by Livia Kohn
In addition, thinking ( si) is associated with the spleen. Just as the heart is the seat of pure yang, so the spleen is associated with pure yin.
It is thus related to Earth. As thoughts arise in a state of sincerity of pure yang, the heart is pained, tears come to the eyes, and the spleen is activated. As this sincerity is further spread into the four directions, the intention is carried far off and communicates with outside forces.
Its nature being yin, it expresses itself in melancholy and sadness, which, in turn, carried by the yang force of the mind, comes to communicate with Earth. Earth, in turn, reports the person’s mental state to the spirits of Heaven. This is the way in which human consciousness moves Heaven and Earth ( Taiping jing 96.426).
The interaction of humanity with Heaven and Earth in this model is, therefore, explained through the actions of qi in its various forms and associations with the five inner organs and the five phases. This, however, does not yet explain how Heaven can have the human characteristics of hearing, feeling compassion, and granting forgiveness.
Even in the Taiping jing, it appears, Heaven is personified enough to allow for certain human characteristics and for mercy felt in response
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to human sincerity. Sins, then, are dissolved through the feeling of merciful compassion on the side of Heaven. And the undergoing of formal confessions, especially in their extreme form, including self-blame and punishment, is the key means of gaining a reaction of compassion from Heaven. It is analogous to the feelings evoked in a human judge when confronted with a penitent criminal. This analogy can be substantiated in three different points.
First, according to the Taiping jing, Heaven and humanity are not only related through their mutual correspondence but also through the fact that the human body is a microcosmic replica of the greater universe and thus parallel to Heaven in structure. Similarly, human society and celestial society are structured alike. In both, there is a hierarchical administration, and Heaven in this is personified as the Lord of Heaven ( tianjun), the senior executive officer who evaluates and judges human behavior. As the Taiping jing says: If one dares to come forward and beg life from the Lord of Heaven, one must not have any egotistic desires. . . . One should rather speak in plain and straightforward words and clearly state one’s rights and wrongs to the various department heads. On this basis, the Lord of Heaven will judge the merits of one’s case. . . . Even if one has committed a major evil and is facing death, one should desire to straighten out and repent one’s wrongdoing, resolve to do only good and abstain from all evil, reflect on one’s deeds day and night. Then one’s sin can be forgiven. . . .
Common people don’t usually realize it, but Heaven sends out its emissaries to observe and record their sins, and whether big or small, Heaven knows them all. Heaven keeps detailed ledgers of good and evil, recording all deeds by month and day, and using them to decide the length of people’s lives. If they don’t abstain from committing evil, upon death they will enter the realm of demons, where they will be examined by the spirits of Earth and their answers measured against the recorded behavior. Then they are made to reflect on their sins and have to undergo punishment, finally learning to be submissive and obedi-ent. (110.524–526)
According to this, the Lord of Heaven has the assembled underlings and lesser spirits keep detailed records of people’s good and bad deeds, which the Lord of Heaven then uses as the basis for moral judgments.
The world of the spirits is organized hierarchically, like a human government, with the Lord of Heaven at the top. Confession is important even after death, when the spirits of Earth examine the sinner and make the accuracy of the report the basis for the punishment to fol-
Confession of Sins and Awareness of Self in the Taiping jing 53
low. The deeds recorded in the ledgers have to match those enumer-ated during confession; if they don’t, the spirits will interrogate for as long as it takes the sinner to recognize his or her own evil.
Second, according to the legal thinking of the time, if a criminal would acknowledge guilt and confess, he or she would be pardoned.
The Hou Hanshu has the story of Wu You, a famous judge who was confronted with the case of Sun Xing, a tax collector who had taken some of the state’s money to buy his father new clothes. The father, however, was not pleased to receive illicit presents, and as a result, Sun Xing felt deeply ashamed. He entered the private chamber of the judge, taking the offending garment along, and confessed his deed. Wu You, acknowledging the sincere intention of both father and son and accepting the latter’s confession, granted him forgiveness (64.2101). This story documents that criminals who would voluntarily confess their deeds could expect to be pardoned in the ancient legal system. Analogous to this, Heaven as the supreme judge of all humanity would tend to grant forgiveness to all those repenting and confessing their sins.
