Strange Tales from Liaozhai - Vol. 2The weird and whimsical short stories in Strange Tales from Liaozhai show their author, Pu Songling (1640-1715), to be both an explorer of the macabre, like Edgar Allan Poe, and a moralist, like Aesop. In this first complete translation of the collection's 494 stories into English, readers will encounter supernatural creatures, natural disasters, magical aspects of Buddhist and Daoist spirituality, and a wide range of Chinese folklore. Annotations are provided to clarify unfamiliar references or cultural allusions, and introductory essays have been included to explain facets of Pu Songling's work and to provide context for some of the unique qualities of his uncanny tales. This is the second of 6 volumes. |
From inside the book
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... ...... xi II.Justice After Death: Pu Songling and the Tradition of the Hell King ....................... xxi The Tales 84. Official Lu's Daughter ....................................... 393 85. The Daoist Priest ......................
... Hell. King. In the universe of Pu Songling's strange tales, a great deal of traffic passes between the mundane world of mortal human beings, and the underworld with its spirit denizens. In the latter, individuals are judged after death ...
... King Yama and Taishan became just two of ten kings of the underworld (the fifth and seventh, respectively). The earliest surviving paintings of the hell kings appear on the walls of the Dunhuang caves (Shimbo 477-81), in Gansu province ...
... King Yama” or the “Hell King” came popularly to be synonymous with any one of the ten kings (Kucera 88). Perception of the Hell King varies in Pu's stories, as it does in Chinese culture more generally, between the extremes of punitive ...
... Hell King's judgments is often overshadowed in literary accounts by the horrors of the torments and tortures waiting for those guilty of misdeeds, explaining why the Hell King's judgments may seem reminiscent of “Lucifer or Beelzebub in ...