# Meng Po (孟婆): The Goddess of Forgetting and Her Soup > Meng Po, the Chinese goddess of forgetting: what her soup does, the Jade Record's account of her tower and bridge, and how a wind goddess became a soup-server. Canonical: https://jadealmanac.com/chinese-mythology/meng-po Author: Julian (祝君瑜), Jade Almanac · https://jadealmanac.com/about Method and sourcing: https://jadealmanac.com/sources Meng Po, 孟婆 (Mèng Pó), "Granny Meng," is the old woman stationed at the exit of the Chinese underworld who hands every soul a bowl of soup before it is reborn. The soup erases the life just finished, so that each birth starts clean. Her only biography is in the Jade Record, a Qing morality book, which makes her a Han-dynasty scholar-hermit who built the Tower of Forgetting on Heaven's orders, and gives the soup a punishment clause for anyone who will not drink. Before she served soup, she was a wind. You have already drunk it, of course. That is why you do not remember. Somewhere at the far end of the Chinese underworld, past the ten courts and their judges, past the hells and the mirror and the terrace where the dead watch their families divide the furniture, there is a plain table with a cauldron on it and an old woman behind the cauldron with a ladle, and every soul on its way to being born again stops there for a bowl. The soup is called Meng Po's broth, 孟婆汤, and the woman is Meng Po, Mèng Pó, "Granny Meng." She is the last face you saw before this life, and you have no idea what she looks like, which is, when you think about it, proof that the soup works. ## The soup people order on bad days She is the most casually mentioned goddess in China. Nobody builds her temples; everybody talks about her. "I need a bowl of Meng Po's soup" is what you say after a breakup, a bad year, a night you would like unhappened. In January 2021 the writer Alex Colville, for *The China Project*, found Weibo users saying exactly that after shifts on COVID wards: they were going to go and see Meng Po, they wrote, and forget the whole thing. Her name is a verb for the wish to forget, and unlike most wishes it comes with a menu. The joke Colville records, that a ghost could easily trick her with a taste of her own soup, is the sort of thing you say about a colleague, not a deity. Chinese people are fond of her in a way they are not fond of the judges she works for. She is on your side. She is also, as we shall see, a great deal stricter than her fans remember. ## The goddess of forgetting on a streaming service For anyone arriving here from a search, the recent surge of interest has a simple cause: she got a movie. *The Legend of Meng Po*, a 2024 costume fantasy on the streaming service iQIYI, gives her the full romantic treatment. In its telling, per the service's own synopsis, she is Meng Wan'er, a daughter of the Heavenly Emperor, banished to the mortal world for loving a general, who gives up the love and takes the ladle instead, brewing the soup at the Naihe bridge to ease everyone's suffering but her own. It is a lovely story and it is entirely modern; the classical Meng Po loved nobody, which is rather the point of her. Colville notes a second and older confusion that the romantic reading feeds on: people mix her up with Meng Jiangnü, the wife who wept a stretch of the Great Wall down to find her conscripted husband's bones. Same surname, different woman, and the search engines' insistence on "Meng Po's wife" is probably her fault too, since a *pó* is by definition an old woman, and cannot have one. ## Her one biography, in the book that shares our name The only life of Meng Po that anyone ever wrote down is in the *Jade Record*, 玉历宝钞, a morality book that circulated in the Qing dynasty, copied and reprinted by the pious as an act of merit, which claims to be the transcript of a meeting of the ten kings of the underworld held on the birthday of the bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha. It says it is from the Song. It is not. But it is the source of every hell-diorama, every temple mural of the ten courts, and every word anyone knows about the woman with the ladle, and its first two characters, as it happens, are the two characters of this site's name, the Jade Almanac. Ours is