Ancient Chinese Beliefs: What Happens After Death?

Around the year 350, someone wrote this down. A man got sick. He died. Somebody came and escorted him to the land of the departed, and a supervisor checked the ledger, looked at him, and said, wrong person. There's another one with that name over in a different county. Send this one back. He woke up. No demons in that story. No fire. No judgment at all. It was a clerical error. We've been handed the wrong word for this whole thing. The real name is D-Fool, and Fool is the same character sitting inside Zhengfu, which is what you call a country's ministries. So it was never a pit of torment. It was a bureau. And I'll show you the one spot on earth where you can still walk through it. Singapore, 1937. Two brothers, Hu Wenhu and Hu Wenbao, have made a fortune off a menthol ointment. You have probably gotten a drawer somewhere. Tiger balm. And they spend a chunk of it building a garden on the west side of the island, filled with painted concrete statues, over 1,000 of them, around 150 scenes. The idea is to teach Chinese values to kids growing up a long way from China. Most of it is what you'd expect. Folk tales, filial sons, a rat getting married. And then there's the corner everybody remembers. Ten rooms. In the third, a man is tied to a red-hot copper pillar. In the fifth, bodies are going into a mountain of knives. In the seventh, a woman's tongue is being pulled out of her head with a pair of tongs. There's a pool of blood. There's a millstone. And there is somebody in it. Now, if you grew up in Singapore or KL or Penang, you know exactly what I'm describing. Because somebody's auntie walked you through that corner where you were seven years ago, and you have not been entirely the same since. Good news, it's still there. The park's been partly shut down since December for repairs, but the 10 courts are open. 10 in the morning to 6 at night. And in 2021, they air-conditioned the whole thing, so the nightmare is climate-controlled now. But the next time you're in there, stop looking at the bodies and read the signs. Because the third court punishes drug trafficking. The sixth court punishes owning pornography. The eighth court, and this is my favorite, punishes cheating on your exams. And somewhere along the way, somebody added a hell for reckless driving. Those are not Tang Dynasty sins. Somebody is still updating this, which raises a question almost nobody asks. And it turns out to be the whole story. Who files the paperwork when hell adds a new offense? The document this all comes from spent about 900 years sealed inside a cave. It's called Fo Shuo Shi Wang Jing, the scripture of the 10 kings, written in China in the 9th century, attributed to a monk named Zang Chuan at a Monastery in Chengdu. Copies went to the Mogo Cave 17 at Dunhuang, along with tens of thousands of manuscripts. And the whole room was bricked up. The earliest dated copy we have is from 908. The illustrated one, the one in the British Library, is a scroll 29 centimeters tall and 491 centimeters long. And you can pull it up online tonight. And one of the surviving copies, cataloged P4523, has no text in it at all. Just pictures. Somebody made a version of hell for people who couldn't read. Here's my favorite part. The scripture, the founding document of the Chinese afterlife, the thing every temple painted for 1,000 years works from. It wasn't accepted into the official Buddhist canon until 1912. Now, everybody pictures the 10 courts as 10 floors. You go down, it gets worse. A parking garage of the damned. Now, it isn't a building, it's a calendar. The 10 courts are 10 appointments. Day 7, day 14, day 21, 28, 35, 42, 49. Then the 100th day. Then the one year anniversary. Then the three year anniversary. Look at those dates again. If you've ever been to a Chinese funeral, you already know them. Those are the morning observances. That's when the family gathers. That's when the offerings get made. What Zeng Chuan did was take the Buddhist idea of the in-between state and bolt it straight onto the Confucian funeral calendar. The dead aren't falling through the floors, they're on a docket. And if the dead are on a docket, just rearrange something in your head. And you're not subscribed, go fix that. It gets stranger from here. Like and subscribe. So who works there? First court, Qin Guangwang. He's intake. He keeps the register of how long everybody gets to live and he punishes nobody. He sorts you and moves you along. Tenth court, Zhuan Lunwang also punishes nobody. He assigns your next life. Fifth court, Yanluo Wang, Yama. Yanluo Wang is the one piece of this that's genuinely Indian. Sanskrit, Yama Raja. In India, he is the lord of the dead, the entire operation. In China, he runs one court out of 10. He got imported and then he got demoted to middle management. It gets better. The Chinese kept reassigning the job over about five centuries. At least four dead officials were understood to be the sitting Yanluo Wang. Han Qin Hu, the Sui general, the dynastic history has him on his deathbed saying he'd been supreme pillar of the state in life. He'd be Yanluo after death. And that was enough. Fan Zhongyan, Kou Chun and Bao Zhang, the Song magistrate we made a whole video about, who is sitting right there in the fifth court. Because in Kaifeng, people used to say, No bribe gets through. There's Yama Bao. So Yanluo Wang isn't a person. It's a post. Every time an incorruptible judge died, China assumed he'd been given the job. The chief clerk was real too. Cui Jue, born 607, in