Again it may not be justified to identify a common theme to any particular hell, but most of these images involve deceitful practice, from outright violent theft to adjusting the market scales. The couplets that flank the magistrate warn that anyone behaving like a two-headed snake - somewhat like being "two-faced" - will become a two-horned animal, and the animal enclosure shows what such deceitful people are destined to become. The text below the animal enclosure states, "At the end of the day and the close of the season, a greatly evil person may tell himself to consume grain and meat foolishly, but without fail they will receive their torturous recompense. Tell everyone and advise the world."
The "Bridge of no alternative" (also rendered as the "Bridge of no return," "of no recourse" or "of futility") stretches across the bottom of this scroll. A Tang Dynasty "transformation text" -- a text originally performed for professional entertainment that eventually came to be written down -- describes how the monk Mulian traveled through hell to rescue his mother. Mulian and his mother will appear in the tenth scroll, but many of the torture sites and topographical features of this afterlife realm are described in this story, including this bridge. When he came to it and saw a large number of tortured souls huddled on one side of it, Mulian asked them for more details about this place, and they replied (as here translated by Eugene Eoyang):
The waters of Futility rush toward the West;
Shattered rock, jagged cliffs -- the way is rough.
Clothes taken off and hung on three branches;
We have not been transferred, and must stay here.
By the riverbank we ask that our names be called;
Without our knowing it, our chests are soaked through.
Only today we've come to realize what death means.
Two by two, under the trees, our tears of grief stream down....
Oxhead demons, staffs in hand, on the southern bank;
Hell's guardians, wielding tridents, on the northern shore.
The eyes of those in the water bulge out;
The tears of those on the riverbank gush forth.
Had we known how bitter death would be,
How would we not have cultivated good deeds in life!