the [household calendar](/chinese-almanac). Theirs is the guidebook to hell. Both are ledgers. The *Jade Record* gives her a short and rather beautiful résumé. She "was born in the Former Han," the text says, which is to say before the year one. "As a child she read the Confucian books; grown, she recited the Buddhist sutras." She was a woman without a past or a future: "She gave no thought to anything past and no thought to anything to come." She spent her life telling people not to kill animals and not to eat meat. "At eighty-one her hair was white and her face a child's, and she was still a virgin. She knew only that her surname was Meng, so people called her Granny Meng." Then she went into the mountains and stayed there for two hundred years. Note what kind of person the book chose for the job. Not a grieving widow, not a mother, not a lover; a scholar who had read everything and had, herself, already let go of it all. The theology is exact. The person who erases your memory is someone who has no interest in her own. Why Heaven needed her is also in the text, and it is a policy decision. "In the world there were people who could know the causes of their past lives, who falsely claimed kin from those lives, played clever tricks and let out the secrets of the dark." Reincarnation was leaking. People remembered, and remembering, they claimed inheritances, exposed the workings of the underworld, and generally made a nuisance of themselves. "So Heaven commanded the woman Meng to be a goddess of the underworld and to build a Tower of Forgetting." The soup exists to plug a leak in the system. Mercy has nothing to do with it. ## What is actually in the bowl Here is the recipe, which no adaptation ever quotes. "Using herbs gathered from the ordinary world, she compounds a broth that is like wine and not wine, in five flavors: sweet, bitter, pungent, sour and salty." All five at once. Not a magic potion, then, but a medicine, made from plants that grow in this world, and tasting of everything a life tastes of. "Every soul being reborn is sent to drink this broth, so that it forgets all that went before." And then the *Jade Record*, which is a moralist's book and cannot leave a good idea alone, adds a side-effect. The soup does not erase quite everything. It leaves a residue, "one, two or three parts of a sickness," carried into the next life as drooling, or sweating, or weeping, or fearfulness, depending on what you were. The good come out of it with sharper eyes and ears and stronger limbs than before; the wicked come out with their senses dulled and their vigor drained, so that the body itself warns them, before they can remember why, to repent. Every unaccountable frailty a person is born with is, on this reading, the taste of the last bowl. It is a theory of original sin with a soup in it. ## The tower, the bridge, and the copper tube The *Jade Record* is also very particular about the architecture, and the details are worth having, because the modern picture of Meng Po, an old woman alone at a bridgehead, is not what her own book describes. "The tower stands in the Tenth Court, beyond the six bridges before the hall of the King of the Dead." It is as big as an abbot's cell, "with a hundred and eight rooms around its four sides," a Buddhist number, "and a single corridor running east, only a foot and four inches wide." Souls are handed over in batches, each room has its own cups and its own kitchen, and the text notes with a bureaucrat's precision that it does not matter whether you drink a lot or a little. Then comes the sentence that no one who calls her soup a mercy has read. "If a cunning, stubborn ghost refuses to swallow the broth, a hooked blade rises under its feet and trips it, and a copper tube is thrust into its throat from above, and it is made to drink in pain." That is the whole of Meng Po's kindness: you may drink, or you may be drunk. The tenderness in her story is real, but it is the tenderness of a nurse with a syringe, and the *Jade Record* has no patience with the ghost who wants to keep its memories. Those are the ones who caused the trouble in the first place. After the bowl, the bridge. The souls, dazed, are "pushed onto a floating bridge of bitter bamboo