The last hell is a kind of redistribution center as the karmic wheel turns and the masses move on to their next lives. The punishments are over, and everyone receives his or her duly earned rebirth in the human and animal realms. (Note that these six realms of rebirth are not the same as the traditional six from Indian sutras where people can also be reborn among the honored gods or hungry ghosts.) Attributed to Amitabha, the lengthy text in the upper left emphasizes the mechanical nature of samsara, and as the first and fifth scrolls have already provided images of the faithful being led off to Amitabha's Western Heaven or "Pure Land," these scrolls are generally calling upon their viewers to shirk samsara -- the "wandering" from birth to rebirth -- and embrace Pure Land Buddhism.

With everyone heading off to rebirth, this tour of hell comes to an end, and yet it still behooves us to recognize the artisans who produced these works. This last scroll from the Taiwan set is damaged, but through pure chance, the current caretaker of these scrolls acquired a second scroll of the tenth hell via Shanghai, a scroll that is clearly from the same studio or at least from the same graphic tradition. A side-by-side comparison demonstrates how these paintings are not individual works of art but are mass produced with only minor differences in color or detail such as in a man's robe, a roof tile or a background window. The striking similarity may be the result of a single set of well-practiced artisans, or it may evince the existence of detailed guidebooks and replication methods. As Lothar Ledderose describes the modular production of other hell scrolls:

It is obvious that single figures and groups, as well as other motifs, were transferred onto the picture ground by the mechanical means of stencils. Most likely, the painters had a pounce -- a sheet of paper on which the contour lines of a motif are indicated by small holes. When these sheets were laid on the painting surface, and they were pounced with black or colored powder, the contours became visible beneath.... Once the dotted outlines were complete, a master painter reworked them in ink using a brush. In a third stage, other artisans assumed the detailed execution and filled in the colors. Such a division of labor has a long tradition in Buddhist painting.

Other scrolls on display here demonstrate a much more painterly quality to them -- less cartoonish and more detailed in face and body -- but even these pieces are most likely not unique works of art but the unsigned products of assembly lines. Perhaps the mechanical, mass-produced nature of hell scrolls inadvertantly reinforced their principal message of mechanical retribution and machinelike karma.