Yánluó: the stories first, then the spelling
Before the spelling, the story. Yánluó earns its restoration the old way — through what was actually told.
The Stories That Carry the Name
Yama, the First Mortal. Before he was a king of hell, Yama was the first human to die. The Ṛgveda (10. 14) calls him the one who found the road away from the world of the fathers; he became the gatherer of the dead, honoured with offerings as the king who presides over the ancestors.
The Fifth Tribunal. The Chinese Ten Kings system, documented from the Tang dynasty onward, receives the dead at set intervals — the seventh day after death, the hundredth day, the first and third anniversaries — distributing them among ten courts (The Scripture of the Ten Kings; trans. Teiser, 1994; the sūtra's Dunhuang manuscripts). Yánluó presides over the fifth, the great reckoning after the first four screenings.
Bao Zheng on the Bench. Chinese folklore kept electing incorruptible mortals to Yánluó's office. The greatest is Bao Zheng, the Song-dynasty magistrate — Justice Bao of a hundred operas and countless storytellings — said to judge the living by day and the dead by night as Yánluó's incarnation, identifiable by the crescent on his forehead and the iron face that fears no noble house. The tradition is a compliment to the office, not a doctrine: the perfect magistrate is already doing the underworld's work, which means the underworld is only the courtroom made honest.
And Here Is What the Spelling Preserves
Against those stories, the attestation: 閻羅王, in the attestation Ṛgveda 10.14 — Yama, the first mortal and king of the fathers and Majjhima Nikāya 130 (Devadūta Sutta) — King Yama and the three divine messengers give us. The name means "'King Yan' (閻羅, from Yama), the judge of the dead".
The restoration keeps 2 features the ASCII form yanluo cannot show:
- a → á — Stress mark (acute/tone): where the voice peaks.
- o → ó — Stress mark (acute/tone): where the voice peaks.
A storyteller pronouncing the name would restore every one of them by instinct. The file only writes down what the voice already knows.
At a Glance
- Restored name: Yánluó
- ASCII form: yanluo
- Meaning: "'King Yan' (閻羅, from Yama), the judge of the dead"
- Domain of influence: Judgment, Underworld, Order
- Pantheon: Chinese
- Classification: Tier 1
- Original script: 閻羅王
- Series: The Restoration Files, No. 537 of 546
The Name Travels
He is the supreme case of Buddhist localization: Yama became Yánluó in China, Enma in Japan (with his own mirror and the red-faced scowl of a thousand temple gates), Yeomna in Korea, and the judges of Vietnamese and Central Asian afterlives. Daoism staffed his courts with its own celestial bureaucrats; folk religion added Mèngpó's tea and the City God as his local deputies.
The Address It Earned
The temple of Yánluó stands at /yanluo/ — lore, scholars, patterns — because a name carrying this much story deserves more than a parking page. Tier-1 is not a compliment; it is a measurement. This restoration keeps something the ASCII form provably loses, and the measurement is repeatable.
The Sources Are Open
The myths above are retold from the temple's record; the primary voices are in the Sacred Texts: Tao Te Ching. Nothing in this file outranks them.
The File Continues
Read the founding dispatch for the name's full story, the Resonance File for the archetype at work — or the whole archive in one sitting.
Continue the series — previous file: Yamunā (read it here) · next file: Yggdrasill (read it here).
The Restoration Files are written from the same canonical record as the temples themselves: the lexicon, the lore catalog, the pattern atlas, and the cited scholarly sources. If a file ever disagrees with its temple, the temple is right — tell us, and the file will be corrected.