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Descriptions of what happens to the human soul after death abound in China, as in other places. An extremely common motif is that after death we are rewarded or punished by a morally concerned universe for the deeds of our lives on earth.
In recent dynasties, various accounts of this judgment have been composed under the awkward title "Jade Calendar and Precious Transmission" (Yùlì Băochāo 玉历宝钞). "The Divine Panorama" is Herbert Giles' more graceful rendering of this name, although surely "The Infernal Panorama" would have been less misleading.
Nearly all such texts are intended for wide distribution in order to encourage people to mend their erring ways before they confront the shadowy purgatorial realm of the "earth prisons" (dìyù 地狱) that English writers have usually called "purgatory" (or more vividly "hell"). Pious people still pay to have them reprinted over and over for free distribution to all who would receive them, and indeed most of the texts themselves explicitly encourage doing this as a way to better one's eventual karmic odds.
The typical text describes the netherworld as a dreary, underground place, divided into ten (or more) courts or diàn 殿, each with a number of subordinate dungeons within it (called "little earth prisons" or xiăo dìyù 小地狱). Each court is headed by an infernal "king" or "lord" (wáng 王), who presides over it as a magistrate accompanied by scribes and lictors. The arrangement is modeled on a romanticized bureaucracy, with countless regulations, provisions for variation in the severity of the punishments, and records of the proceedings being passed back and forth among the various dungeons and courts.
The ten kings ultimately report to the Jade Emperor (Yùhuáng Shàngdì 玉皇上帝) by way of a figure with the title Great Emperor of Fēngdū (Fēngdū Dàdì 酆都大帝).
The folklorist E.T.C. Werner tells us that a rebel leader called Chŭ Bà 楚霸 ("the tyrant of the state of Chŭ") was executed in the Qín 秦 dynasty and appointed by the celestial forces to govern the deceased spirits at Fēngdū 酆都, a county in Sìchuān 四川 province surrounding the modern city of Chóngqìng 重庆.
(Usage Note: In folk thinking, Fēngdū is considered to be the capital of the land of the dead,as attempting to "Google" the name will readily demonstrate. The written form of the modern county name of Fēngdū, as written in traditional characters, was [therefore?] changed from 酆都 to 豐都, "Abundance City," in an effort to shed this unfortunate association. The modern county is written 丰都 in simplified characters. Officially there is no simpification for the character 酆, which continues in the context of the city of the dead. [If there were to be a simplification, presumably it would be too easily confused with bāng 邦, "nation."] However, popular usage, ignoring the political correctness of keeping the human region separate from the infernal one, readily enough writes 丰都 in both meanings.)
Of Fēngdū, Werner writes (1932: 127):
All souls entering these regions are interviewed by him , and their names registered, before being sent to the First Section. Each month the Ten Kings make a record of what has happened within their districts and forward it to to Ch'in Kuang-wang [Qín Guăng wáng 秦广王], the King of the First Section, who submits it to the Emperor Fêng-tu. These monthly statements he forwards to the God of the Eastern Peak [Dōngyuè Dàdì 东岳大地] and the Pearly Emperor [Yùhuáng Shàngdì 玉皇上帝]. Through him all the affairs of Hades are managed.
The entry to the infernal realm was traditionally thought to be through a portal somewhere in or near Fēngdū leading to a place called the Wòjiāo Rock (Wòjiāoshí 沃燋石). (Wòjiāo is sometimes written 沃礁 or 沃焦, and sometimes pronounced wù rather than wò and/or qiăo rather than jiāo.) Warner (p. 315) equates Wòjiāo Rock to Meru or Sumeru, and describes it as:
A fabulous mountain in the navel or centre of the earth, on which is situated Swarga, the heaven of Indra, containing the cities of the gods and the habitations of celestial spirits and the habitations of celestial spirits. It would seem to be some mountain north of the Himalayas.
