The pantheon · The Ten Courts of the Underworld
Yanluo Wang
閻羅王 · Yanluo Wang (Wade-Giles: Yen-lo Wang)
Syncretic
King Yama, judge of the fifth court
The best-known ruler of the Chinese underworld, King Yama presides over the fifth of the ten courts, weighing each life against the record of its deeds.
- Portfolio
- judgment of the dead · the fifth court · karmic accounting
- Observance
- During the seventh lunar month, and especially at the Ghost Festival (Zhongyuan, 中元節), the living offer food and paper goods to the dead and to unsettled spirits — the season when the courts of the underworld are felt to be closest to the world above.
How to recognise them
He is shown as an imperial magistrate: a broad red or dark face, the flat mortarboard cap and court robes of a Tang official, a writing brush or an audience tablet in hand. He presides from a raised bench, and beside him stands the mirror of retribution, in which a soul sees its own deeds replayed.
The name Yanluo (Yen-lo, 閻羅) is a Chinese rendering of the Sanskrit Yama, the lord of the dead in Indian religion. As Buddhism spread through China from the Han dynasty onward, Yama travelled with it, and by the Tang dynasty he had been absorbed into a distinctly Chinese vision of the afterlife: a government office, staffed and audited like the empire that imagined it.
In the mature system described in the medieval Scripture on the Ten Kings, the dead are not sentenced by one judge but pass through ten courts in sequence, one for each memorial feast held over the three years after death. Yanluo Wang holds the fifth court. That he became, in the popular imagination, the ruler of the whole underworld says more about his fame than about his rank within the bureaucracy.
What the tradition emphasises is procedure rather than terror. Each soul is measured against a written record; the karma mirror shows deeds already done; sentences are finite and lead, after their term, back to the wheel of rebirth. This is why scholars describe the Chinese underworld as purgatorial rather than hellish — a period of accounting, not an eternity of punishment. Families could also intervene, commissioning rites to lighten the ledger of the dead.
Nearby
Written from
- The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism — Stephen F. Teiser, University of Hawai'i Press, 1994
- Yuli Baochao (The Jade Record)
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