God's Chinese Son by Jonathan Spence Page B

the stairs of King Yan Luo's Tower to View the World. The Canton authorities execute hundreds of their people for vio­lent crimes each year, and both these killers and their victims must face judgment once again in the courts below the earth. 26 Often there has been both public spectacle and retribution, as with the Canton wife condemned to death by slicing because she killed her husband. Huge crowds assem­bled to watch her death, drawn, it is said, by her pride and fierceness, her amazing beauty, and the tiny size of her feet. 2 ' Crowds gather too to see a woman who murdered her mother-in-law executed in her husband's presence, and to watch as a member of the pirate gang that killed twelve innocent foreign seamen is executed by being nailed to a giant cross. 28
    Others around Canton have committed crimes for which punishment both on earth and in the realms of hell seems justified to their contempo­raries. The men who pose as regular sedan chair carriers, using their dis­guise to kidnap and sell blind singing girls; the Buddhist priest who runs a den of thieves from his temple outside the city's eastern gate; those who rob the local graves not only of the ritual objects that might be buried there but of parts of bodies, to practice their "murdering, diabolical and magical arts." 29
    Other gods and spirits have their places and their days in the Jade Record: Guanyin, the compassionate Bodhisattva of mercy, and the Bud­dha Sakyamuni have two days each, one for the day of their earthly birth and one for the day on which they achieved enlightenment; the kitchen god has two as well, once for his birthdate and once for the day at the end of the year when he reports back to heaven what he has seen down here on earth. The city god has his day in the middle of summer, as do the local gods of the soil, in the middle of spring. The goddess Meng has her day on the thirteenth of the ninth month. Her role is a central one, for in the ten reaches of hell where the dead souls wander and suffer, the focus of the other gods is on judgment and remembrance, so that all human souls can be punished until the record is clear. But Meng's role is to induce forgetfulness, so that those born again to various forms of life on earth will not be burdened—or overgifted—with earlier memories.
    Goddess Meng's Tower of Forgetting, subdivided into 108 chambers, lies just beyond the tenth palace of hell, where all souls have received their final decisions on reincarnation. In every chamber of her domain her demons lay out cups of the "wine that is not wine," and every soul that enters is forced to drink. As they drink, their past lives vanish from their senses, they are stripped clear of memory, and tossed into the red waters of hell's last river. Borne by the current, they are washed ashore at the foot of a red wall, on which a message four columns long is hung: "To be a human is easy, to live a human life is hard; to desire to be human a second time, we fear is even harder. If you wish to be born into the Happy Lands, there is one easy way—say what is really in your heart, then you'll reach your goal." Two demons then haul them ashore, to send them on to their newly allotted spans. One demon is tall, round-eyed and laughs uproariously; he is in a fine robe, with a black scholar's hat on his head, writing brush and paper in his hands, a sword on his back. His name is Life-is-short. The other is dressed in soiled cotton clothes, blood flows from his head, he furrows his brows and loudly sighs, carries an abacus for calculations, and has an old rice bag slung around his shoulders in which he stuffs scrap paper. His name is Death-has-gradations. 30
    There is one group of souls, the Jade Record tells us, who after they have passed through all the trials, and been prepared for their return to earth, petition the demons to stay as ghostly souls a while longer, before regaining their corporeal forms, and sometimes their petition is granted. These are women