The Wòjiāo Rock is mentioned at the beginning of each story. But in popular thought (and artistic representation), the entry to hell is the heavily fortified Ghost Gate (Guĭmén Guān 鬼门关, shown at left), and a person is summoned to it at death by a pair of infernal lictors. (In Taiwan they are identified with two sworn brothers named Xiè 谢 and Fàn 范. [Story Link])
Among the ten infernal lords themselves, and presiding over the fifth court, is King Yánluó 阎罗王 , a kind of first among equals, who figures in proverbs and folklore as "the king of the land of the dead." Indeed, the first syllable of his name is sometimes extended to the set of ten kings taken collectively, and called yán wáng 阎王, not an inappropriate term, since yán by itself means "gate." However the more likely derivation of the term is that Yánluó is an abbreviation of Yánmó-luóshì 阎摩罗士, in the first two syllables of which which one may recognize a Chinese transcription of the Indian Yamaraja. (In some paintings, although not in our text, the magistrate of the fifth court is given the name King Sēnluó 森罗王. The term sēn means "dreary.")
The Chinese image of postmortal judgment, and the notion of retribution (bào 报) for one's good and (especially) bad acts in life, has roots in remote antiquity. But it is heavily influenced by folk Buddhism, so much so that it is considered by some to be simply a folk corruption of an originally Indian Buddhist idea.
Certainly important Buddhist themes pervade it, including the constant representation of evil deeds by the act of eating meat or otherwise taking life.
Explicitly Buddhist are two popular bodhisattvas or púsà 菩萨, the Earth Treasury Bodhisattva, Dìzàng púsà 地藏菩萨, and the Bodhisattva Guānyīn 观音菩萨, both of whom embody a pervasive sense of compassion in a system centered far more vividly on grotesque ways of inflicting overwhelming physical pain. Neither of them is a central figure in this text (excluding the prolog), but in temple sculptures, the Earth Treasury Bodhisattva is normally seated immediately behind the throne of King Yánluó in the fifth court, keeping watch that justice be tempered with mercy.
But central to the Chinese theme of retribution, and the very Buddhist presentation of it as specifically karmic retribution, is reincarnation at the end of it to a new life determined by an erring soul's just deserts.
Karmic retribution figures in most other popular morality texts. But that says nothing in itself about what deeds produce good or bad karma. Here, as in so many other tracts, the anonymous authors and editors have been quite explicit in laying out dozens of explicit examples. They include doubting established religious teachings and ignoring the constraints of social structure, or indulging in pornography or concocting aphrodesiacs. But far more importantly the examples of sinful behavior relate to outrageous abuse of fellow human beings. We read here, for example, of men who trick gullible women into being their concubines and then dump them, or of scavangers of dead bodies who use them to stuff meat buns sold to innocent customers, or of those who mix random ingredients and sell them as medicine to the gullible.
Stephen Teiser's learnèd volume The Scripture of the Ten Kings describes the beginnings of the Chinese Buddhist idea of purgatory and the texts relating to it that emerged from the famous Dūnhuáng 敦煌 Cave manuscript collections. Although his appended translation bears little resemblance to the text here, the accompanying illustrations make it clear that the notion of ten hells, overseen by the same ten kings we meet here, underlay the far more liturgical Scripture of the Ten Kings (Shíwáng Jīng 十王经), a work which, he tells us, "was probably written in China in the ninth century, based on notions that crystallized sometime in the seventh" (Teiser 1994:1).
Guō Lìchéng (1984: 19, 26) comments that the Jade Calendar was carried to Sìchuan 四川 province in the Liáo 辽 dynasty (period 16, AD 907-1125) by a monk with the religious name of Dànchī 淡痴 ("Poor and Foolish"), who presented the text to another monk named Wùmí 勿迷 ("Be Not Misled"), who began distributing copies about 1098 or so. Leon Wieger (1913: 392) also suggests that the underlying text was probably composed sometime during the (overlapping) Sòng 宋 dynasty ( period 15, AD 960-1279).
However the version offered here, which is the one that, with occasional variations, is most often distributed today in temples and by pious societies across China, does not seem to be written in eleventh-century prose, literary or vernacular, and it includes obvious later elements. It appears that, throughout the centuries, different editors have felt free to modify the text in minor ways, usually through linguistic or cultural modernizations or discrete omissions. Indeed, as a translator Giles did some of this himself, considering an occasional passage too disgusting to translate in detail. But the Chinese text of his era appears also to have contained greater elaboration of a few passages than one finds today. For example, the present text condemns pornographic movies, a new feature, even though it refers to success in the long vanished imperial service examinations, and it appears that slaves and concubines appeared in earlier versions that are missing today.
