A Journey into Taoist Hell

Following poorly printed maps labelled in broken English and handed out by auto-rickshaw drivers at Thai flea markets is a hazardous undertaking at the best of times. The present author recently set out on a foot march through the suburbs of Trang - a Chinese city in southern Siam - following the instructions on one such map in search of a certain Chinese temple that he was assured was worth the journey. It proved to be a major undertaking.

Trang is not a particularly large city and is very orderly, but when you are not sure just where you are headed then it might as well be a sprawling labyrinth. After a few wrong turns you find yourself thoroughly lost, and since the road signs are all in Thai script there are few useful landmarks to help you on your way. Soon you are wandering aimlessly through industrial estates and semi-rural allotments. Moreover, setting out after lunch is a mistake in the 'Mad dogs and Englishman' category. The humidity starts to soar in the early afternoon. Rain clouds gather but no rain arrives; just an inpenetrable wall of humidity shimmering under the blazing sun. You go on regardless, though, and buy some water off a man on the roadside who, you think - if his hand signals are to be believed -, indicates that yes there is a temple, or something, somewhere on ahead. Eventually you decide that you'll give it five more minutes before turning around, and then - suddenly - as you come around a bend, there it is! Temple gates in the distance! It is a small miracle, and an ordeal, but you've made it!

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The temple in question is undoubtedly one of the strangest this author has seen in all his travels. It is sacred to the great Chinese war god Guan Yu who is honoured with a full-sized statue, along with his horse, just outside the temple portals. Thus:

The grounds of the temple are very colourful, with numerous small buildings and service structures with the whole space centred on a very tall and prominent dragon pillar, which indeed is the emblem of the temple as marked on the map the author has been following. The temple is known for this tall pillar. Thus:

The temple itself is large and spacious and features a dragon pool below the open aperture in the centre of the ceiling such that the pool and its dragons shine within the gloom of the space. Few other temples make such dramatic use of the light of the oculus. The effect is very pleasing, giving the whole a sort of mystical, luminous ambience. Dragon symbolism - always standard in any Chinese temple - is especially accentuated here, both in the grounds and in the temple, and it is done very well. Thus:

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Beyond the temple, through a side door, is an opening onto a quite extensive covered space with tables and chairs for dining. It is a space intended to accommodate a large congregation, especially during the famous Trang vegetarian festival each October during which crowds of Chinese travel from far and wide. It is perhaps relevant to this function, and to vegetarianism specifically, that at the far corner of the dining area is a small temple to the Hindoo deity Shiva. It is remarkable because it is entirely in the Hindoo style. Its whole iconography is Hindoo, an entirely Hindoo gesture within an otherwise completely Chinese temple complex. Thus:

The Shiva temple is the small building in the distance. Its function is directly related to the dining area. It is arranged, evidently, so that diners can easily access it.

None of this, however, prepares the visitor for a further section of the complex back towards the main gates and to the left. There is a small temple to Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, and a large statue to the laughing Boodha, Boodai - a great favvourite among the Chinese. But then, without warning, one encounters an outdoor garden scene that features a bridge and life-sized, lurid efigies of poor souls being tortured by a vicious demon. Thus:

Then, in a shelter beyond this - back out into the heat and following the pathway - you come to an extraordinary scene: an extensive, explicit diorama depicting the many tortures of Taoist hell in all their gruesome detail. It is an unexpected and arresting discovery. The author had been told the temple was worth the visit, and the tourist literature made much of the dragon pillar in the courtyard, but no one had mentioned a full-scale rendering of the torture chambers of the Chinese underworld in pornographic naturalism! Thus:

Some dozen explicit tortures are depicted. Here are a few:

Pounding

Bisection

Dismemberment

Bed of Nails

Eaten alive by Dogs

Wok fried

The agents of torture are feirce crazy-eyed chocolate-brown demons, each of them wearing tiger-skin underpants with tiger faces on their behinds. Thus:

Commanding the demons are the various ministers of hell. There are, firstly, the two guides to the Chinese underworld, Ox-Head and Horse-Face, who in this case are standing guard at one end of the display. By tradition these are the first beings the dead soul encounters after crossing the bridge into the Underworld. They carry pitch-forks and deliver the souls to the torture chambers where each soul is punished according to their failings and misdeeds. Here they are:

More menacing, though - and a successfully macabre feature of this particular display - are the two figures called the Heibai Wuchang, the black and white 'Ghosts of Impermanence'. They are watching on as the demons do their work. Here they are:

Images of these two ghouls also feature on the altar at one end of the display. Thus:

The purpose of the diorama, it is clear, is to remind visitors to the temple complex of the terrible purifications that await them in the afterlife as a consequence of their sins in this current life. The scenes are lurid and ghoulish in order to frighten and terrify.

Westerners very often have entirely sanitized views of Taoism - Boodhism too - and have a corresponding bleak and prejudiced view of the occidental traditions, and Catholicism in particular. They are surprised, even shocked, to find that the eastern religions have such graphic and violent depictions of a terrible afterlife. ("I thought terrifying people with tales of hellish torment was the stuff of the medieval Church. Alan Watts never mentioned this!") 

In reality, Taoism - by which we mean popular, practical, religious Chinese Taoism and not the secularized philosophical version, or coffee shop Taoism, known in New Age circles - proposes a complex afterlife featuring purifying tortures prior to reincarnation. Numerous Taoist texts describe the hell-realms and their denizens and the torments thereof in shocking detail. They are a commonplace in Chinese folklore. To a great extent this has been appropriated into Taoism from Boodhist descriptions of the 'Naraka' (realms of punishment) since - contrary to Western misunderstandings - Boodhism too has conceptions of otherworldly punishments every bit as grisly as any ever imagined in Catholicism. 

Indeed, the present author can think of no depictions of the torments of hell in Christian art - not even in Heironymous Bosch or Dante - that are quite as graphic and quite as extreme as these. The diorama at Trang illustrates the perverse depths of the oriental religious imagination. A journey to this temple - the Guan Yu temple on the northern outskirts of Trang - is worth the effort just for this. It is a sobering and confronting reminder of a dimension of oriental religiosity about which many Westerners know nothing. Taoists, like Boodhists, are threatened with terrible punishments if they misbehave. The fact that hell is a temporary phase of the afterlife in the eastern traditions and not an eternal damnation as it is in the West is, in context, small comfort. 

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black

The Temple Painter of Trang

The provincial city of Trang in southern Siam is used by a few tourists as a brief stop over on the way to such over-priced and over-rated locations as Phuket but is otherwise largely unknown to Western travelers. The present author arrived there a few days ago after journeying into the Kingdom by boat and by another short journey inland, but rather than using the city as a bus hub he has decided to camp there and explore for a while. The main reason for this is that, like George Town where he had stayed earlier, Trang has a large population of Straits Chinese and a strong Chinese culture; it is another instance where the local culture – in this case Thai rather than Malay – has been greatly enhanced by the admixture and influence of settlers from southern China. In the case of Trang the Chinese went to there to work in tin mines and have remained and intermarried. In general, the Chinese in Siam are well-integrated; the resulting Chinese-Siamese hybrid culture is rich and colorful, peaceful, clean, productive, industrious, cordial, relaxed, and with an excellent cuisine. 