lashed with hemp, under which runs a ravine of red water," and from the middle of it they can read four lines of chalk verse painted on the red cliff opposite. The verse is the closest the book comes to a lullaby: "To be born a person is easy; to be a person is hard. To be born a person again may be harder still. There is nothing hard about being born into good fortune; let the mouth and the heart agree, and it is not hard at all." While they are reading it, two enormous demons leap out from the far bank, one in a black gauze cap and brocade jacket laughing with a brush and a knife, whose name is Alive-Impermanent, and one in a white shirt with a bloody face and an abacus, sighing, whose name is Death-Has-Its-Share, and they shove the souls off the bridge into the red water. The souls sink, drunk and stupid, find their way into wombs, and then the last sentence of her chapter, which is the best thing in the book: "Both feet kick through the caul, it rushes out of its mother's womb, and with a wail it lands on the ground." The soup is the reason a baby cries. It has just been pushed off a bridge. ## The bridge she is not on Everyone knows Meng Po sits by the Naihe bridge, 奈何桥, the "what-can-you-do" bridge, with her bowl. Everyone is slightly wrong. The bridge is real, and older than she is: *Journey to the West*, in the eleventh chapter where the Tang emperor Taizong tours the underworld, has him cross a bridge over the River Nai, guarded, the novel says, by "countless Ox-Heads and Horse-Faces, grim-faced," and it is a horrible thing, three fingers wide with a drop of a hundred feet into stinking water, which the novel describes at length. There is no old woman on it. There is no soup anywhere in the novel. Taizong walks out of hell with his memory intact, which is the whole point of the chapter, since he has to go home and hold a mass for the dead he saw there. Meng Po, in her own book, sits in a tower by a different bridge, a bamboo one. It was only later, Colville observes, that popular prints parked her alone at the Naihe bridgehead like a toll-keeper, where she has stayed. The *Jade Record* has [King Yama](/chinese-mythology/king-yama) five courts back and a whole administration between him and her. The picture everyone carries is a compression: a bridge, a bowl, an old woman. The book is a building. ## She was a wind first Now the part nobody on the internet knows, because it is in a Ming book about words. Yang Shen was the most learned man of the sixteenth century and spent thirty years of it in exile in Yunnan writing down everything he knew, and in the first chapter of his *Danqian zonglu*, a miscellany of philology, there is an entry headed simply "Meng Po," which begins: "In common speech the wind is called Meng Po." Not the underworld. The wind. He gives his evidence. The Song poet Jiang Jie, in a lyric about spring rain embroidering the blossom, asks how the flowers can bear "Meng Po's bluster." The emperor Huizong, the painter-emperor whose dynasty fell under him, wrote a lyric that Yang quotes in one line: "Meng Po, be a dear and do me a kindness: blow the boat around." South of the Yangtze, Yang goes on, the July gales are worse than the trade winds, "and the country people say Meng Po is angry." Then he does what a philologist does and asks where the name came from, and he finds a conversation from the sixth century. An envoy of the Northern Qi, Li Taotu, sent south to the Chen court, asked a southern scholar named Lu Shixiu what this Meng Po was that the southerners kept talking about. Lu's answer: the *Classic of Mountains and Seas* has "the Emperor's daughter who roams the river and goes out and comes in always with wind and rain about her. Because she is the Emperor's daughter she is called Meng Po," which is to say the eldest lady, *mèng* being the word for the first-born. A river goddess with weather about her, first-born of a god, whom the boatmen of the lower Yangtze called Granny Meng and blamed for the July storms. That is the oldest Meng Po there is. She had nothing to do with forgetting, and she was not old. | | Meng Po the wind | Meng Po the soup | |---|---|---| | Where she appears | Song lyrics; Yang Shen's *Danqian zonglu*, 1540s | The *Jade