Yeomra

On the thirty-fifth day after a death, the soul arrives at the fifth court. Four kings have already looked at it and five more are waiting. The fifth sits behind a low desk in a red robe, with a book open in front of him and a mirror standing at his elbow, and the mirror does not show a face. It shows a life.

Korean Buddhism does not hand the dead to a single gatekeeper. It hands them to a docket. Seven days after death the soul stands before Jingwang, fourteen days before Chogang, twenty-one before Songje, twenty-eight before Ogwan. Thirty-five days brings it to Yeomra. Then Byeonseong at forty-two and Taesan at forty-nine, Pyeongdeung on the hundredth day, Dosi at one year, Odojeollyun at three. Ten kings, ten hearings, spread across three years of a family’s grief, and Yeomra sitting exactly in the middle of them.

You can still walk into his courtroom. In the Judgment Halls of Korean temples the Ten Kings are ranged in clay or carved wood down both sides of a Ksitigarbha triad, odd-numbered kings to the bodhisattva’s left, even to the right, which puts Yeomra fifth along on the left. The carvers gave each of them something to be caught doing. One strokes his beard. One reads. One holds the register open with both hands, thumb pinning the page. They wear the wonyugwan or the tongcheongwan, the crowns a Joseon king put on for a formal audience, and the wide-sleeved round-collared robe of a court official, and they sit in chairs finished with dragon heads and phoenix heads under the palms. The sets at Bulgapsa from 1635, at Heungguksa in Yeosu from 1648 and at Cheonggoksa in Jinju from 1657 are all still standing. The smell in those halls is old wood and cold incense, and the wood is cold to touch.

He is an import, and nobody in Korea ever pretended otherwise. The name travels from Sanskrit Yama through Chinese Yanluo to Korean Yeomra, and the whole ten-king apparatus came in with Buddhism from China. Belief in the Ten Kings seems to have reached the peninsula around the unification of the Three Kingdoms, but nothing survives in stone or paint until Goryeo. Kim Chiyang put up a Siwang temple northwest of the palace during Mokjong’s reign, sometime between 997 and 1009. In 1102 King Sukjong went with his queen and his heir to celebrate the finishing of a Ten Kings hall at Heungboksa. In 1246 the sutra behind the whole system was cut into woodblocks at Haeinsa, and in the Yeomra section of that printing he appears with Ksitigarbha beside him.

That pairing is the strange part, and Korea pushed it further than anyone. The scriptures say Ksitigarbha manifests in many bodies, as Brahma, as the four heavenly kings, as a beast, as a warden of hell, and as King Yama, and that Yeomra himself will one day put down the register and become a Buddha. Korean practice split the difference by inventing a second figure for the redeemed version, Hyeonwang, and giving him his own paintings and his own rite. Hyeonwangdo were not hung with the other underworld scrolls in the Judgment Hall. They went into the main hall, over an altar of their own, and they contain no hells. No boiling, no sawing, no clerks writing down the count. Yeomra loses the mirror in them too, because the point of praying to Hyeonwang was never to be frightened but to get a dead relative moved along quickly toward the Pure Land.

One of these survives in unusual detail. The Hyeonwangdo made at Buljiam Hermitage on Mt. Baegun in the twelfth month of 1798 was painted by two monks, Bohun and Yeonggyeom, out of materials left over from regilding a statue at Seongbulsa. Somebody cut four small cavities into the wooden roller of the scroll and packed them with grains, seeds, metal, glass, coloured thread and a dharani written in red Sanskrit, wrapped in papers marked east, west, south, north and centre. The prayer sealed inside asks that the donors’ parents be reborn on the nine-tiered lotus. The last thing done to the painting, after everything else, was to paint in the pupils of his eyes, with a monk reciting scripture while it happened.

The Jeju shamans got him somewhere else entirely, and there he is a character rather than an office. In the Chasa bonpuri, sung by a simbang in ordinary clothes sitting at the messenger’s table with a janggu drum going under one hand, a king called Beomu has three sons under a death sentence of fifteen years. A monk takes them into a temple to pray the sentence away, warns them on release to keep clear of the land of Gwayang, and sends them off carrying silk. They get hungry in Gwayang. The woman of the house sees the silk, gets them drunk, pours boiling sesame oil into their ears and sinks them in a pond. Three flowers come up seven days later. She burns them, three beads appear in the ash, she swallows the beads, and nine months later she is nursing triplets. The triplets grow up brilliant, pass the state examination, come home in glory, kneel to their parents and die on the floor mid-bow.

