Daoist Identity

by Livia Kohn

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  Harper 1978; 1982; 1985; 1987; 1998), a new appreciation of the prehistory of Daoism has emerged.

  Of special significance for our purposes is Anna Seidel’s work on the “tomb ordinances” or “tomb contracts” ( muquan and related artifacts) of the Han, especially the genre of “grave-securing writs” ( zhenmu wen): texts from the Latter Han (first–second centuries c.e.) written on earthenware jars and buried together with the dead (see Seidel 1982; 1987a; 1987b). Written as edicts emanating from a Celestial Monarch (Tiandi) and delivered by his Envoy (Tiandi shizhe), the grave-securing ordinances command a minor spirit-bureaucracy of the tomb to conduct the deceased to the underworld (which also has its own magistrates, prisons, and systems of taxation and corvée) and place him or her securely in the charge of the underworld administration. According to Seidel, the people of the Han who used the writs expected that the dead would be treated like criminals: because of misdeeds committed when alive, they would be imprisoned by the authorities. The grave-securing writs, therefore, also sought the “liberation” ( jie) of the dead—that is, their release from the prisons of the earth to the secure dwellings of their tombs (Seidel 1987a; 1987b).1

  The religion of the grave-securing writs was both bureaucratic and ethical, in Seidel’s analysis. The motif of judicial trial for past sins, followed by imprisonment and release, has remained central to Chinese death ritual until today.

  Though it does not possess all the features Seidel identified with the “religion of the Celestial Monarch,” a rather typical grave-securing writ, from the late second century, reads, in part, as follows: In the second year of Xiping, in the twelfth month [early 174], whose first day is yisi, on the sixteenth day which is gengshen, the Envoy of the Celestial Monarch declares to—the rulers of the left, the right, and the center of the Zhang family’s three mounds and five tombs, the Assistant of the Sepulcher, the Director of the Sepulcher, . . . the Hostel Chief of the Gate of the hun-soul, . . . and the others, [and also] dares to announce to the Assistant of the Mound, the Sire of the Tomb, the Subterrestrial Two Thousand Bushel Officials, . . . the Squad Chiefs of Haoli, and the others:

  Today is auspicious and good, and for no other reason [is this announcement being made], but only because the deceased, Zhang Shujing, had a barren fate, died young, and is due to return below and [enter] the mound and tomb.

  The Yellow Monarch [Huangdi] gave birth to the Five March-

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  mounts, and he rules over the registers of the living. He summons the hun- and po-souls, and rules over the records of the dead. . . .2

  For this reason are offered: medicine for exemption from forced labor, with the desire that there will be no dead among those of later generations; nine roots of ginseng from Shangdang, with the desire that they be taken in replacement of the living; lead men, to be taken in replacement of the dead; and yellow beans and melon seeds, for the dead to take to pay the subterrestrial levies. . . . Let the odium of the soil be driven off, with the desire that evil be kept from propagating.

  Once these orders have been transmitted, the civil servants of the earth shall be bound, and are not to trouble the Zhang household again. Quickly, quickly, in accordance with the statutes and ordinances.

  (Ikeda 1981, 273, no. 6)

  Seidel correctly categorizes the “religion of the Celestial Monarch”

  ( tiandi jiao) that underlay the grave-securing writs as a type of “proto-Daoism.” While it is not clear in the above document whether the

  “odium of the soil” is the result of the deceased’s misdeeds or simply the irritation of the earth spirits as a result of the introduction of the polluting corpse into their realm—the line between pollution and moral malfeasance in early Chinese religion is often a fine one —the notion of a bureaucratic administration of the underworld (the “civil servants of the earth”) overseen by a celestial deity and his underlings clearly anticipates Daoist cosmology. In a later description, Seidel even more boldly ascribes “many beliefs and practices of the early Daoist church (e.g., the bureaucratized heavenly and netherworldly hierarchies)” to “the religion of a literate class outside of officialdom—

  village elders, exorcists and specialists in funerary rites—since at least the first century c.e.” (Seidel 1990, 237). The Daoist religion was less of a novelty than accounts that contrast it only with spirit-mediumism and sacrificial cults would imply.

