Meng Po

Chinese popular religion elaborated a scheme of ten courts of the underworld, Diyu, each presided over by a king who judges and punishes a different class of wrongdoing before a soul is permitted to proceed toward rebirth; Yama, adapted from the Buddhist and ultimately Indian Yama into Chinese religious literature, is folded into this scheme as one king among the ten rather than the sole ruler of the dead.

Meng Po's station is at the very end of the process, beside or upon the Bridge of Helplessness, Naihe Bridge, which every soul must cross on the way to its next life. Her broth, brewed in some tellings from herbs gathered throughout the ten courts, ensures that nobody arrives in a new birth carrying memory of the life just finished, and folk stories built around the scheme sometimes explain deja vu or unusually vivid dreams of a former life as the result of a soul that managed to spill, hide or only partly drink the broth before crossing. The ten courts scheme as a whole reflects a bureaucratic model of the afterlife, with judgment organized as a sequence of specialized offices a soul passes through in order, an image that borrows heavily from the imperial Chinese administrative system it was imagined alongside rather than presenting a single unified tribunal.

Meng Po belongs to the popular and folk religious literature that grew up around the ten courts scheme, including illustrated morality books, precious scrolls and temple murals that carried vivid images of judgment and punishment to a wide audience who might never read canonical Buddhist scripture directly, rather than to Buddhist doctrine in its formal, textual sense.

Some versions of her legend give her a specific backstory as a virtuous woman of a past life who was given the post of brewing the broth of forgetting as a reward for a lifetime of good conduct, an explanation that turns a figure who could easily read as menacing into one whose role is administered with a kind of grim fairness rather than malice. She is typically depicted as an elderly woman seated at a pavilion or table beside the bridge, ladling soup into bowls for the souls passing before her, an image repeated with only minor variation across the temple art and popular illustrated books that transmitted the scheme. Her pavilion is conventionally placed directly beside the Naihe Bridge itself, so that drinking the broth and crossing into the next life are presented as one continuous act rather than two separate stages a soul might choose to undergo apart from each other.