The Jade registers are a contemporanous genre that surveys the ten underworld courts and is a kind of textual counterpart to the hell scrolls. They often group large numbers of sins to be addressed in particular hells, and sometimes it's possible to discern general (but very loose) themes. For example, the third hell tends to punish people who did not properly fulfill their allegiance to their superiors; the sixth is earmarked for the misuse and distruction of sacred symbols; and the seventh answers anyone who improperly concocted medicines. In the same Jade registers, the fourth hell is designated for economic crimes such as merchants who fiddled with their weights and measures in the marketplace, and indeed, this fourth scroll shows the cheating merchants being trussed up, weighed and left hanging.
Yet here that overlap in content between the textual and pictorial surveys of hell may be more coincidence than intention. Most hell scrolls do not line up with the Jade registers, with other texts or with each other. Morever, it's usually hard to discern any particular theme among the tortures or sins addressed in any particular hell scroll, and each torture is usually not fixed to a particular crime. (Hanging the cheating merchants from infernal steelyards is one of the exceptions.) There also doesn’t seem to be any concern for systematic gradations in torture severity in any of these tortures. Crimes of murder and of gossip received equally heinous retribution. Finding a tidy and predictable system amidst this plethora of tortures – the Jade registers alone offer hundreds of different hell torments to choose from – seems impossible.
Perhaps there’s not a system at work here but rather an aesthetic. The hell spectacle appeals to sensation more than to intellect, and not just because we can’t find an orderly structure beneath it.
There is an aesthetic in attempting to name the full complement of a thing, like the catalogue of ships in the Iliad or like the encyclopedic fu-poetry of medieval China in which the poem’s subject is described in comprehensive detail from every angle. The exhaustive list becomes a kind of art form in itself. So here when we see torture after torture in these scrolls, what resulted may not have been an intellectual argument but a sensation, a sensation of comprehensive domination, of covering every contingent, until the living simply gave up trying to mentally master it. It implicitly mastered them.
Hell being hell, it was already beyond mundane experience by definition, and so it may have made sense that its tortures were beyond methodical conceptualization. While this disarray was probably not intended by the writers and painters of hell, the inability to schematize all the tortures into a single consistent system may itself have been an asset to the message they wanted to convey. We can’t rationalize the overwhelming comprehensive diversity of hell; we instead must surrender to the system we can’t know, just as one day we must surrender to the magistrate’s summons to the infernal tribunal itself.