Third, as did Sun Xing in the above case, many protagonists of popular court cases enter the judge’s private chamber and engage in self-blame. The term used for this chamber is he, which literally indicates a small side door, and by extension refers to the doorway that separates the official from the private quarters of an imperial administrator (see Sahara 1989; Yoshikawa 1998, 74). The Hanshu presents the case of Tian Yannian who let himself be bribed by an enemy agent, then closed the private side door behind him and entered into a zhaishe, or purification room, to reflect in loneliness (90.3666). The private quarters of senior officials were, therefore, often also purification places, or rooms for solitary reflection and study.
In addition, rooms used for confession in the Taiping jing are also called zhaishi, or purification chambers. It says: “If you want to escape from danger, follow instructions carefully, enter a purification chamber and make sure the door is closed firmly behind you, lest others enter by mistake” (154.723). As both types of rooms have the word zhai in their names, it is likely that they were facilities for the practice of zhaijie, or purification and abstention. The same kind of room was also called a jingshi, or chamber of tranquility, as described earlier. In addition, according to Yoshikawa’s recent studies, the chamber of tranquility had a close connection with the Han official qingshi, or chamber of interrogation, and the term jingshi as likely as not derived from qingshi (1998, 66). In other words, the religious practice of confession
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in the Way of Great Peace closely imitated the legal practice of interrogating criminal suspects.
Conclusion
Several notions have become clear in the above discussion. To begin, the confession of sins in the Way of Great Peace is based on an understanding of qi as the key connecting factor between the universe and humanity. Heaven, Earth, and humanity are connected and in harmony through the continuous flow of qi, and just as Heaven sends down disasters if the king lacks virtue, so it visits disease upon the body if the human being commits evil. Sickness is a state in which the harmony of the body’s qi with the forces of the universe is interrupted.
In such a state, the spirit inherent in the person feels defiled and flees to avoid contamination. It can be brought back into the mind and body only through proper purification and self-reflection. The confession of sins, then, fulfills the function of providing a means of purification of body and mind. As the sick person undergoes confession, he or she inevitably reflects upon the self and reaches a state of increased self-awareness.
While this self-awareness finds expression in the punishments sinners inflict upon themselves, it is also responsible for the sense of personal guilt and shame that is experienced during confession and self-punishment. The latter is especially designed to anticipate any further sufferings Heaven might inflict, and confession in this respect serves to convey the sinner’s sincere consciousness of fault to Heaven with the aim of engaging the latter’s compassion and finding forgiveness.
The way sins are exonerated in the religion, moreover, closely reflects the way in wh
ich official judges have dealt with criminals, punishing them if unrepenting or leaning toward pardon if they confess. Heaven and humanity are one system, organized in a parallel fashion, from their overall structure to the specific actions undertaken.
Confession and self-blame on occasion are formal ways of enacting even the death penalty for a given sin. In this case, they serve to avoid death, and the sinner, fully penitent, vows never to commit the same act again. In some ways, the formal confession can thus be described as a performance, during which the old self—the sinner—is left behind and a new self—the penitent—is found. The performance, moreover, involves close reflection on the existence and nature of one’s self, from its beginnings through its development to its present state and possible renewal. The Taiping jing says accordingly:
Confession of Sins and Awareness of Self in the Taiping jing 55
Your destiny rests mainly with yourself—why would you kowtow and invoke Heaven? Your own self is what has to be purified—who else could you possibly cleanse? Your own self is what should be loved—who else could you possibly love? Your own self is what should be perfected—
who else could you possibly perfect? Your own self is what has to be reflected on—who else could you possibly have memories of? Your own self is what has to be blamed—who else could you possibly find guilt in? . . .
