by Livia Kohn
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transformed anew . His hun-soul will ascend to heaven, and his form will enter the earth to dwell. Now he is going to return to a brick tomb established on a mountain in (such and such a) township and village.
(So-and-so) when he was alive abandoned the profane and followed a Master, requesting that the Way allow him to leave the world to seek learning and to wear at the waist the great scriptures, talismans, charts, and declarations of the Three Caverns of Shangqing. He is carrying all of these back to the Grand Yin (Taiyin), along with winter and summer clothes, ornaments, and implements, altogether including (such and such) varieties, his pine coffin and the gear used for the funeral and the burial and the preparations therefor.
When this talisman arrives, attentively lay to rest and conceal his form and bones; vigilantly guard the scriptures and treasures; guide, cap, and gird him. Order your subordinates to greet and escort him, and not to impede him. Let him go directly and without obstruction to his place of concealment. Do not allow the demons of other surnames dwelling [in graves] nearby, to left or right, or to east, west, south, or north, to appropriate his name or assume his surname, thus falsely giving rise to theft. Clearly receive these talismanic orders; do not disobey them. Let all be in accordance with the statutes and ordinances of the Nüqing Edicts of the Demon Laws of the Grand Mysterious Capital.
( Yaoxiu keyi 15.14ab; see Nickerson 1996)
The text attributes this form of Announcement to (the greater) Master Meng (16.4b); it should, therefore, date from about the year 480.
Despite the passage of time and the emergence of the mature Daoist tradition, the “Announcement” here still resembles very closely the Han grave-securing writs: besides the overall similarity of form—the identical roles of the Celestial Elder and the Celestial Monarch’s Envoy, the members in common of the underworld pantheon, and the
“talismanic orders” that must be obeyed “in accordance with the statutes and ordinances”—the “Announcement,” like the writs, seems primarily to be concerned with securely placing the deceased, together with his grave goods, in the tomb, the “place of concealment”
( zangsuo). The post-mortem journey’s final destination seems less than inviting.
Soteriology in the Medieval Daoist Synthesis
But as the second key ritual document in the funeral directions of the Yaoxiu keyi shows, the overall intent of the mortuary rite remains soteriological, in a manner that is highly consistent with the journey paradigm, which I will try to show is characteristic of the Daoist tradition
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as a whole. The text prescribes the sending up of a petition ( zhang ) in conjunction with the burial of the document in the tomb—as does the early Lingbao work Miedu wulian shengshi miaojing (Miraculous Scripture of Salvation through Extinction by Revivification of Corpses through Fivefold Refinement, HY 369; see Bokenkamp 1989). The form of petition set out in the Yaoxiu keyi reads, in part, as follows:
[Since the deceased had become] bound by his sins and his [allotment]
of trespasses had been filled, his body became exhausted and his spirit departed. In this month on (such and such a) day at (such and such a) time he took his leave of heaven and earth and sank forever down to [the realm of] the officials of the soil. Having [prepared] the precious scriptures, talismans, charts, ritual implements, clothing, and other articles he possessed in life, we then today at (such and such a) time sealed [them together with] his enshrouded and encoffined corpse in the mound and sepulcher.
We fear that in life [the departed] may have committed a capital crime, or that the demons of stale vapors [that enforce] prohibitions and taboos or the wicked and false sprites of mountains and rivers will block the deceased and not open the way. Also we fear that the subterrestrial rulers of the four seasons, the Elders of Haoli, the Assistant of the Mound and the Sire of the Tomb, and the Subterrestrial Two Thousand Bushel Officials will not lay him to rest and conceal him.
Respectfully we list the scriptures and funerary objects and transfer each item as per the document. And respectfully we prostrate our-selves on the earth and offer up a petition, inviting our superiors—
the Envoy who Descends to the Corpse, and the Lord and Clerks in Charge of Funerals—to descend together and supervise the funeral and lay to rest [the deceased’s] skeleton and spirit, giving him ever-lasting peace in Haoli and reincarnation in accordance with his karma.
