A boy is given away to Death by his father in a fit of temper, arrives at the house of Yama, and is left waiting three nights because the master is out. Returning, Yama apologises — an unfed brahmin guest in the house is a serious lapse — and offers three boons in compensation. The boy, Nachiketa, spends the third on a question: when a man dies, some say he exists and some say he does not; which is true? Yama tries to buy him off with sons, cattle, chariots and long life. Nachiketa refuses them all, on the grounds that pleasures wear out the senses and that even a long life is short. The Katha Upanishad is Death's answer, and it is one of the great philosophical dialogues in any literature.
The first to die
The Vedic Yama is not a judge. He is the first mortal, who died and thereby discovered the road that everyone afterwards must take, and became king of the pitris, the ancestral dead. Rigveda 10.14 asks him to seat the newly dead among the fathers in a place of light, where there is soma and a tree and the sound of the flute. Two four-eyed dogs, Shabala and Shyama, guard the path, and the mourner is told to hurry past them. There is no weighing, no ledger and no punishment; there is a journey and an arrival.
He also stars in the strangest hymn in the collection. Rigveda 10.10 is a dialogue between Yama and his twin sister Yami in which she urges him to sleep with her, arguing that the gods intended them to continue the race, and he refuses, citing the watchers who never blink and the wrongness of it. She calls him weak. The hymn ends without resolution, and it is the earliest explicit statement of an incest prohibition in Indian literature.
The judge, the buffalo, and the ledger
Puranic Yama is a different official. He rides a buffalo, carries a noose and a staff, presides over the southern quarter as a lokapala, and sits in a court called Yamasabha where the dead are brought by his messengers, the Yamadutas. His accountant is Chitragupta, who keeps a record of every act — a scribe deity with his own worship, particularly among Kayastha communities in north India, whose festival falls just after Diwali when pens and account books are honoured.
The Garuda Purana supplies the fullest description of what follows: the journey south along a road of specified length, the terrible river Vaitarani, and a catalogue of hells assigned by offence with the durations set out. This text is recited in many households during the thirteen days of mourning, which gives it a place in ordinary life that its lurid contents might not suggest. The important structural point is that these hells are not final. Sentences are served and rebirth follows; the Indian afterlife is a correctional stop, not a destination, which distinguishes it sharply from the underworlds of the Mediterranean and Near East.
He is also Dharmaraja, king of law, and the ambiguity in that title is doctrinal: he does not decide what is just, he applies it. In the Mahabharata he is the divine father of Yudhishthira, and he tests his own son at the end of the exile with a set of riddles at a poisoned lake — a scene in which death examines a man on ethics before returning his brothers to life.
Savitri, who argued with him and won
The other famous conversation with Yama belongs to a woman. Savitri chooses Satyavan knowing he has a year to live, follows Yama when he comes to take her husband's soul, and refuses to turn back. Yama, impressed, grants her boons on condition she does not ask for Satyavan's life. She asks for her father-in-law's sight, then his kingdom, then sons for her father, then a hundred sons for herself — and having accepted that last one, Yama has to concede that she cannot have them without her husband. It is a legal victory, and the Vat Savitri observance kept by married women in June, tying threads around a banyan tree, commemorates it annually.
Festivals in which death is on the guest list
- Bhai Dooj, or Yama Dwitiya, two days after Diwali, is explained by the story of Yama visiting his sister Yamuna, who feeds him and marks his forehead; brothers visit sisters and receive the same, and the day is said to protect them from him.
- Naraka Chaturdashi, the day before Diwali in much of India, involves an oil bath before dawn and lamps set out for him.
- Pitru Paksha, a fortnight in the autumn, is given over to offerings to the ancestors in his keeping, with rites performed at Gaya above all.
There is no significant temple cult, which is unsurprising: he is petitioned to stay away rather than approached.
The most widely exported Indian god you have never noticed
Buddhism carried Yama across Asia and he prospered abroad. In China he becomes Yanluo Wang, presiding over a bureaucratic underworld of ten courts with registers and clerks that reads unmistakably like an imperial civil service; in Japan he is Enma, who judges with a mirror that shows the dead their own deeds; Korea, Vietnam and Tibet all have their versions, and Tibetan Buddhism develops both Yama Dharmaraja and the wrathful Yamantaka, "the ender of Yama". More people in East Asia can name him than can name most of the deities on this page.
At home, modern India has domesticated him into comedy. Yamraj with his moustache, buffalo and pot-bellied clerks is a stock figure of mythological television and of advertising, and Indian traffic police have repeatedly run road-safety campaigns with an actor in full Yamraj costume stopping helmetless riders at junctions — a use of a death god that would be unthinkable in most religious traditions and is received here as good sense.
Questions the god of death attracts
Do Hindus believe in hell?
In a qualified and generally unemphatic way. The Puranic hells are elaborately described and are also temporary, and the dominant frameworks — karma, rebirth, and eventual liberation — make the moral accounting continuous rather than final. Many philosophical traditions treat the hells as figurative or as pedagogical, and there is no equivalent of a doctrine of permanent damnation to be argued about.
What are the two dogs?
Shabala and Shyama, four-eyed and broad-nosed, guarding the road in the Rigveda, sons of the divine bitch Sarama. Comparative mythologists have connected them to the hound at the entrance to the Greek underworld and to the Norse Garmr, and one proposed etymology links Shabala directly to Kerberos — the derivation is contested and has been for over a century, but the shared image of dogs on the path of the dead across Indo-European traditions is not in doubt.
Why a buffalo?
The buffalo is the standard sacrificial animal in the non-Vedic strand of Indian religion and carries associations of dark, heavy, southward force; it is also the form taken by the demon Durga kills, which sets up an iconographic rhyme that sculptors clearly enjoyed. Yama's mount and Mahisha's body are not the same figure and are frequently confused in popular explanation.
What is Yamaloka actually like in the texts?
It is described as a walled city to the south with gates, a court, an assembly hall built by the divine architect, and a great deal of administration — attendants, messengers, a registrar and a specified procedure. The literature is much more interested in process than in landscape, which is consistent with a deity whose entire authority rests on applying a rule the same way every time.