The ancients thought about this question. Where did the soul go after death? In ancient times, people have long considered this issue.
Now we know that people will cross the Naihe Bridge to go to hades after death, but in ancient times, the place where people originally imagined the soul to return was Kunlun Mountain.
Chu Ci says: In the northwest of heaven, there is a country where there is no sun in the underworld.
The Book of Rites states that the dead are in the north and the living are in the south.
In the Spring and Autumn Period, people were buried after death, with their heads facing west and north, in order to enable their souls to return to the kingdom of the nether world.
Where is the kingdom of the underworld?
Kunlun Mountain.
In ancient legends, Kunlun Mountain has always been the place where gods and ghosts live.
Three thousand six hundred miles underground of Kunlun Mountain is the underworld, which is as big as twenty Wan Li and supported by four pillars.
The ancients considered it very carefully, thinking that ghosts wanted to drink water, so the nine wellheads in the nether world of Kunlun Mountain kept flowing with spring water day and night, but these spring waters were all yellow, which was probably the origin of yellow.
It is not easy for a ghost to go to the underworld after death, and it has to go through many passes.
First of all, you have to cross a big river, which is called weak water.
The weak water in Kunlun must be Lapras.
Weak water is a little helpless, but weak water needs Lapras to cross the river without a bridge.
In all national myths, there seems to be a river leading to the underworld. In Norse mythology, this river is called the Gil River, but there is a bridge over this river. It is a crystal suspension bridge with a hair hanging, which is more frightening than the glass plank road. Besides, there is an old witch Mojid grinning across the river, waiting for the ghost to die and suck blood.
In Egyptian mythology, there is also a river on the way to the nether world, called the Urnis River.
After the weak water, you have to cross the volcano.
The description of volcano in China mythology is very general, saying that there are birds, animals and trees on the volcano, and they all live by fire.
For Buddhists, this kind of fire is specially called Eight Inflammation Fire, which has eight kinds:
Charcoal pit, burning forest, sword forest, knife path, thorns, salty river, copper column, boiling shit.
The most interesting thing is this last one, burning hot shit, which is exciting when you think about it.
Buddhists seem to like this thing very much. Later, the hell in the Buddhist system was iterated several times, and boiling shit appeared repeatedly.
After the volcano, ghosts have to go through nine gates. The old nine gates in Nanpai's uncle's novel are transformed from the nine gates in ancient legends.
Nine gates are actually ghost gates, where ghosts go in and out. The gods guarding the Nine Doors are the first two door gods: Shen Tu Lei Yu.
In addition to gods, there are also divine beasts, called enlightened beasts, with a human face and a tiger body.
There are also ghosts in foreign myths. In Egyptian mythology, the ghost gate is seven gates, and each gate has evil spirits to collect taxes. The first seven ghosts have nothing to worry about when they are naked.
In Norse mythology, the gate of hell is also guarded by animals. The animal guarding the gate of hell is a big dog with blood spots, Garm.
Many stories in ancient mythology have similarities, for example, all ethnic groups have legends of the great flood, and the legends of the underworld have many similar settings.
Ghosts entering the gate of hell are divided into three categories: good ghosts, evil ghosts and ghosts.
A good ghost is a person who does good things before life becomes a ghost.
An evil ghost refers to a person who did something bad before his death and became a ghost.
Ghosts are ghosts who die suddenly.
In the gloom of Kunlun Mountain, the god who manages spectres is called Zongbu God. People are more familiar with his identity.
Hou Yi is also an unfortunate person. His wife stole the elixir of life, and later he was shot by his apprentice Feng Meng. After the death of Hou Yi, the Queen Mother of the West hired him to come to the underworld to deal with the spectre.
There is also a great god in the underworld called Guo Guo. This guy is seventy feet tall and has a waistline. He and Zhong Kui have the same hobbies, and both like to eat evil spirits.
Eat ghosts as food.
Guo's appetite is much better than that of Zhong Kui. He eats 3000 evil spirits in the morning and 300 at night.
I still pay attention to health.
The highest god in the underworld of Kunlun Mountain, Pluto, is also our acquaintance, the Queen Mother of the West. The Queen Mother of the West has a musical instrument called the longevity tree. It is said that good people can return to the dead through the immortal tree when they reach the underworld.
In the TV series The Ferry of the Soul, Pluto is a woman, and the prototype is probably the Queen Mother of the West.
When we arrived in the Three Kingdoms of Han Dynasty, maybe everyone thought it was a little far to go to Kunlun Mountain, and the water in Qianshan Mountain was too weak and it was too difficult to cook shit, so they chose Mount Tai as the underworld.
The description of the soul returning to Daishan in the History of the Three Kingdoms.
Daishan is Mount Tai, because the office location has changed, and the guardian of the underworld has changed from the Queen Mother of the West to the Lord of Mount Tai.
The Queen Mother of the West became a graceful fairy. She received Zhou Muwang and other human emperors and invited them on dates or something.
In the Tang Dynasty, the underworld described by the Tang people became Luofeng Mountain in the north.
This is related to the rise of Shitian Road in Zhang Tianshi.
Taoism says that people will go to Beijing after death, and the caretaker in charge of the afterlife is Dongyue the Great.
Dongyue Emperor should be an upgraded version of Taishan Fujun.
