The writer Eileen Chang (also known as Zhang Ailing, birth name Zhang Ying) was born in Shanghai, and emigrated to the United States in 1955. At some point after she left China, she wrote an essay to explain Chinese religion to English-speaking foreigners. David Pollard translated portions of this essay in his book The Chinese Essay (New York: Columbia University, 2000) under the English title “The Religion of the Chinese.” I offer the following excerpts from Pollard’s somehwat clumsy translation:

The Chinese have a Taoist heaven and a Buddhist hell. On death all souls go to hell to receive judgement, so in contrast to the Christian subterranean fiery pits, where only bad people go to suffer for their sins, our underworld is a comparatively well ventilated place. By rights ‘The Shades’ ought to be in everlasting twilight, but sometimes they are like a perfectly normal city, the focus of interest for tourists being the eighteen levels of dungeons. When living souls escape through an aperture and drift down to hell, it is quite routine for deceased relatives and friends whom they meet there to take them around sight-seeing.

…

Actually the Chinese heaven is superfluous. Hell is good enough for most people. Provided their conduct is not too bad, they can look forward to a limitless succession of similar lives, in which they work out predestiny and unknowingly sow the seeds of future relationships, conclude old feuds and incur new enmities — cause and effect are woven closely together, like a mat made of thin bamboo strips; you get dizzy trying to pick out the pattern.

…

…the greatest obstacle to Chinese people being converted to Christianity is rather that the life to come that it depicts does not appeal to Chinese tastes. We can leave aside the old-style Christian heaven, where there is perpetual playing of golden harps and singing to the glory of God. The more progressive view of the earth as a kind of moral gymnasium where we limber up in order to go on to display our prowess in a nebulous other world, is also unacceptable to the self-satisfied and conservative Chinese, who regard human life as the center of the universe. As for the saying that a human life is but an ephemeral bubble in the tidal flow of the Great Self, such a promise of eternal life without individuality is not very meaningful either. Christianity gives us very little comfort, so our native folklore can still stand up to the high-pressure proselytizing of Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity, though it has not counter-attacked, though is hasn’t the support of big capital, has no propaganda literature, no splendid peaceful sets, not even a bible — for since almost nobody understands the Buddhist sutras, it is as if they do not exist.

Actually, Chang’s description of the Chinese hell does sound better than the perpetual playing of golden harps.