King Songdi

The third court

King Songdi presides over the third court in the sequence followed here. Yuli Baochao associates him with the Black Rope Hell and sixteen subsidiary hells. Its catalogue of wrongdoing includes altered accounts, harmful litigation, and failures of social obligation. These categories express the values and hierarchies of the society that circulated the book.

Reading a historical moral world

A fierce official expression, crown, tablet, and formal robes make the ruler recognizable in temple art. Particular images and duties nevertheless vary. Describing the old categories does not mean endorsing every historical rule governing families, servants, or social rank. Nor should this morality-book account be treated as the wording of all Buddhist or Daoist scripture. The Ten Kings tradition joins religious ideas of recompense with a Chinese courtroom imagination; different texts and regional practices arrange that combination in their own ways.