Meng Po in Popular Religion and Art

Meng Po belongs to the popular and folk religious literature that grew up around the ten courts scheme, including illustrated morality books, precious scrolls and temple murals that carried vivid images of judgment and punishment to a wide audience who might never read canonical Buddhist scripture directly, rather than to Buddhist doctrine in its formal, textual sense.

Some versions of her legend give her a specific backstory as a virtuous woman of a past life who was given the post of brewing the broth of forgetting as a reward for a lifetime of good conduct, an explanation that turns a figure who could easily read as menacing into one whose role is administered with a kind of grim fairness rather than malice. She is typically depicted as an elderly woman seated at a pavilion or table beside the bridge, ladling soup into bowls for the souls passing before her, an image repeated with only minor variation across the temple art and popular illustrated books that transmitted the scheme. Her pavilion is conventionally placed directly beside the Naihe Bridge itself, so that drinking the broth and crossing into the next life are presented as one continuous act rather than two separate stages a soul might choose to undergo apart from each other.