The Ten Courts of the Underworld

The Chinese underworld — Diyu (Ti-yü, 地獄), the "earth prison," usually administered through what are called the Ten Courts — is not a single standard map handed down intact. It is a composite, assembled over centuries from at least three streams: the Buddhist Naraka, imported from India with its purgatories and animal-headed guardians; the vision of the cosmos as a vast government bureaucracy; and older native beliefs about ancestors, ghosts and the underground world of the Yellow Springs (Huangquan, 黃泉).

The familiar figure of ten courts, each under its own king, took shape only in the medieval period. It is set out in an influential apocryphal text, the Scripture on the Ten Kings, which Stephen Teiser has studied in detail, and was elaborated much later in popular morality books such as the Jade Record (Yuli Baochao). The "ten" is not a fixed feature of the cosmos: it maps onto the ten memorial feasts a family held for the dead across the first three years, so the courts and the rites for the dead mirror one another.

Because it grew this way, the underworld varies from source to source and from place to place. The number of courts, the names and order of their kings, how many sub-hells attach to each court, and even whether there are ten courts at all differ between the scriptures, the morality books, and the murals painted on temple walls. Any table that presents one version as the definitive layout of the Chinese afterlife is flattening a living, plural tradition into a chart it never actually had.

One difference from Western expectations is worth stating plainly. This underworld is not a place of eternal damnation. It is procedural: a soul is summoned, its record is examined, a term is served, and — after a final draught that clears the memory — it returns to the wheel of rebirth. The whole apparatus is closer to a court and a period of correction than to a permanent hell, and the living can petition on the dead's behalf to ease their passage through it.

The bureaucratic character of all this is genuine and pervasive, but it should not be overstated. Recent scholarship has begun to question the old generalisation that Chinese gods are simply officials in a celestial administration; historians such as Robert Hymes describe at least two competing models of the divine, bureaucratic and personal, held side by side. The offices below are described here as the tradition imagined them, with no claim that this was the only way China pictured its gods.