In the Romance of Gods, Huang was named the Emperor of Dongyue. In an older legend, Dongyue the Great is a descendant of Pangu. He has a brother who has been red and purple in the past two years, and his name is Donghua the Great.
Emperor Dongyue has a book of life and death in his hand. It is said that when the household registration in the afterlife is cancelled after death, the book of life and death in the underworld has a name.
Emperor Dongyue has officials such as the commander of the main tomb, the commander of the tomb and the director of the soul gate to help him deal with officials and ghosts.
This actually moved the world's bureaucracy underground.
There is a saying that people will go to Jiuquan after death, and the saying of Jiuquan also comes from Taoism.
In the Song Dynasty, there was a man named Lu Shi who wrote a book called "The Secret of Three Days in Yutang", in which Jiuquan was written as follows:
The owner of Tanquan Prison took photos of Monty.
The master of Yaquan Prison took a picture of the temple.
The owner of the yellow prison photographed the spirit of the mountain.
The Jianghu monsters photographed by the cold spring prison master.
Yin Quan prison master eats evil spirits with blood.
The prison master in You Quan filmed the evil in the mountain.
The owner of Xia Quan Prison took photos of ancient corpses.
The owner of Bitter Spring Prison is a wizard.
The owner of Xiequan prison died suddenly.
The Taoist system of hell is very rough. We are familiar with it as eighteen layers of hell, with black and white faces and judges of the underworld. This set comes from Buddhism.
Buddhism's definition of the underworld refers to the Taoist book of life and death and introduces the bureaucratic system of the world.
The Buddhist underworld system has been localized with reference to the concept of Indian hell.
In their imagination, the underworld is located in 60 Wan Li, which is as big as 60 Wan Li, and is underground in the southern mansion.
Hell is arranged vertically, similar to today's buildings, and each floor is an office.
At first, Buddhists had only sixteen hells.
But these sixteen hells have only eight hot prisons and eight cold prisons in the misery system.
The eight most popular prisons are:
Waiting for a living hell: Ghosts kill each other here, like a hunger game.
Black rope hell: strangle a ghost with a black rope.
Howl in hell: howl in hell.
Screaming hell: an enhanced version of the last one.
Hot hell: similar to kebabs.
Hot hell: the kebab is burnt.
A nose hell: a hell of constant suffering. It can be understood as working for free and starving every day.
The name of Ba Leng Prison is simpler than that of Ba Re Prison, which is the description of various state words of people whose teeth are shaking with cold. The two lightest prisons in Bahan, one is called sore prison, and when ghosts go in, they get sores all over, and the other is called pustule prison, which sounds super disgusting.
Later, sixteen hell iterated into eighteen hell, and a book called Eighteen Hell Classic was published to publicize eighteen hell.
This iteration has optimized the original eight cold and eight hot hell, and the stinking excrement prison in fireworks has returned impressively, and at the same time, the maggot prison and the train prison have been added.
The students in white robes guessed that the hell of the train prison was not for people to take the train to nine and three-quarters railway stations.
At the beginning, Hades was in charge alone, and Hades' eighteen judges were in charge of the eighteen levels of hell. The judges included service personnel such as Niu Tau Ma Fang Hag and Luo Cha.
There are eight witches and sixteen Luo Cha, and each witch has seven thousand little witches and Luo Cha under Luo Cha.
Why are there more Luo Cha than yaksha? Because Luo Cha is divided into men and women, male Luo Cha has red hair and green eyes, and female Luo Cha is a top beauty with good skin and long legs.
The cow's head and horse's face are responsible for exorcising ghosts into hell, and the hag is responsible for executing various punishments.
This hell system is quite reasonable in design.
But it's not over yet.
Eighteen hell also had the last iteration, which is the system we are familiar with now.
In this iteration, those disgusting and incomprehensible names in the names of hell are gradually replaced, such as mud pear hell and boiling shit hell, and the names of hell are replaced by some easy-to-understand names.
For example, scissors hell, oil tripod hell, tongue cutting hell, ice hell and so on,
The specification of hell has also been optimized, which may refer to the setting of nine "hell" in China ancient mythology.
Yan Luowang, the chief executive of Buddhism, is in charge of ten hell masters, who live in different halls and have equal status. Every regional owner has a Chinese surname, such as Song Yu in the Third Hall, Lu Wang in the Fifth Hall and Cang in the Fifth Hall.
The biggest difference between the ten halls of hades and the original design is the addition of a distinguishing mechanism. The first temple, King Guang Jiang of Qin, was responsible for screening, sending good people to the west and bad people to hell.
Ten halls Yamaraja is in charge of eighteen layers of hell. A simple understanding is similar to the current office building system, where each floor has a general manager in charge of all business.
The first floor is the projection room. The screening of new ghosts is to go to 1234 floor, or directly to Lingshan headquarters.
The top ten halls are responsible for highly subdivided business. For example, Wang Lu, five officials on the fourth floor, is responsible for dealing with adultery, murder, gambling, murder and arson, and heartless ghosts.
Originally, the underworld was ruled by Yan and his judges. Now, ten Yan are in charge of eighteen hell places, and the judges have also been streamlined, from eighteen judges to four, namely, palm good, palm evil, palm punishment and palm life and death books.
The executioner's surname is Lu. He is also a poor lover. He likes to drill seven holes in people's hearts or change his head for nothing.
The judge in charge of the life and death book is surnamed Cui.
Text: Xue Bai pao