Record*, Qing; Ding Fubao's Buddhist dictionary, 1922 | | Who she is | The Emperor's eldest daughter of the *Classic of Mountains and Seas*, who travels with wind and rain | A Han-dynasty scholar-hermit, eighty-one and a virgin, hired by Heaven | | What she does | Wrecks spring blossom; turns boats; raises the July gales | Erases the last life; runs a tower of 108 rooms; drowns the newly dosed in a red river | | What people asked of her | A fair wind (Huizong: "blow the boat around") | A clean slate ("I need a bowl of Meng Po's soup") | How the wind became the soup, we do not know. Yang Shen died in 1559 and had never heard of the underworld version; the *Jade Record* appears two centuries later with the soup fully formed. Someone in between borrowed a name that already meant an old woman with power over the river and gave her a cauldron. My guess, and it is only that, is that the river did it: a goddess who lived on the water people had to cross was a natural candidate for the water everyone crosses last. ## The ones who did not drink Every rule needs its exceptions, and Chinese storytellers have supplied them. Colville cites the Qing writer Shen Qifeng, whose collection *Xiedu* has two lovers, Ge Sheng and Lan Rui, whose bowls are withheld so that they can recognize each other in the next life; and the old belief that a newborn who speaks is a soul that somehow skipped the soup, which is the sort of thing said about unnerving children in every culture. The satirical ghost-novel *Hedian*, written in Wu dialect in the early nineteenth century, treats Meng Po Village as an ordinary place on the map of the underworld, reachable by boat, with a temple in it, which is how a goddess knows she has become furniture. Even Ding Fubao's great *Dictionary of Buddhist Studies* of 1922 has an entry for her, condensed from the *Jade Record* and filed, with a scholar's shrug, under "legend." And the modern reader has added the kindest exception of all. In the *Jade Record* the soup is compulsory, and the copper tube is waiting for anyone who argues. In the version people actually carry around, the one on Weibo and in the film, the bowl is an offer, and the old woman is the only person in the whole underworld who wants nothing from you but that you should be all right. That is not what her book says. It is what people need her to say, which is a different kind of truth and, in a folk religion, the one that lasts. She built a tower to make people forget. They have used it, for three hundred years, to remember her fondly. Then the wail, and the floor, and here you are. ## Primary sources - The Jade Record (玉历宝钞), 'The Goddess Meng Po', her life, and why Heaven hired her, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, Qing dynasty (the text claims a Song origin) > 孟婆神：生於前漢。幼讀儒書，壯誦佛經。凡有過去之事不思，未來之事不想。在世惟勸人戒殺、吃素。年至八十一歲，鶴髮童顏，終是處女。只知自己姓孟。人故皆稱之曰『孟婆阿奶』。入山修真，直至後漢。世人有能知前世因者，妄認前世眷屬，好行智術，露洩陰機。是以上天敕命孟氏女為幽冥之神，造築醧忘一臺。 > The goddess Meng Po was born in the Former Han. As a child she read the Confucian books; grown, she recited the Buddhist sutras. She gave no thought to anything past and no thought to anything to come. In the world she did nothing but urge people not to kill and to eat no meat. At eighty-one her hair was white and her face a child's, and she was still a virgin. She knew only that her surname was Meng, so people called her Granny Meng. She went into the mountains to cultivate the true way, and stayed there into the Later Han. In the world there were people who could know the causes of their past lives, who falsely claimed kin from those lives, played clever tricks and let out the secrets of the dark. So Heaven commanded the woman Meng to be a goddess of the underworld and to build a Tower of Forgetting. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/玉歷寶鈔 - The Jade Record (玉历宝钞), 'The Goddess Meng Po', the recipe, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, Qing dynasty > 用採取俗世藥物，合成似酒非酒之湯，分為甘苦辛酸鹹五味。諸魂轉世，派飲此湯，使忘前先各事。 > Using herbs gathered from the ordinary world, she compounds a broth that is like wine and not wine, in five flavors: sweet, bitter, pungent, sour and salty. Every soul being reborn is sent to drink this broth, so that it forgets all that went before. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/玉歷寶鈔 - The Jade Record (玉历宝钞), 'The Goddess Meng Po', the tower, and what happens to those who will not drink, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, Qing dynasty > 臺居第十殿，冥王殿前六橋之外。高大如方丈，四圍廊房一百零八間。向東甬道一條，僅闊一尺四寸。……如有刁狡鬼魂，不肯飲吞此湯者，腳下現出鉤刀絆住，上以銅管刺喉，受痛灌吞。 > The tower stands in the Tenth Court, beyond the six bridges before the hall of the King of the Dead. It is as tall and broad as an abbot's cell, with a hundred and eight rooms around its four sides, and a single corridor running east, only a foot and four inches wide. ... If a cunning, stubborn ghost refuses to swallow the broth, a hooked blade rises under its feet and trips it, and a copper tube is thrust into its throat from above, and it is made to drink in pain. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/玉歷寶鈔 - The Jade Record (玉历宝钞), 'The Goddess Meng Po', the bridge, the red water, and the cry, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original, Qing dynasty > 推上麻紮苦竹浮橋，下有紅水橫流之澗。橋心一望，對岸赤石巖前上，有斗大粉字四行，曰：為人容易做人難，再要為人恐更難；欲生福地無難處，口與心同卻不難。……雙足蹬破紫河車，奔出娘胎，哇的一聲落地。 > They are pushed onto a floating bridge of bitter bamboo lashed with hemp, under which runs a ravine of red water. From the middle of the bridge one sees, on the red cliff of the far bank, four lines of chalk characters as big as pecks: "To be born a person is easy; to be a person is hard. To be born a person again may be harder still. There is nothing hard about being born into good fortune; let the mouth and the heart agree, and it is not hard at all." ... Both feet kick through the caul, it rushes out of its mother's womb, and with a wail it lands on the ground. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/玉歷寶鈔 - Danqian zonglu (丹铅总录), juan 1, by Yang Shen, the entry 'Meng Po', tr. Jade Almanac, from the original; the Wikisource text is unpunctuated and the punctuation is ours, 1540s > 俗謂風曰孟婆。蔣捷詞云：春雨如絲，繡出花枝紅裊，怎禁他孟婆合皂。宋徽宗詞云：孟婆好做些方便，吹個船兒倒轉。江南七月間有大風，甚於舶䑲，野人相傳以為孟婆發怒。按北齊李騊駼聘陳，問陸士秀：江南有孟婆，是何神也？士秀曰：山海經帝之女遊於江中，出入必以風雨自隨，以帝女故曰孟婆。 > In common speech the wind is called Meng Po. A lyric by Jiang Jie runs: "Spring rain like silk embroiders the branches with swaying red; how can they bear Meng Po's bluster?" A lyric by Emperor Huizong of Song runs: "Meng Po, be a dear and do me a kindness: blow the boat around." In the seventh month south of the Yangtze there are great winds, worse than the trade winds, and the country people say Meng Po is angry. Note: when Li Taotu of the Northern Qi went as envoy to the Chen, he asked Lu Shixiu, "South of the river there is a Meng Po. What god is that?" Shixiu said: "The Classic of Mountains and Seas has the Emperor's daughter who roams the river and goes out and comes in always with wind and rain about her. Because she is the Emperor's daughter she is called Meng Po, the eldest lady." https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/丹鉛總錄_(四庫全書本)/卷01 - Journey to the West (西游记), Chapter 11, the Naihe bridge, without her, tr. Jade Almanac, from the original (see Anthony C. Yu's standard translation), c. 1592 > 無數牛頭並馬面，猙獰把守奈河橋。 > Countless Ox-Heads and Horse-Faces, grim-faced, guard the bridge over the River Nai. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/西遊記/第011回 ## Pop culture appearances - The Legend of Meng Po (孟婆传说) · film · 2024 · released · A costume fantasy romance in which Meng Wan'er, a daughter of the Heavenly Emperor banished for loving a mortal general, gives up her love and becomes the Meng Po who brews the soup at the Naihe bridge · Meng Wan'er / Meng Po · Streams on iQIYI with English subtitles; a good sample of the modern romantic reading, and nothing like the Jade Record. ## Sources - The Jade Record (玉歷寶鈔), full text, with the section on the goddess Meng Po (Chinese Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/玉歷寶鈔 - Yang Shen, Danqian zonglu (丹鉛總錄), juan 1, the entry on Meng Po the wind (Chinese Wikisource, Siku edition): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/丹鉛總錄_(四庫全書本)/卷01 - Ding Fubao, Dictionary of Buddhist Studies (佛學大辭典), 1922, entry 'The goddess Meng Po' (Chinese Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/佛學大辭典/孟婆神 - Zhang Nanzhuang, Hedian (何典), chapter 1, in which Meng Po