Some versions are quite different, as though retold from scratch. For example, Wieger's bilingual version, presented in Moral Tenets and Customs in China (1913) is much more colloquial and uses simpler vocabulary, so that it differs in the wording of most of its sentences, although it follows the same general ordering of the parts.
In some temples I have retrieved versions that are converted to comic book format, or that are severely shortened. One of these, for example, (Jiăng 1985a) abandons the numbering of hells and simply presents individually named dungeons, luridly illustrated, with rewritten text (and in some cases Japanese and English translations of his rewrites). Some texts update the crimes to include drunken driving or computer scams or make other adjustments to the modern era.
On the free literature tables of Taiwan temples one finds reprint after reprint of a derivative work, A Journey Through Hell (Dìyù Yóujì 地獄遊記, DYYJ 1978) produced by planchette between 1976 and 1978 by the influential Shèngxián Táng 圣贤堂 of Táizhōng 台中 and made up conversations between a believer named Yáng 杨 (presumably the medium), his guide, the Salvationist Living Buddha 齐公活佛 (a frequent patron of séance groups), and infernal kings. Although extremely popular and quite innovative, this is not the first journey through hell. Also from Dūnhuáng is a medieval account of a visit by the Tàizōng 太宗 Emperor of the Táng 唐 dynasty (period 12). (Story Link) Far from being merely of antiquarian interest, the millenium-old work even became the basis of a Singapore comic book published in English as well as Chinese (Féng 2001).
The Jade Calendar has a seemingly clear organization, wherein each court of hell is presented with its location first, then the punishments administered therein or a listing of the dungeons specializing in particular punishments, next the types of sinners punished, and finally the way in which its horrors may be avoided, often in the form of a little exhortation. However the admixture, sometimes chaotically, of material that does not follow the scheme suggests (to me) that the work now circulating may have originated, like so much of the text material important in Chinese popular religion, as trance writing or transcriptions of trance utterances. Other hints of such an origin are the repetition of material in more than one place, the hortatory asides, and the occasional descent into unintelligibility.
Representations of the courts of hell are common in Chinese folk art, where they are generally considered a bit morbid, but where they are found fascinating by children (and foreigners) and are thought edifying to the unwashed.
For centuries large and wealthy temples have included models of some of the torments of hell, sometimes as life-sized dioramas. Some of the illustrations used here come from modern equivalents, which today are sometimes animated. The picture at the left is an animated, near-life-sized diorama in central Taiwan. In this picture, a demonic torturer is slipping a sinner into a wok of boiling oil. Visitors to Singapore or (formerly) Hong Kong may have encountered some such statuary in the famous Tiger Balm Gardens (Hǔbào Biéshù 虎豹别墅) of those two cities.
References to Hell are not wanting in politics either. As he approached death, Máo Zédōng spoke of going to see King Yánluó.
Meanwhile, propagandists in Taiwan used images clearly based on traditional representations of hell in their campaign to discredit the Communist régime. (Not surprisingly, such exaggeration tended to discredit the propagandist more than the intended object of hatred.) The image below-right is from a 1969 propaganda tract called specifically, "Pictures of the Hell of Communist Bandit Terrorism" (Gōngfĕi Bàozhèng Dìyù Tú 共匪暴政地獄圖) (Zhōu 1969: 42). The picture, like the diorama, shows an ill-omened sinner about to be fried in a wok of boiling oil. Hell imagery has clearly been very much alive in modern politics. (Of interest to Americans in 2009, perhaps, is a picture of water-boarding from the same tract [p. 25]. Click here.)
In Taiwan, murals representing the torments of the damned have long been a preferred decoration for chapels intended for memorial services. Scrolls representing these realms are hung up along the walls of temporary chapels where funerals are conducted. Elsewhere on this web site I have included an article attempting to interpret the juxtaposition of the image of the punishment of the dead with the grief expressed in a funeral for a beloved family member.
The anonymous woodcut illustrations used to illustrate the translation here have been distributed with the majority of different editions I have in my collection, sometimes very slightly modified when recopied.
