A Deal with the Underworld: A Tang Tale of the Chinese Underworld and the Sutra That Buys Ten Years

In the Tang dynasty, a censor-judge bound for Huainan shared his last meal with a hungry stranger at a crossing on the Huai River. At the next post station he learned what he had fed: an officer of the Chinese underworld, sent to take his life — his death was already written in the book of life and death. For that one meal the ghost delayed his death by a single day, at the price of a beating; the only way out was to recite a thousand scrolls of the life-extending sutra, the Diamond Sutra, before the day ran out.