government service by 633, ran three counties. After he died, people decided he was the underworld's chief judge and the imperial court formally canonized him twice. The government of China issued an official promotion to a bureaucrat working in the afterlife. The bailiffs are Niu Tou Ma Mian, ox head and horse face. Ox head is Indian and old, named in a text from the fourth century. An ox head, human hands, hooves. Horse face has no Indian ancestry at all. Best guess anybody has. Chinese art wanted a matching pair. Ox head was imported. Horse face was hired locally to balance the composition. Let's go back to the man from the beginning of this video. This book is Su Shen Ji, In Search of the Supernatural, written by Gan Bao around the year 350. The man is Jia Ou, courtesy name Wen He, from Nanyang. And here is the actual line. The director of destinies consulted the register and said to the clerk, you were to summon the Wen He from such and such commandery. Why have you brought me this man? Send him back at once. Now count what's in that sentence. A summons, a clerk who serves it, a register, and somebody opens it and checks, a supervisor who catches the mistake, and a man who died because two people in two different districts happen to have the same given name. Now count what isn't in it. No Yen Luo Wang, no ten courts, no Buddhist hell. He isn't even taken to Di Yu, hell. He's taken to Mount Tai, which is where the Chinese dead have been going since the Han dynasty. That is roughly 500 years before the scripture of the ten kings. And this is the thing I want you to walk away with. The bureaucracy is not the Buddhist part. The bureaucracy was already here. Han dynasty tomb documents under a lord of the underworld and an assistant magistrate of the underworld administering grave taxes and labor service. The Chinese dead were being assessed for tax before Buddhism ever arrived. So Buddhism did not conquer the Chinese underworld. Buddhism showed up and got absorbed into a civil service that was already running. Yama didn't take a throne. He was given a desk. And this isn't me being clever. Stephen Teaser, who wrote the standard book on that scripture, calls the whole thing, quote, the last stage in the imposition of a bureaucratic metaphor on the experience of death. Or his sharper line, karma was none other than the law administered by the ten kings and their staff. There's a study out this year that went through 15 printed editions of the Yu Li Bao Chao, the Qing dynasty handbook that locked in the popular version of all this. It's argument. Ordinary people built this in response to the courts they actually had. Courts you couldn't trust. Verdicts you couldn't appeal. Officials you had to pay. So they drew a courtroom where the evidence gets recorded. The sentence fits the crime and everybody stands equal in front of the bench. Hell was the appeals court. Nobody ever gave them. So the most famous scene in Chinese literature, and I bet you've never heard it described as an office visit. Journey to the West, chapter three. The monkey king gets dragged down to the underworld in his sleep. He doesn't fight his way out. He has to see his file. And it's there. Soul category, number 1,350. Sun Wukong, a stone monkey, born of heaven. Allotted lifespan, 342 years. Manner of death, natural causes. So he says, I don't even remember how long I'm supposed to get. Just cross it out. Bring me a brush. And the clerk hands him one, freshly inked. The most beloved character in Chinese literature becomes immortal by editing a document, not by beating death, by amending the file. And look at what the file actually said. He was going to die peacefully at 342. It was never a threat. It was a schedule. Eight chapters later, same ledger, opposite crime. Emperor Taizong dies, goes below, and Cui Jue, the magistrate we just met, is holding a letter from a living minister who used to be his colleague. He turns to a 13 and a 33, and the emperor walks out alive. One vandal, one insider, same piece of paper, which brings us to the exit and the most famous figure in the whole system, Meng Po, the old woman with a bowl of soup. She's not in the 9th century scripture. She's not in the Dunhuang manuscripts. Search Chinese writing from before the late Ming dynasty, and there's no goddess of forgetting in any of it. She turns up in the Qing dynasty, around the time the United States was being founded, and China had stories about people remembering past lives for 1600 years before she existed. So the soup isn't the ancient part. The soup is the explanation somebody added afterward for why the rest of us don't remember. Next time you see the tongues and the oil cauldrons, look past them and count the furniture. A bench, a clerk, a register, and a mirror that plays your life back to you because that court doesn't want your confession. It wants the footage. China didn't imagine a hell and then hire people to staff it. The staff came first. The registers, the summonses, the grave taxes, the director of destinies, and when a god of death turned up from India, they did the most Chinese thing imaginable with him. They gave him a job. Now here's the living. In the 1430s, an emperor developed a taste for cricket fighting, and the order went down the chain. Court to governor, governor to magistrate, magistrate to a man with a bamboo tube and a silk net, and by the time it reached the bottom of that chain, it was a nine-year-old boy at the bottom of a well. That video is on your screen right now. Click it to watch, and until next time, zai jian!