The Ten Courts and the Bridge of Forgetting

Chinese popular religion elaborated a scheme of ten courts of the underworld, Diyu, each presided over by a king who judges and punishes a different class of wrongdoing before a soul is permitted to proceed toward rebirth; Yama, adapted from the Buddhist and ultimately Indian Yama into Chinese religious literature, is folded into this scheme as one king among the ten rather than the sole ruler of the dead.

Meng Po's station is at the very end of the process, beside or upon the Bridge of Helplessness, Naihe Bridge, which every soul must cross on the way to its next life. Her broth, brewed in some tellings from herbs gathered throughout the ten courts, ensures that nobody arrives in a new birth carrying memory of the life just finished, and folk stories built around the scheme sometimes explain deja vu or unusually vivid dreams of a former life as the result of a soul that managed to spill, hide or only partly drink the broth before crossing. The ten courts scheme as a whole reflects a bureaucratic model of the afterlife, with judgment organized as a sequence of specialized offices a soul passes through in order, an image that borrows heavily from the imperial Chinese administrative system it was imagined alongside rather than presenting a single unified tribunal.