Translation
This whole group of people is being recompensed for taking that which was heavy and selling it as if it were light.
Appearance in a Taiwanese visit to hell
For a description of punishing merchants who had falsely adjusted their weights from a Taiwanese spiritual medium who had engaged in a series of hell tours between 1976 and 1979, see Voyages to hell, Chapter 26.
If nothing else, these hell scrolls reveal the daily concerns and worries of their painters and viewers; they tell us what was on their mental radars. Common fraud in the marketplace was one such concern, and this torture of the fraudsters justly suffering from their own tools is frequently depicted in such scrolls. As the Vidor Collection describes its own version of the scene:
The gateway at the left side with the horizontal writing leads to the "Hell of the Great Scale." Approaching this is a man who throughout his life used measuring cups to his own advantage. He used a large cup for buying and a small one for selling grain. The man nearby is receiving punishment, for he never used the scales justly and acted against moral principles.
A second example of punishing someone who cheated with weights and measures from another hell scroll (S15).
Weighing the false merchant as depicted at Fengdu, the City of Ghosts.