Voices from the Underworld: Chinese Hell deity worship in contemporary Singapore and Malaysia by Fabian Graham (review)

In Voices from the Underworld, Dr. Fabian Graham focuses on one dimension of modern religious practice in Malaysia and Singapore: Chinese hell deity worship. Graham is an anthropologist with degrees from National Chengchi University in Taiwan, Cambridge University, and SOAS University of London, and has been documenting Chinese vernacular religion for many years. In this monograph, he employs a framework of analysis that he calls “self-perpetuating technologies of religious synthesis” (p. 2), seeking to explore religious ontology (foundational concepts like the soul and existence) while at the same time situating his study in the time and space of modern Singapore and Malaysia. He asserts that the hell deities that he is describing and their associated rituals “now lie at the heart of vernacular religious practice in Singapore and Malaysia” (p. 20).

The book is divided into four parts and twelve chapters. After briefly introducing modern Underworld traditions in chapter 1, Graham gives background on Chinese temple traditions in Singapore and Malaysia in chapter 2. Chapter 3 describes the long history of the Underworld in Chinese Buddhism and Daoism and its cosmological foundations. Part 2 (chapters 4–6) describes the Underworld tradition in Singapore, part 3 (chapters 7–9) focuses on Malaysia, and part 4 (chapters 10–12) investigates the history of the modern Underworld tradition.

In this study, Graham focuses on spirit medium cults devoted to Underworld deities, including two whose statues are displayed in City God temples throughout China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia. In Singapore and Malaysia, they are called Da Er Ye Bo 大二爷伯 (Southern Min: Tua Li Ya Pek or Tua Di Ya Pek), referring to the tall white-robed Da Ye Bo 大爷伯(Southern Min: Tua Ya Pek) together with his short black-faced companion, Er Ye Bo 二爷伯 (Southern Min: Di Ya Pek). They have many names, including Black and White “Impermanences” (Wuchang 无常), and the Seventh and Eighth Masters. During the Hungry Ghosts Festival in Penang, the paper statue of Tua Ya Pek wears a tall hat on which is written “To see me is great luck!” (一见大吉), and some describe him as the spirit of luck.

These two hell officials work in the Chinese Underworld, which has long been imaginatively represented as ten courts presided over by magistrates who are assisted by police and torturers. These representations of hell and its torments are meant to impart moral lessons, teaching the living about the punishments they will face in the afterlife for their transgressions. A world-famous diorama of the ten courts of hell built in the 1930s is still on display at Singapore’s Haw Par Villa (formerly Tiger Balm Gardens).

At funeral rituals, Daoist priests burn offerings of hell money in denominations of many millions of dollars; this money is described as bribes for hell’s greedy officials. And in vernacular fiction, depictions of hell often are thinly disguised satires on the inefficiency and corruption of bureaucracy. In one episode of the vernacular novel Journey to the West, for example, the Monkey King was incorrectly arrested by hell police and taken to the Underworld. Knowing that he had drunk the elixir of immortality, he demanded to see his name in their records. Hell’s clerks finally located the correct volume of the Book of Life and Death. While no one was looking, the Monkey King erased his name and the names of his monkey subjects, granting them immortality.

Throughout this in-depth study of hell deities, Graham provides many richly detailed dialogic vignettes of his interactions with Underworld deities. Speaking through his medium, Tua Ya Pek advised him that “Everyone must visit the Underworld,” then asked him if he was afraid (p. 50). Graham accepted this and other challenges, placing himself in a coffin on one occasion, and performing the self-mortifying act of “washing his hands” in burning oil on another.

In addition to providing close transcriptions...