  Nonetheless, Seidel concludes that Daoism involved an entirely “new soteriological paradigm.” Daoism introduced into the bureaucratic framework of the proto-Daoist religion of the Han grave-securing writs the goals and lore of the elite immortality cult, with its graceful transcendents and fantastically adorned celestial landscapes. Ordinary people could aspire to more than a dreary existence under the earth as resentful subjects of the administration of the shades. The Daoist religion promised, instead, “liberation” from death and promotion to celestial transcendence (Seidel 1987a, 47–48).

  Angelika Cedzich has further expanded this line of thought through her ground-breaking analysis of the early Celestial Masters’ ritual of

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  petitioning the celestial authorities ( shangzhang ) and the use of the petitioning ritual in handling the spirits of the unquiet dead (1987).

  In her analysis, the paradigmatic break between the beliefs about the afterlife implied by the grave-securing writs and Daoist ideas of salvation was even sharper than Seidel’s work might imply. The purpose of the grave-securing writs was at its root exorcistic: their chief goal was to get the potentially malevolent spirits of the dead away from the living and keep them away. Only with the advent of the Way of the Celestial Master was an attempt made instead to save the dead, to integrate them into a greater “social” body together with the living—the bureaucracy of the Daoist church and the Daoist cosmos. In Daoism the use of ritual to install the deceased in a secure and pleasant post in the afterworld ensured the salvation of the dead. But the Daoists thus did not simply propose a new kind of soteriology: by insisting on salvation rather than mere exorcism, Daoists created the first indigenous soteriology (see Cedzich 1987, 42–60; 1993; Seidel 1988).

  Implicit in the views of Strickmann, Seidel, and Cedzich is the idea that the advent of Daoism, as represented by the Way of the Celestial Master, involved a significant rupture in Chinese religious history. The early Daoists’ treatment of the dead, in which a soteriological ritual and ideological paradigm was adopted in place of an exorcistic one, meant a complete reconfiguration of the Chinese religious universe.

  Daoism promised salvation in heaven for the worthy—in contrast with the pre-Daoist and proto-Daoist notion of an afterlife for all in the Yellow Springs and/or the tomb. It thereby advocated, in Joseph Needham’s terms, a conception of the afterlife that was otherworldly and ethically polarized—rather than this-worldly and nonethical (Needham 1974, 77–113). Hence, one infers from these scholars’ analyses, although the proto-Daoist religion of the grave-securing writs might, like Daoism proper, have involved the idea of an afterworld bureaucracy that could hold the dead accountable for their misdeeds, the Celestial Masters and their heirs placed those beliefs within cosmological and moral contexts that differed radically from what had gone before.

  The vocabulary with which the “Daoist revolution” is described—

  New Dispensation, New Testament, reformation, revolution—testifies amply to the roots of such periodizing schemes. Behind this periodization is an evolutionary typology of religions that opposes “higher”

  religion—which is otherworldly in its cosmology and has an afterlife that is ethically polarized, and an approach to the dead that is soteriological—to a more primitive antecedent that is this-worldly,

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  does not apply ethical criteria to the determination of afterlife destinations, and is sacrificial or e
xorcistic in its dealings with the spirits of the dead. Thus the issue of the place of Daoism in the history of Chinese religion has come to be discussed in terms of questions about death: the cosmology of the afterlife, the means of determining who goes where, and the rites conducted in the attempt to secure good destinations for the departed. This chapter supports a claim that differs significantly from the views of the scholars discussed above: Daoist soteriology involved no revolution, no fundamental paradigmatic shift, from the religious treatments of death that had preceded it.

