Typically depicted with a darkened visage, King Yama or Yanluo is the most famous of the ten judges in hell, having ruled the realm of death as early as pre-Buddhist India. Keith Stevens describes his presence in the Chinese afterlife as follows:

Consensus agrees that Yen-lo Wang [i.e. King Yanluo] is the supreme Judge of the Courts of the Underworld and not the Lord of the Underworld, and so is no more than the most senior of the Ten Judges, ruling over the Fifth Court. Yen-lo Wang is not the Satan of the Christians and Muslims. He is an honourable soul, still working off his sentence in purgatory himself and whose task is to defeat evil and ensure that souls are properly purged and pure before being reborn. This he does through his bureaucracy by keeping a close record of all merits and demerits earned by humans during their lives. The crimes which bring the soul into his Court are mainly those committed against the Buddhist religions and sexual crimes such as incest.

One legend claims that, although he possesses a grand palace, life is not a bed of roses. As he is one of the damned himself, during every twenty-four hour period he is seized thrice by demons, laid flat on a scorching hot metal surface and a stream of molten copper is poured down his throat. After each session he is freed and allowed to amuse himself with female demons until the next punishment is due.

While the crimes punished in this particular depiction of hell do not focus on religious and sexual misdeeds as Stevens notes -- hell scrolls generally do not cluster crimes and tortures by type -- his description of King Yama as himself not being above karmic law further highlights how mechanical the system is. Unlike Western traditions in which there is often a god over and above creation, here the system is over and above all beings, god-like and otherwise.

Unfortunately the lower right corner was damaged at some time in the past. In the lower left corner are two of the most famous torture sites in hell, namely the sword tree and knife hill here both awaiting violent robbers. Conversely in the upper right corner are two of the most common virtues to be rewarded, namely the ritual burning of any paper that had written text on it and the release of animals back into the wild. A heavenly spirit is looking on to record these merits.