Buddhist conceptions of Hell have grown since the earliest introduction. Often they include tales from people who returned from the dead (e.g. because they were incorrectly brought to the underworld before their time).
Secondary studies:
- Berëzkin R. V. Many Faces of Mulian: The Precious Scrolls of Late Imperial China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017. (ebook Trexler)
- Ng, Zhiru. The Making of a Savior Bodhisattva: Dizang in Medieval China. Studies in East Asian Buddhism, 21. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. (ebook Trexler)
- Teiser, Stephen F. The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism. Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism, 9. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1994.
- Ledderose, Lothar von. “The Bureaucracy of Hell”. In Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Print. The A.W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts, 1998. (PDF)
- Zhang, Zhenjun. Buddhism and Tales of the Supernatural in Early Medieval China: A Study of Liu Yiqing’s (403-444) Youming Lu. Sinica Leidensia. Leiden: Brill, 2014. (ebook Trexler)
Podcast:
- “The Great Maudgalyayana”. Chinese Literature Podcast. https://chinachannel.org/2018/02/07/great-maudgalyayana/
Art:
- “Taizong’s Hell: A Study Collection of Chinese Hell Scrolls”, by Kenneth Brashier. URL: http://people.reed.edu/~brashiek/scrolls.html
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- Explore the focal set of ten scrolls. You can zoom in on the main picture, and click through on the small fragments on the right, for the ten different courts.
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Translations:
- “Chapter 10 and 11”. In The Monkey and the Monk: A Revised Abridgement of The Journey to the West, translated and edited by Anthony C. Yu, 143-177. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006.(PDF)
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- This is the story of Taizong in Hell as it is found in the late sixteenth-century version of Journey to the West (Xiyouji or Hsi-yu-chi). That larger book opens with the story of Monkey (see topic: Monkey)
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- Grant, Beata, and W. L Idema, trans. Escape from Blood Pond Hell: The Tales of Mulian and Woman Huang. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011. (ebook Trexler)
- “The Emperor Taizong in Hell.” In An Anthology of Translations: Classical Chinese Literature. Vol. 1: From Antiquity to the Tang Dynasty. Edited by John Minford and Joseph S. M. Lau, 1080-1088. New York: Hong Kong: Columbia University Press; The Chinese University Press, 2000. (PDF)
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- This story is from a ninth- or tenth-century manuscript found in northwestern China (Mogao Caves, near Dunhuang)
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- Waley, Arthur. Ballads and Stories from Tun-Huang. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2012. (ebook Trexler)
- Yan Wang. Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales from Early Medieval China. Translated by Robert Ford Campany. Classics in East Asian Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2012. (ebook Trexler)