  Precursors of Daoism: Archaic Death Ritual

  In ancient times, the hazards posed by death often were handled by figures who might, with varying degrees of specificity, be termed shamans. One of the earliest literary traces of archaic, nonclassical mortuary rites centers on the description of the fangxiang shi or “exorcist.” According to the Zhouli (Rites of Zhou) of the Warring States Period,

  The duty of the fangxiang shi is to cover himself with a bearskin, [a mask having] four eyes of gold, a black upper garment, and a vermilion lower garment. Grasping his halberd and brandishing his shield, he leads the hundred functionaries in the seasonal No [the “Great Exorcism” held on the eve of the La, or New Year] in order to search through the rooms and drive out pestilences. (3.475; see Granet 1926, 1:298; Kobayashi 1946; Bodde 1975, ch. 4; Boltz 1979)

  In the Great Exorcism the fangxiang was assisted by 120 (or 240, 60, or 24) youths and twelve dancers in animal masks and costumes, and he invoked in an incantation twelve demon-animal servants to devour the specters due to be exorcised. But what is of greatest importance here is that the fangxiang was also said to have had duties during royal funerals. The Zhouli continues,

  In great funerals he goes before the coffin. When the grave has been reached he enters the pit and with his halberd strikes the four sides in order to drive out the fangliang [demon]. (31.12a–b [3:475]) Other early shamanic figures involved with the dead included the court shamans who exorcised corpses before rulers might approach them—and, of course, Shaman Yang (Wu Yang), who summoned the soul in the Chuci (Songs of the South). It might further be claimed that, whether one terms all of them shamans or not, at the least these figures

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  represented a common type of archaic religious practitioner, one whose activities involved exorcism, soul-summoning, and masked dancing.3 Ying Shao (c. 140–206) comments concerning the function of masks in popular death ritual in a way that establishes a very close link between masked performances and the summoning of the soul: The hun-soul vapor of the deceased floats about. Therefore one makes a griffon head [mask] ( qitou) to preserve ( cun) it. [The term qitou] indicates that the head is monstrously huge. Sometimes the griffon head is called striking-the-pit ( chukuang ). This is a special local term. ( Fengsu tongyi 1.88; Taiping yulan 552.10a [3.2501]) Ying Shao’s remark echoes the statement in the Liji (Book of Rites) that after death the hun -soul vapor has “nowhere it does not go, nowhere it does not go” (10.19b [5.194A]). However, for those who practiced the rites described by Ying Shao, this clearly was not regarded as a good thing. Instead, qitou, “griffon heads” (Schafer 1987, 78) or spirit masks, were employed to keep the soul from wandering away (see Lewis 1990, 312 n 106).

  Given its role in the protection of the deceased—here the soul rather than the body—together with what might be an allusion to the exorcist’s striking of the sides of the grave-pit, the griffon head mask would appear to be linked, at least functionally, to the fangxiang. This identification is made explicitly in Duan Chengshi’s Youyang zazu (Mis-cellanea from Youyang), where the nature of the performances involving the masks is also clarified:

  When a person dies nowadays, there is someone who acts and plays music that is called “funeral music.” The griffon head is that by which the hun-soul vapor of the deceased is secured. One name for [the performer] is Fright, because his clothing and coverings are frightening.

  Others call him Crazed Suspicion ( kuangzu). If he has four eyes he is called a fangxiang; if he has two eyes he is called a dervish. (13.69–70; see Kiang 1937, 92–93)

  The griffon head thus refers both to the mask and to the ritualist who wore it. As shown by the numerous regional names provided by Ying Shao and Duan Chengshi, there must have been many local varieties of such funeral performances, involving masked players who danced, perhaps in a state of ecstatic trance —the monster masks and frenzied dancing certainly suggest shamanism.4 Their work was probably intended to drive away the demons that would eat the corpse (a goal attributed to the work of the fangxiang ) and (at least by the time of the Latter Han, when Ying Shao wrote) also to prevent the soul from wan-

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  dering or dispersing. The soul so protected was in all likelihood then provided with permanent lodgings in the tomb.

  These funeral rites must have been much like the Nuo, or Great Exorcism, itself. While the Nuo was a seasonal rite aimed at specters of age, dirt, and decay, the death rite sought to neutralize all the hazards death created: for the deceased, attacks by demons of putrefaction or by the fierce demonic creatures the soul would encounter were it to wander too far; for the survivors, the pollution of the corpse and the potential hostility on the part of the spirit of the deceased. The central feature in both cases was the exorcistic masked dance by the fangxiang (or the related qitou) accompanied, Marcel Granet suggests, by drumming and “cris provoquaient des états d’extase et de possession” (Granet 1926, 333). Analysis has revealed a continuous tradition of exorcism and shamanism that during funeral rites employed masked dancing, music, and chanting.

