Chinese · Vernacular Chinese · c. 1592
Journey to the West
Attributed to Wu Cheng'en
A Ming novel, carried here as reception rather than as doctrine, and the reason the Chinese underworld bureaucracy is familiar to people who have never read a sutra. Its most useful episode for this corpus is the Monkey King dragged before the king of the dead, seizing the register of lives and striking his own name out of it — a comedy about jurisdiction that assumes a reader already knows exactly how that court is supposed to work.
Read Journey to the West in full at the linked edition →What this text attests · 1
| Name here | Rank given | # | Powers described |
|---|---|---|---|
 King Yama = Yanluo Wang | — | — | The court as everyone imagines it, and a joke at its expense: Monkey is dragged down by the summoners, demands the register of lives, and strikes out his own name and the names of every monkey on his mountain. A novel that can play the underworld's paperwork for laughs is evidence of how thoroughly the system was understood by ordinary readers. |