孟婆

孟婆 is the underworld figure associated with the soup of forgetting in 136. 春日明媚，聊聊鬼神. The episode treats her as a solution to a narrative problem in rebirth stories: if souls reincarnate, why do people not remember previous lives?

The source gives multiple versions rather than one standard biography. In one, Meng Po is a Western Han woman who studies texts and Buddhist scripture, urges people to avoid killing, and is later assigned to the underworld. In another, souls enter Meng Po’s lodge, receive soup from beautiful women, and only afterward discover that splendor has become wasteland and beauty has become bones. The forced-drinking variant keeps forgetting inside Underworld Bureaucracy: even memory loss has a procedure and an enforcement mechanism.

Connections

• 136. 春日明媚，聊聊鬼神 - source episode.
• Chinese Folk Religion Layering - concept explaining multiple variants around the figure.
• Underworld Bureaucracy - procedural afterlife context for mandatory forgetting.
• Afterlife Moral Accounting - adjacent moral order before rebirth.
• [[YanluoWang|阎罗王]] and [[TenKingsOfHell|十殿阎罗]] - judgment system before reincarnation.