper and brush, has a sword slung over his shoulder and irons at his belt, and laughs. The other has a filthy bloodied face, a white robe, an abacus in one hand, a rice sack on his back and a string of paper money round his neck, and he sighs. Between them they shove the whole crowd off the bridge into the red water. Some of the souls cheer, being pleased to be getting a body again. The ones who understand what they are losing weep. Then all of them, dazed and mindless, rush toward whatever house has a woman in labour in it.

There is an older Meng Po, and she has nothing to do with any of this. In Song poetry the name belongs to a weather spirit, the one you ask for a favourable blow. A lyric attributed to the emperor Huizong pleads with her to do him a kindness and turn his boat around, which is the request of a man being carried somewhere he does not want to go. Jiang Jie complained of her in a spring poem, and as late as the eighteenth century Zhao Yi was blaming her for days of gale flattening the flowers. The standard dictionary of record still defines Meng Po first as a wind deity and only then as anything else. How a Jiangnan wind became an old woman with a ladle at the edge of hell is not recorded anywhere, and the two may simply have collided over a shared name.

The underworld Meng Po herself is younger than she looks. Her story comes from the Jade Guidebook, a morality tract circulated by the tens of thousands in the Qing to frighten people into behaving, which claims an eleventh-century origin its own prose does not support and which every generation of editors has felt free to revise. The river she stands beside is genuinely old, appearing as the Nai in a Tang manuscript from Dunhuang. She is not. Popular retellings that make her the wall-weeping widow Meng Jiang, unable to move on and inventing the broth so that nobody else has to suffer as she did, are a later graft, and the sources do not agree.

Her power is absolute and completely unglamorous. She does not judge, sentence, torture or forgive; those are other people’s departments, and she gets the souls only after all that is finished. She cannot be argued with, and refusing her costs a great deal without changing anything. Her one real limit is that the cup occasionally fails. A soul now and then slips the terrace altogether, or swallows too little, and the evidence turns up in a newborn who speaks, or in a child who describes a village nobody in the family has been to. Every past life anyone claims to remember is, by the logic of her own story, a bowl she did not quite get down them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Meng Po?

Meng Po is the goddess of the Chinese underworld who serves the soup of forgetting to souls about to be reborn. She works at the Terrace of Drunken Oblivion in front of the Tenth Court, and her job is to make sure nobody carries memories of a previous life, or of hell itself, into their next one.

What is Meng Po soup made of?

Meng Po soup is described as a decoction of ordinary herbs gathered in the world above, brewed into something that resembles wine without being wine. It comes in five flavours: sweet, bitter, acrid, sour and salt. However much or little a soul drinks, the memory loss is complete.

What happens if you refuse to drink Meng Po’s soup?

Refusal does not work. Hooked blades rise out of the ground to trap the soul’s feet, a copper tube is forced into the throat, and the broth is poured down regardless. The account is explicit that this is painful and that it always ends the same way.

Where does Meng Po stand, and what is the Naihe Bridge?

Meng Po’s terrace sits just before the Naihe Bridge, a floating walkway of bitter bamboo tied with hemp rope over a torrent of red water. After drinking, souls are escorted onto it and pushed off into the water by two enormous underworld figures, and from there they are reborn.

Was Meng Po always a goddess of the underworld?

No. In Song dynasty poetry the name Meng Po belongs to a wind spirit, invoked by travellers and sailors and blamed for storms, and Chinese dictionaries still give that as the word’s first meaning. Her role as the keeper of the soup of oblivion comes from the Jade Guidebook, a morality tract that circulated widely in the Qing dynasty.