  The Post-Mortem Journey in Daoist Mortuary Ritual

  Many parallels in medieval Daoist texts can be found for the archaic and proto-Daoist rites. Here I will examine just one, from the Yaoxiu keyi jielü chao (Breviary of Rules, Rituals, Precepts, and Statutes Essential to Practice; HY 463; see Cedzich 1987, 14–15). The last two juan of this work (15 and 16) contain precise instructions for the funerals of Daoist priests, based on a tradition the ritual master Zhu Faman traces to “the greater Master Meng,” Meng Jingyi (fl. 480), as well as to three other individuals: “the Lesser Master Meng,” identified by Isabelle Robinet as Meng Zhizhou of the Liang (502–550; Robinet, 1977, 99); and Shijing gong (Sir Stonewell) and Zhang Xu, whom I have not been able to locate in other sources. Zhu presents his version as a “synthesis” ( huihe) of the work of his four predecessors, and he is so scrupu-lous in his attribution of various sections of the ritual or different variations to his four sources that there is little reason to distrust his claim that he represents a tradition whose development over two centuries or more was well documented.

  The text is quite detailed and represents, to my knowledge, a relatively untapped source for the study of medieval funerals. Particularly noteworthy is the way in which the classical form is retained—the rite is divided into the standard categories found in the Yili (Protocols and Rites) and other early ritual texts, such as the “lesser dressing” ( xiaolian) of the corpse, the “greater dressing” ( dalian), or coffining, and so forth, and the same general sequence is followed. At the same time,

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  new Daoist procedures are interwoven into that structure. This suggests that there was little inherent conflict between Daoist (and quite likely Buddhist) mortuary ritual and “Confucian” ritual forms until that conflict was created by the Neo-Confucians of the Song (see Davis 2001).

  The Yaoxiu keyi’ s funeral for priests shows how the Daoist synthesis of the late Six Dynasties and the Tang incorporated both of the key tributaries of the larger stream of the Daoist ritual tradition, not only the Lingbao scriptures, but also the Way of the Celestial Master. This is also borne out by the Zhengyi lun (Discourse on Upright Unity) attributed to Meng Jingyi.5 It argues precisely for the unity of the Way of the Celestial Master and the revelations of Lingbao: “The teachings of Zhang [Daoling] and Ge [Xuan,
fl. 200; traditionally the first recipient of the Lingbao scriptures] are entirely the same and share a single function” (HY 1218, 3b2).

  Continuities among archaic, proto-Daoist, and medieval Daoist mortuary rites are evinced by two ritual documents whose use is prescribed by the Yaoxiu keyi. The first of these, called an “Announcement”

  ( yiwen), is, like the proto-Daoist grave-securing writs of the Han, in fact a form of tomb ordinance. (One difference between this document and other tomb ordinances is the identity of the issuer of the Announcement, the Celestial Elder [Tianlao], but this difference may not be so great as initially appears.)6 It is to be written either on plain silk or paper, recited during the ceremony, and then placed in the coffin for burial together with the corpse.

  The “Announcement” in the Yaoxiu keyi first provides a form for listing the scriptures, registers, and talismans received by the departed during his lifetime (which may or may not be placed together with the corpse in the tomb), together with the other grave goods: clothing and the articles appropriate to the priestly profession, such as ink stone, paper, brushes, petition-table, and incense burner. The text continues:

  The Celestial Elder announces to—the Heavenly One and the Earthly Two; . . . the Elders of Haoli; the Two Thousand Bushel Officials beneath the soil; . . . the Inspector of the Gate of the Hun-soul; . . . and the Envoys in Charge of Talismans:7

  Now (so-and-so), a disciple of the Three Caverns, from (such and such a) village, township, district, commandery, and region, a male born in (such and such a) year, who lived (so many) years, died this month on (such and such a) day at (such and such a) time. Having declared his lifespan exhausted, suddenly he gave up [his life] in order to be