Memitim - East Asian Folklore / Mythology

East Asian Folklore / Mythology

In Chinese mythology, Yanluo (simplified Chinese: 阎罗; traditional Chinese: 閻羅; pinyin: Yánluó; Wade–Giles: Yen-lo), is the god of death and the ruler of Di Yu (Jp. 地獄 Jigoku, Ko. 지옥 Jiok, "hell" or the underworld). The deity originated from Yama in Hinduism and was adopted into the Chinese pantheon and eventually spread to Japan as Enma-O (閻魔大王) and Korea as Great King Yŏmna (염라대왕). He is normally depicted wearing a Chinese judge's cap and traditional Chinese robes in both Chinese and Japanese depictions.

In Korean mythology, the equivalent of the Grim Reaper is the Netherworld Emissary (저승사자). He is depicted as a stern and ruthless bureaucrat in service of Great King Yŏmna (염라대왕), who escorts all—good or evil—from the land of the living to the netherworld when the time comes.

In Japanese mythology and in the Kojiki, after giving birth to the fire god Hinokagutsuchi, the goddess Izanami dies from wounds from his fire and enters the perpetual night realm called Yomi-no-kuni (the underworld) that the gods retire to and to which Izanagi, her husband, traveled in a failed attempt to reclaim her. He discovers his wife as not-so beautiful anymore, and, following a brief argument afterwards, she promises him she will take a thousand lives every day, signifying her position as the goddess of death.

There are also death gods called shinigami, which are closer to the Western tradition of the Grim Reaper. Shinigami (often plural) are common in modern Japanese arts and fiction and essentially absent from traditional mythology.

Read more about this topic:  Memitim

Famous quotes containing the words east, asian, folklore and/or mythology:

    I’m glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.
    Elizabeth, Queen Mother (b. 1900)

    We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.
    Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)

    So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio—remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales—we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    Love, love, love—all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.
    Germaine Greer (b. 1939)