Diyu, the Chinese Underworld

Chinese ideas of the afterlife grew in layers. Early texts speak of the dead going to the Yellow Springs, a shadowy place beneath the earth. By the later Han dynasty, in the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, many believed that the dead were registered at Mount Tai in the east, whose god kept the records of life and death like a government office. Documents placed in tombs addressed the officials of the underworld much as one would address a magistrate.

When Buddhism reached China in the first centuries CE, it brought the ideas of karma, rebirth and the hells, along with Yama, the Indian lord of the dead, called Yanluo Wang in Chinese. The Chinese word for hell, diyu, “earth prison”, comes from Buddhist translations. Over the following centuries these ideas merged with native beliefs and with Daoist teachings about the celestial bureaucracy. The result was an underworld run like an imperial administration, with courts, judges, clerks, registers and prisons.

The layers shown here are schematic. Diyu is pictured beneath the earth, but texts and temples arrange the courts and hells in different ways, and the heavens of the Jade Emperor and of Amitabha Buddha belong to different strands of tradition. The diagram follows the order in which a soul passes through the courts.

The classic picture of Diyu appears in the Scripture on the Ten Kings, a Chinese Buddhist text from the late 9th or 10th century, which names a monk of Chengdu, Zangchuan, as its compiler. It describes the dead passing before ten kings, one after another. The first seven courts follow at seven-day intervals, the eighth at a hundred days, the ninth at one year and the tenth at three years. These dates match the memorial services that families hold for their dead, and the scripture teaches that offerings and rites performed on those days help the dead through each court.

Popular tradition fills in the scene. Guards with the heads of an ox and a horse, Ox-Head and Horse-Face, lead the soul through the Ghost Gate. In the First Court, ruled by King Qinguang, the soul sees its life reflected in the Mirror of Retribution. King Yama presides over the Fifth Court; a well-known legend says he was moved there from the First because he was too lenient. The same court is said to hold a terrace from which the dead can look back at their homes one last time. Each court is linked to particular sins, and the guilty are sent to hells where the punishment fits the offence. Popular tradition speaks of eighteen levels of hell, though texts give different numbers.

Diyu is a purgatory, not an eternal hell. When punishment is complete, or when merit and the prayers of the living have shortened it, the soul comes to the Tenth Court, ruled by the King Who Turns the Wheel. There it is assigned a new birth according to its karma. Before leaving, it meets Meng Po, the Lady of Forgetfulness, who gives every soul a bowl of soup that wipes out the memory of past lives. The soul then crosses the Bridge of Helplessness, Naihe qiao, and returns to the world.

Compassion runs through these stories. The bodhisattva Dizang, known in Sanskrit as Kshitigarbha, is said to have vowed not to attain Buddhahood until the hells are empty, and he is often shown in temples as a monk with a staff that opens the gates of hell. The tale of Mulian, a disciple of the Buddha who descended to the underworld to rescue his mother, became the foundation story of the Ghost Festival. In the story, Mulian finds his mother suffering as a hungry ghost and cannot feed her himself; the Buddha teaches him to make offerings to the community of monks on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, and the merit of that gift frees her.

Not every soul passes straight through the courts. Those who die violently, too young or with no descendants to make offerings may become wandering ghosts, hungry and restless. Much of Chinese ritual life aims to care for such spirits as well as for one’s own ancestors, so that the living and the dead remain in a relationship of mutual support. Daoist priests perform rites to rescue souls from the hells, and Buddhist monks recite scriptures and hold great ceremonies of feeding for all beings in the lower realms.

These practices express a central idea of Chinese religion: that death does not end family bonds. The dead depend on the living for offerings and remembrance, and the living hope for the blessing and protection of well-cared-for ancestors.

Belief in Diyu shapes Chinese practices around death. Families burn paper money, often printed as Hell Bank Notes, as well as paper houses, clothes and other goods, so that their ancestors will be provided for in the spirit world. In the seventh lunar month, when the gates of the underworld are believed to open, the Ghost Festival brings offerings for ancestors and for wandering ghosts with no family to care for them. Buddhist temples hold the Yulanpen rites and Daoist priests the Zhongyuan rites on the same day.

The underworld also became a favourite setting for literature and art. In the novel Journey to the West, first printed in 1592, the Monkey King storms the underworld and crosses his name out of the register of life and death, and an emperor of the Tang dynasty visits the courts and returns. Temples in China and Taiwan display painted or sculpted scenes of the Ten Courts, and the town of Fengdu on the Yangtze is known as a “ghost city” full of underworld shrines. Haw Par Villa in Singapore, a sculpture garden opened in 1937, is famous for its Ten Courts of Hell. These images, at once frightening and moral, taught generations that every deed is recorded and that the living can still help the dead.