(16.3b–4a)
Here, very similar to the late-Han grave-securing writs, the principal fear surrounding death and burial is that the deceased will be held responsible for sins, the “capital crimes” he committed during his life, or for the breaking of the rules governing burial—the “prohibitions and taboos”—and that this will cause the chthonian spirits to harass him.
The body/spirit dualism that differentiates the Daoist from the proto-Daoist handling of death is expressed strongly, if not without some ambiguity. The death is first described in terms of the exhaus-tion of the body and the departure of the spirit ( shenjin shenshi). However, the deceased is treated as a unitary being: we are told simply that
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“he”—the text fails to introduce a new subject, which therefore remains the “disciple of the Three Caverns, (so-and-so)” of the very first line —
“sank forever down to [the realm of] the officials of the soil.” The petition next addresses only the burial of the grave goods and the corpse.
The initial body/spirit ( shen/ shen) bifurcation resurfaces, however—
and even more explicitly—as the petition goes on to detail the fears felt by the survivors on behalf of the deceased. The spirit, for which the way to the beyond must be opened, is treated separately from the body, which must be laid to rest in the tomb. Regarding the spirit, the text worries that the demons of “stale vapors [that enforce] prohibitions and taboos” might hold the deceased accountable for his sins and thus “block [him] and not open the way.” But while the spirit is to be sent on its way to heaven, the body is to be “laid to rest and concealed” ( an yin), provided that the cooperation of those ubiquitous spirits of the tomb—the Elders of Haoli, the Assistant of the Mound, the Sire of the Tomb, and so on—can be secured. Corpse and spirit must be brought to their appropriate, and separate, resting places so that eventually the deceased may be “reincarnated in accordance with his karma.” Or as the “Announcement” had stated: “His hun-soul will ascend to heaven, and his form will enter the earth to dwell.”
The Yaoxiu keyi’ s funeral rite, in fact, demonstrates how Daoism’s soteriological concerns—and the related separation of spirit and body—were handled within the pre-existing framework of mortuary thought, according to which death was a journey requiring exorcistic protection. The apparent ambiguities just pointed to—where the deceased is alternately treated as a single entity and as a compound of body and spirit—point to a kind of historical accretion. As in the Han grave-securing writs, the whole person of the deceased, including both the material and the more ethereal components, is first installed in the tomb: he is to “go directly and without obstruction to his place of concealment,” “forever down to [the realm of] the officials of the soil.”
At that point, however, the destinies of body and spirit diverge. Though both might initially enter the tomb, it is the body alone that will remain in its dwelling place in the earth, while the spirit will continue on and ascend to heaven (or be reincarnated—this, of course, is another ambiguity that pervades Chinese notions of post-mortem fates).
Hence the Yaoxiu keyi’ s funerary petition addresses two distinct groups of spirits: one to settle the body in the tomb, and one to open the deceased’s way to heaven.
The process of historical accretion that resulted in the construction of Daoist soteriology on the foundation of pre- and proto-Daoist
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t
raditions of mortuary exorcism was expressed in Daoist ritual through a homologous temporal dualism. The first journey of the deceased was to the tomb and the underworld; the soul alone subsequently undertook the second journey—to the heavens or other pleasant afterworld realms. This appears to have been a common notion concerning death during the Six Dynasties. An example is Huangfu Mi, whose religious world seems primarily to have been molded by New Text Confucianism. In his writings, he expresses a similar view: while the corpse will remain in the grave, the hun-soul will ascend after burial from the grave to the heavens (see Knapp 1998).