Village is a place you take a boat to (Chinese Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/何典/01 - Journey to the West (西遊記), Chapter 11, the bridge over the River Nai (Chinese Wikisource): https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/西遊記/第011回 - Alex Colville, 'Hell's bittersweet end: Meng Po, goddess of forgetfulness' (The China Project, 2021): https://thechinaproject.com/2021/01/18/hells-bittersweet-end-meng-po-goddess-of-forgetfulness/ - The Legend of Meng Po (2024), iQIYI's own synopsis: https://www.iq.com/wiki/en_us/album/253szfjimhg - Meng Po (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meng_Po - Anthony C. Yu, 'The Journey to the West', Revised Edition (University of Chicago Press), the standard English translation: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/J/bo12079590.html ## FAQ **What is the story of Meng Po in Chinese mythology?** Meng Po is the old woman at the last stop of the Chinese underworld. After a soul has passed through the ten courts and been sentenced, it is sent to her tower in the tenth court, drinks her soup, forgets everything about the life it just lived, crosses a bridge, and is born again. Her biography comes from the Jade Record, a Qing morality book: she was a Han-dynasty woman who studied Confucian and Buddhist texts, became a hermit, and was appointed by Heaven to build the Tower of Forgetting because people who remembered their past lives were causing trouble in this one. **What is Meng Po soup?** The broth of forgetting, called Meng Po tang in Chinese. According to the Jade Record it is compounded from ordinary herbs of the human world, is "like wine and not wine," and comes in five flavors at once: sweet, bitter, pungent, sour and salty. Every soul about to be reborn drinks it and forgets the previous life. The book adds that a trace stays behind: a little drooling, sweating, weeping or fearfulness carried into the next life, one to three parts, which is its explanation for the small inexplicable ailments people are born with. **What happens if you refuse to drink Meng Po's soup?** In the Jade Record, nothing kind. A hooked blade rises under the ghost's feet and trips it, and a copper tube is forced down its throat so that it drinks in pain. The bittersweet Meng Po of modern retellings, who offers the bowl as a mercy, is a softer figure than the one in her own source. Later stories do let some souls through undosed: The China Project cites a Qing tale by Shen Qifeng in which two lovers' bowls are withheld so they can find each other again, and the old belief that a baby who talks at birth is one who skipped the soup. **Is Meng Po good or evil?** Neither, in the way a nurse is neither. She is a functionary of the tenth court whose job is to make rebirth possible, and the Jade Record presents her as a virtuous scholar who took the post on Heaven's orders. Chinese people mostly speak of her with affection: to "go and see Meng Po" or "drink a bowl of Meng Po's soup" is what you say when you want to forget something, a breakup, a bad year, a shift on a hospital ward. The cruelty in her story belongs to the system she works for, not to her. **Was Meng Po always the goddess of forgetting?** No. Her earliest appearances have nothing to do with the underworld: in Song dynasty lyrics Meng Po is the wind. The Ming scholar Yang Shen collected the evidence in his Danqian zonglu: Emperor Huizong writes a song asking Meng Po to blow his boat around, the poet Jiang Jie blames her bluster for battering the spring blossom, and Yangtze boatmen called the July gales her temper. Yang traces the name to the Emperor's daughter in the Classic of Mountains and Seas who travels with wind and rain. The soup-server is a Qing invention laid over an older name. **Does the name Meng Po mean the same thing as the slang word meng?** No, they are different characters that happen to sound alike. Meng Po's Meng is a surname, and its dictionary sense is "eldest," which is why Yang Shen could read her name as "the eldest lady." Po means an old woman, a granny. The slang meng that means "cute," borrowed from Japanese moe and written with the character for a sprout, has nothing to do with her, though the internet enjoys the coincidence.