If you continue to commit evil without stopping, negative reports to Heaven will also never cease and you will bring death upon yourself. You must know the rules and precepts! If you commit evil, it is you alone who will shoulder the burden—nobody else will take it for you! (110.527)
This establishes a close and severe connection between the individual’s sins and punishments. Despite the fact that overall the Later Han dynasty saw individuals as parts of larger community organizations and tended toward communal responsibility and punishment, the Way of Great Peace, operating at the same time, strongly proposed an individualistic vision of guilt and sin, emphasizing personal responsibility. Although a comparison with Western religions might seem simplistic, the early Daoist understanding of sin and blame is highly similar in its complexity and cannot be put aside merely as a utilitarian measure used for the curing of diseases. The intensity and depth of self-awareness exhibited in the ancient writings on confession clearly show that Chinese culture did not lack in self-reflection and critical self-evaluation, but document that it had its own highly developed visions of the functioning and structure of human self and consciousness.
Translated by Livia Kohn
Notes
1. As the Shenxian zhuan says, “If they would unexpectedly fall sick, they would forthwith proclaim their misdeeds; thus on the one hand they obtained healing, and on the other were moved to shame and remorse which deterred them from sinning again” (Ofuchi 1991, 152).
2. The latter is described in the Hou Hanshu:
Zhang Lu, zi Gongqi, . . . organized his followers into several groups. Initial practitioners were “demon soldiers” ( guizu), later they would advance to “libationers” ( jijiu). Each libationer was in charge of a group of followers, and those who ruled a particularly
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large group were known as “village heads” ( litou). They demanded highest sincerity and faith and would not tolerate any falseness or cheating. When someone fell sick, they would make him or her confess all sins. (72.2435)
3. Further arguments for the early date of certain ideas and terms of the Taiping jing, including a detailed examination of relevant sources, are found in Fukunaga 1987; Maeda 1994.
4. He documents this point by examining not only early confessions among Daoist movements but also Shen Yue’s Chanhui wen (On Confession); Wang Ji’s (1498–1583) Zisong (Self-Criticism); Zhu Hong’s (1535–1615) Zize (Self-Accusation); Liu Zongzhou’s (1578–1645) Renpu (Life Chronology); and other works, especially of the Ming and Qing dynasties. See Wu 1996. Other studies of the subject include Tsuchiya 1994; and on the Western aspects, especially Foucault 1997.
5. This reflects mainstream Chinese cosmology. See Huainanzi 7; Chunqiu fanlu 13.
6. The text has, “If a person has a sin within his belly, why would his face be red?” For more on shame in the Taiping jing, see Miyakawa 1983, 489.
7. A similar argument can be made from Shen Yue’s Chanhui wen; see Wu 1990, 209.
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3
“Opening the Way”
Exorcism, Travel, and Soteriology
in Early Daoist Mortuary Practice
and Its Antecedents
Peter Nickerson
The Celestial Masters in Chinese Religious History
Zhang Daoling and his followers clearly effected a religious revolution.
They inaugurated a new dispensation that defined itself, then as now, not in relation to Buddhism or “Confucianism,” but rather in antithe-sis to the false gods whom the benighted populace worshipped with blood offerings. Though the early Daoists spoke of high antiquity, of the Yellow Emperor, Yu the Great and the famous immortals of the Zhou dynasty, . . . the social history of Daoism begins with the founding of the Way of the Celestial Master in the second century a.d.
Thus, I am proposing to use the word Daoist only in referring to those who recognize the historical position of Zhang Daoling, who worship the pure emanations of the Dao rather than the vulgar gods of the people at large, and—I may add—who safeguard and perpetuate their own lore and practices through esoteric rites of transmission (Strickmann 1979, 165–166).
A working definition of Daoism more elegant and practical than Michel Strickmann’s has yet to be proposed. In one stroke —by highlighting the essential distinction between Daoism and the popular religion of sacrificial god-cults and related practices—it freed Daoist studies from that tired sinological notion according to which “all that which is neither Buddhism nor Confucianism is Daoism.” In another respect, however, the view that Daoism appeared as an entirely unprecedented (“revolutionary”) alternative to a debased popular religion of blood sacrifice has been shown to be in need of revision. Largely owing to a great expansion in the excavated archaeological record and resultant work on Han and pre-Han magico-religious traditions (see, e.g., 58