For each court I have also included murals photographed from the painter's scafolding as they were being completed among the rafters of the hall for memorial services at the Qìng'ān Gōng temple in Xīgǎng Township, in Táinán County, Táiwān (台南縣西港鄉慶安宮) during my first fieldwork, 1966-1968. I am most grateful to the enthusiastic cooperation of the authorities of the Xīgǎng temple and of the artist in granting me this opportunity. (As happens in heavily patronized temples, within a decade they were so begrimed by incense smoke as to have become nearly invisible, and they have no doubt been replaced several times since these pictures were taken.)
I have supplemented these with additional pictures from various sources as indicated, especially from a set of anonymous 1970s-vintage printed scrolls intended for the use of funeral officiants, and photos of other artwork as I have occasionally encountered it.
Although scenes of torture in the various dungeons are favorites with illustrators, they receive only very brief mention in the text, normally only in the titles of the dungeons.
But also important are a few of the "landmarks" of the infernal realms, such as the great mirror that reveals the transgressions a sinner has just denied (Court 1), or the terrace where the deceased may watch his family betray the legacy he sought to leave to them (Court 5). The bridges crossed to a new life make fine material for a theme park, but are mentioned only briefly in our text (in Court 10, although they are located near the entry to the first court).
Some of the prisons from which memorial rites seek to liberate trapped souls are discussed in other parts of the text than the descriptions of the ten courts. And so on. And illustrators have, it seems, felt relatively free to move some infernal landmarks from one court to another to achieve a better distribution of material across a series of pictures. (This is true of many of the dungeons, but also of the six bridges.) Although Chinese artists have not made use of hell scenes to suggest the fate of contemporary political figures, some known figures to turn up in hell who are not part of the text itself, in particular the famous filial son Mùlián 目莲. (Story Link)
Scenes of hell figure in a few films and operas. But allusions to hell figure in many more. For example, in a recent film, flashes of a past life haunt the heroine because she did not drink her allotted amount of Grandmother Mèng's 孟 elixir of forgetfulness in the tenth court. In another, spirits refuse to leave the land of the living because they fear the judgment that awaits them if they do, and they are therefore easily recruited to a troublesome band of rogue ghosts.
The representation of hell in paintings and temple statuary has been studied by Ann S. Goodrich (1981) and in the catalogs of at least two art exhibits (Hé et al. 1984, Donnelly, 1990). Some descriptions can be found in XIXth- and early XXth-century descriptions of Chinese folk life.
Difficult to portray in art, but prominent in the text, are the many assertions that, with true repentance, deliverance from the torments of the dungeons is possible. It is a theme that is repeated over and over, and a reader has the impression, as the observer of painted representations does not, that despite truly sadistic tortures, sins can in fact be washed away, and that true repentance is all that is needed.
The Chinese text as presented here was gratefully downloaded from a now vanished anonymous Internet site in simplified characters, then corrected and revised to agree with several booklets in traditional characters picked up in temples in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Where there were occasional (rare) disagreements, my authority was RSBJ 2007 (despite the different title). The text and translation here make up pp.49-119 of that text. (For a link to an electronic version of the full book, see the note attached RSBJ 2007 in the sources listed below.) I believe this makes it about as close as one is going to get to a standard modern version. (Some characters are not available in computer type fonts and I have described them in notes. Most internet sources make relatively self-evident substitutions.)
It was my original intention to use the translation by Herbert Giles, provided as an appendix to his translation of Pú Sōnglíng's 蒲松龄 work, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liáozhāi Zhìyì 聊斋志异) (Giles 1916). Beside it I planned to display the Chinese text. However it became obvious that Giles was working from a slightly different version from those circulating today, that he abridged or glossed over many passages (often difficult or "disgusting" ones), that he occasionally made mistakes, and that his century-old English was both quaintly obsolescent and too Ciceronian to align easily to the Chinese original in a bilingual presentation.
Abandoning the idea of simply reproducing Giles' rendering, I dismantled and reassembled it, making drastic revisions, seeking to account for all of the Chinese text possible and to make it useful to modern students of traditional Chinese culture or of Chinese language. I have preserved phrases and sentences of his rendering now and again, but almost none of it survives intact. I doubt he would approve of the result, although it would be an exaggeration for me to claim that this is an entirely new translation.
As elsewhere on this web site, traditional characters are blue and simplified characters are red.
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