The journey paradigm remained as the model used to represent the transformations of death: the visible journey of the deceased to the tomb was simply duplicated on the invisible plane as the ascent of the spirit. Like the corpse, it too had to be bathed, clothed, and girded (cf. Miedu wulian jing 7b–8a). Just as the fangxiang led the funeral procession, “opened the way” to the tomb, and then entered the grave and drove off the demons that might devour the deceased, and just as proto-Daoist ritualists placed grave-securing writs in the tomb to finalize the transfer of the deceased to the underworld regime and protect deceased and survivors from the “civil servants of the earth,”
so medieval Daoists used their apotropaic documents to control the spirits of the earth and the tomb in order to secure both legs of the journey of death. In fact, not only the funeral ritual of the Yaoxiu keyi, whose beginnings go back to the late fifth century, but also the c. 400
Lingbao scriptures and certain excavated Celestial Master tomb ordinances, which span the period from 433 to 520, testify to the existence of a common medieval Daoist conception of death and its dangers, and of the ritual means to be employed in order to combat those dangers (see Nickerson 1996, ch. 3).
Passage and Paradigm in Daoist Mortuary Rites
In her essay on the Han grave-securing writs, Anna Seidel has stated that, by grafting notions of celestial transcendence that had developed as part of the immortality cult of the Han elite onto the popular religion of the grave-securing writs, Daoism created a “new soteriological paradigm” that “infused beauty, mystery and hope into the gray and legalistic spirit hierarchy of the Celestial [Mon]arch” (Seidel 1987a, 47–48). Whether one finds this to have been the case depends largely on how one defines the term “paradigm.” Certainly, the notion that there was somewhere beyond the grave for ordinary souls to go (other
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than unhappily wandering the earth) was new, and Seidel’s work shows brilliantly how Daoists were able to incorporate the goal of celestial transcendence into their bureaucratized (if not “gray and legalistic”) rites for the dead.8 However, if one understands “paradigm” in accordance with its basic meaning of “an accepted model or pattern”—
as Thomas Kuhn has defined it in his application of the term to the history of science (1970, 23)—what is interesting is that Daoism was able to incorporate these new ideas without developing a new pattern for representing the process of death and afterlife. From the standpoint of the Kuhnian understanding of scientific revolutions, the duplica-tion of the journey to the grave on a spiritual level would seem to have been precisely the application of an old pattern—the exorcistically protected journey—to new “data”: the peregrinations of the soul of the deceased in an expanded invisible world. Thus, to that extent, there was no paradigmatic break, no revolution in soteriology.
More detailed morphological analysis of Daoist death ritual and its predecessors will help substantiate this view. Here I employ the (by now well-worn) framework for the study of the structure of mortuary rites proposed by Arnold van Gennep in his seminal Rites of Passage (1960, ch. 8, esp.163–164). As a rite of passage, a funeral can be considered in terms of three stages: (1) separation—whereby the ties between the deceased and the survivors are severed; (2) an inter-mediate, liminal phase of transition; and (3) incorporation, which effects the entry of the deceased into the land of the dead or other new place or state. These divisions are by no means clear-cut: burial, for instance, may be considered as separation, the removal of the dead from the presence of the living, but also as a rite of incorporation, as in the case of societies in which the dead are considered to dwell in the grave.
In early China, the most visible and tangible funerary rite of passage was the funeral procession itself, whereby the departed was removed from the dwellings of the living (separation), conveyed to the burial site (transition), and lodged in the tomb, which at least from Warring States times onward was conceived as a home for the dead (incorporation).9 The centrality of the journey as a metaphor for the transition from life, through death, to afterlife is thus perfectly understandable: the most important rite of passage was, in fact, a plainly visible journey. Moreover, while van Gennep has noted that “the journey to the other world and the entrance to it comprise a series of rites of passage whose details depend on the distance and topography of that world” (1960, 153), the reverse is also true: when death is con-
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ceived as a journey, a culture’s notion of travel molds the conception of death.