* * * 

Just a few miles walk from the centre of Trang is a large Boodhist temple on a hill boasting a statue of the Boddhisatva Guanyin, the goddess of mercy. (Her prevalence in Asian spiritual life was the subject of a previous post, here.) It stands as a beacon over the city and so is an obvious place for a newcomer to investigate. After climbing a steep series of broken steps, however, you will discover that the temple is in advanced disrepair – in fact, abandoned. The author was greeted not by monks in prayer but by two cleaners – a man and a woman – who, rather than sweeping with their brooms, were happily groping and fondling each other somewhat immoderately in the shade of the temple walls. The goddess stood golden and merciful at the summit all the same, identifiable from her iconographical pitcher of water and her twig of willow, but everything else about the temple – a modern rather than traditional construction - is in ruin. It is a very odd structure. Evidently based on the architecturally ill-conceived idea of a giant cement-fabricated lotus pad it is a maze of circular forms, winding stairs and empty conference rooms, all of which is now crumbling and streaked with water stains, a dilapidated, melancholy monument to modern Boodhist decay. See:

* * * 

In the forest area below this temple, though, is another structure also dedicated to the great goddess of mercy, a small Chinese temple consisting of two simple buildings. See here:

If the Boodhist modernist monstrosity on the hill is disappointing, this traditional and modest Chinese temple is a hidden treasure. It is so inconspicuous that it does not even appear on google maps, nor on the otherwise infotmative local map of must-see temples and tourist spots entitled 'Prestiguous Merit Making'. This small temple is sheltered in concave landforms and overgrown forest and is accessed by an obscure pathway from the monastery at the foot of the larger temple. English-speaking locals could report little of it, except to say that it is a "joss house" - one of many in Trang - and that it is kept by the old Chinaman who is responsible for its paintings and iconography. 

The author found this old Chinaman on top of a small pagoda in the front of the temple, putting finishing touches to the enamel designs on the pagoda roof. Other than a few children playing near the caves at the back, he was the only person around. Here he is: 

He speaks very little English, for which he apologises, but in one way or another is able to communicate a few salient points about his temple. "Chinese temple!" he says - by which he means "as opposed to Thai." And as for how long he has been there painting he just says, "Long time." He is perhaps in his sixties or seventies - it is hard to tell and impolite to inquire. 

In any case, he has clearly been painting over the walls and fixtures of this temple from little tins of enamel for many years, and just as clearly it is a labour of dedication and love. The afternoon sun is very hot. He is perched on the pagoda roof protected only by a coolie hat. He is manifestly proud of his temple and very happy that a traveller would be bothered to step off the beaten path to see it. 

Although modest from the outside, the interior is a carnival of Chinese vermillion adorned with dozens of scenes from mythology and other paintings. It is all done in the same bright glossy enamels with which he is now painting the highlights of the padoga roof.  

The iconography of the temple is standard, and much of it can be seen in similar "joss houses", but the endearing feature of the temple is the somewhat naif mode of the painting. The artist is not idiosyncratic; he follows the canonical iconography, but he is - so it would seem, anyway - self-taught, or at least not a professional. The colours are bright and strong. The lines are intense and heavy. The medium is modern industrial enamels applied thick and without much subtlety. It is not a polished temple like others, but it has beauty and simplicity and power. Here is one of the door guardians:

  

Here are some panels showing Guanyin as one of the immortals:

Some scenes depict stories from the famous novel of Wu Chengen, Journey to the West - the story of 'Monkey' and Tripitaka who has been tasked by goddess Guanyin to journey from China to India to fetch the sacred scriptures:

As well as these familiar mythological depictions, there are also a number of panels near the front portal that seem to depict modern scenes of mining. The author surmises - though he might be wrong since it is a matter he was not able to clarify in the brief conversations with the old painter - that they concern the history and hardship of the Chinese tin miners who travelled from southern China to settle in the Trang region of the Siamese Kingdom in the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries. They are more cartoonish than the panels based on established iconography, presumably because the painter was creating scenes from his imagination:

The real delight of this temple, and this painter's work, however, is in the incidental depictions of birds and animals and flowers and fruit that fill the gaps between the formal panel paintings and that adorn the pillars and lintels thereabouts. These are really quite wonderful little nature studies - all in enamel - that are often signed and dated in both traditional Chinese dating and in the dating of the common (Western) calendar. Examples can be found below. As readers can see for themselves, the paintings of birds are especially successful:

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black