Yifan Li, M.A.

Über die Promotion

The Transformation of the God of the Underworld Yama in Ancient Indian and Ancient Chinese Sources

This project examines how the image of King Yama (Yanluo wang 閻羅王), the god of the underworld, was formed and transformed across distinct historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts. It traces Yama’s development from his earliest appearances in the Vedic corpus (ca. 1500–500 BCE) to his role in early Buddhist sutras and their Chinese translations (ca. 2nd BCE–5th century), and further to his reinterpretation in Chinese apocrypha (8th–10th century) and vernacular literature up to the Song Dynasty (13th century). This dissertation argues that the transformation of Yama from an ancestral deity into a cosmic judge was driven not only by developments in Buddhist doctrine but also by changing imaginaries of death, periods of political instability, and the institutional structures that shaped conceptions of the afterlife in ancient India and medieval China.