The mortuary passage was not the only kind of journey in early China that necessitated exorcistic rites. Kiang Shao yuan, in his classic study of ancient Chinese beliefs associated with travel, and particularly their relationship to demonology, reached the following conclusion:
The ancients, when they left their homes or their native states, believed themselves to be continually exposed to the attacks of supernatural beings. . . . It was because of these immaterial beings that travelers needed to fear so many difficulties, privations, and perils. In order to prevent them, cope with them, or remedy them, the ancients made use of a great number of recipes. (Kiang 1937, 127, 129)
Later Daoists and magico-religious practitioners of similar ilk continued such traditions. Best known is Ge Hong’s discussion in his Baopuzi ([Book of] The Master Who Embraces Simplicity) of “ascending mountains” ( dengshan; ch. 17), a dangerous undertaking that required the prior knowledge of all manner of esoteric techniques.
Closer to our immediate topic, when the fangxiang shi opened the way for the funeral procession and drove the demons of putrefaction from the grave —and the fangliang and its ilk were also among the most common nemeses of travelers (Kiang 1937, 169–216)—this constituted in an important sense simply another type of travel exorcism: the provision of apotropaic protection for a procession. In that role, the fangxiang followed in the footsteps of his patron deity, Chiyou, also a guardian of processions.10
A similar convergence of travel and mortuary ritual is evident in the case of the ancient travel sacrifices, the zu and the ba. The zu could serve as a farewell ceremony for a living wayfarer but could also be performed before the setting out of the funeral cortège, or as a seasonal ritual to send off (and hence exorcise) wandering souls. Chiyou was also a tutelary god of the zu. The ba was structurally homologous with the pattern of sacrifice and exorcism outlined by Wang Chong (27–91) with reference to the appeasement of earth spirits offended by the construction of houses (or graves) and was carried out (in conjunction with the zu) to drive off the malevolent spirits of the mountain paths and make the traveler’s way secure. Rituals for travel, death, and exorcism were thus inextricably linked (Nickerson 1996, 208–
220).
Nor was this ritual interrelationship disturbed by the incorporation
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within the Daoist religion of new concepts centered around judgment in the afterlife and the possibility that souls could enjoy either transcendent bliss in the heavens or imprisonment and torture in the
“earth prisons.” No radically new model for the post-mortem journey had to be developed. Instead, the pre-existing pattern was replicated on an additional level: the endpoint of the initial journey—the tomb—
simply became the starting point for a new peregrination. Burial placed the
deceased in the charge of the spirits of earth and tomb, after which the second journey commenced. It was the function of the death ritual to ensure that those spirits acted as dutiful escorts for the soul’s trip to the beyond, rather than as malevolent demons that could de-tain the soul or attack it on the road.11 The parallelism between the physical journey of the funeral procession and the invisible journey of the soul should not be surprising: that the treatment of the corpse tends to be structurally parallel to beliefs about the fate of the soul was the essential principle established in Robert Hertz’s pathbreaking study of mortuary rites (see Hertz 1960).
“Among the reasons for [the Daoists’] success,” Seidel writes, “was no doubt the fact that they proposed a way out of the dilemma of physical death . . . [and] eventually came to devise means to save even those who had already become wretched demonic shades” (1982, 225, 230).
The appeal of early Daoist soteriology must have been that much stronger because of what it could provide, not only for those among the living who were concerned about their own fates, but especially for all (nearly everyone, if one follows Seidel’s reading) who were anx-ious about their ancestors. Daoism allowed a means of redressing the balance between unfilial, self-interested terror of the dead and filial fear on their behalf.
Early Daoist mortuary ritual gained the salvation of the dead by means of the transformation of the initially unfilial rites of exorcism themselves. Ancient travel sacrifices and funeral rituals exorcised the enemies of the traveler/deceased and, simultaneously, sent off—and thus, in effect, exorcised—the traveler/deceased him- or herself.
Daoist rites of salvation, by consigning the well-fed and properly clothed soul securely to some pleasant region of the afterlife, similarly made certain that the dead would not come back and harm the living. On the other hand, the successful transfer of the dead to higher realms, while satisfying the ubiquitous imperative of the Han grave-securing writs—“let living and dead take separate paths”—also satisfied moral and emotional demands that one’s forebears be well treated.