She petitions the local magistrate, Gimchi, over and over until he cracks. Only Yeomra can settle this, he says, and he sends his officer Gangnim to fetch him. Gangnim gets there on his wife’s piety, helped along the road by the door god and the hearth goddess, and comes at last to the Haenggi pond, where he shuts his eyes and jumps. He surfaces at the gate of the underworld. When Yeomra finally hears him out, the king does not refuse and does not fight. He names a day and an hour and tells the man to go home and wait.

At the appointed moment the sky and the ground shook together and he came down. He dried the pond, gathered the bones lying in the mud, put the three brothers back together alive and sent them home to their parents, and executed the couple who had killed them. Then he asked to borrow Gangnim. The magistrate refused. Yeomra offered to split him instead, soul or body, take your pick, and the magistrate took the body, so Yeomra walked off with the soul and left a corpse on the ground and a widow blaming the wrong man.

Afterwards he tried to fix death itself. He wrote out a red warrant ordering that people come to the underworld in proper order at the age of eighty, and gave it to Gangnim to deliver. Gangnim handed it to a crow along the way. The crow lost it, or muddled it, and the order never arrived as written, which is why the young die before the old and always will. Yeomra’s last errand in the song is more cheerful. Dongbangsak had been dodging collection for three thousand years, so Gangnim knelt at a stream and washed charcoal until a passing old man asked what he was doing and was told the charcoal would go white eventually. Three thousand years, the man said, and I never heard that one. Yeomra decided the officer was clever enough to keep, and made him the messenger who takes people away.

What he can do follows from what he holds. The register fixes a lifespan, the warrant enforces it, and no household is hidden from it because his messengers stop at the village guardian’s shrine and have the name confirmed before they ever reach the door. He can undo a death when the death was theft, drying water and reassembling bone to do it, and he can end a life on the spot when the case is proved.

What he cannot do is more interesting. He is fifth of ten, not sovereign, and the soul in front of him has six more courts to go. A county magistrate sent a single officer to summon him and he came, on time, having given his word. His own decrees can be mislaid by a bird. And the scriptures he sits beneath promise that the job is temporary, that the mirror and the register go back on the desk one day and the judge of hell turns out to have been the bodhisattva who swore to empty it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Yeomra?

Yeomra, fully Yeomra-daewang, is the king of the underworld in Korean myth and the fifth of the Ten Kings who judge the dead. His name descends from Sanskrit Yama by way of Chinese Yanluo, and he arrived in Korea with Buddhism. Korean tradition treats him as the ruling voice among the ten even though he sits in the middle of the sequence.

What does Yeomra actually do?

He holds the register that records every person’s fixed lifespan and issues the red warrant that sends messengers to collect them when it runs out. A soul reaches his court on the thirty-fifth day after death, the fifth of ten hearings spread over three years. He judges what the person did and passes them along the sequence.

Is Yeomra the same as Yama?

He is the Korean form of the same figure, transmitted through Chinese Buddhism, but the Korean material around him is its own. Korea developed a separate enlightened aspect of him called Hyeonwang, with its own paintings and its own temple rite, and Jeju shamans sing an epic about him, the Chasa bonpuri, that has no counterpart elsewhere.

What happens to Yeomra in the Chasa bonpuri?

A mortal magistrate sends his officer Gangnim to the underworld to summon Yeomra over three unexplained deaths. Yeomra agrees to come, arrives on the day he promised, revives three murdered brothers from their bones and executes their killers. He then takes Gangnim’s soul as payment and makes him the messenger who reaps the dead.

Why do people die out of order in Korean myth?

Yeomra tried to fix it. He issued a red warrant ordering that people come to the underworld in sequence at the age of eighty and sent Gangnim to deliver it, but Gangnim passed it to a crow, and the crow lost the message. Because the decree never arrived as written, death has come at random ever since.

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