Religious and Literary Background

14 Chapter 1 Chapter 1 Religious and Literary Background The Ideal of Xian-ship Although the hope of longevity and avoidance of death has been an integral part of Chinese culture since early times,1 the concept of xian immortality was developed consistently and theoretically grounded within the context of Daoist religion from the late Han dynasty onward. The concept of xian involved a specific notion of eternal life in which not only the spiritual components of man survive but the physical body as well—albeit, in a purified and sublimated form achieved through a successive course of various alchemical, physiologi cal, and ritual practices. It was believed that xian immortality could be attained during a man’s lifetime without an inevitable passage through death. The adept who rose to the state of a xian could ascend into the ranks of the heav enly bureaucracy as a perfected immortal or choose a terrestrial life among picturesque earthly landscapes. Liberated from the anxieties of old age, death, and dissolution, he could enjoy a finer, eternal life that still included all the pleasures of human existence.2 In the philosophical and religious context of ancient China, such notion of corporeal immortality presented the only possible solution to the problem of everlasting life. Before the arrival of Buddhism, it was generally held that man lives in this world but once. Even though opinions as to what happens to the spiritual components of a person after death differed, all Chinese thinkers agreed that a rebirth (fusheng 復生 or zaisheng 再生) was not possible. More over, the notion of the survival of the individual self and hence the concept of eternal life was intimately bound to the preservation of the body. The soul was never perceived as an invisible spiritual counterpart to a visible, corporeal body. Both soul and body were simply aspects of the same primordial breath, or qi 氣 (translated also as “pneuma,” “vital breath,” or “vital energy”), con 1 The wish that death might be avoided altogether was expressed in bronze inscriptions from the eighth century BC onward. See Yu Yingshi, “Life and Immortality in the Mind of Han China,” 87. 2 For overviews of xian immortality, see the excellent survey in Campany, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth, 18 –97; Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 2, 139–154; and Penny, “Immortality and Transcendence,” in Daoism Handbook, ed. Livia Kohn. On preHan and Han concepts of immortality, see Yu Yingshi, “Life and Immortality.” © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi 10.1163/9789004313699_003 Religious and Literary Background 15 densed to different degrees. Furthermore, every person possessed not one but many souls, or more precisely, spiritual components, roughly divided into two groups—hun 魂 and po 魄—which scattered at death. It was the physical body that held the numerous souls and spirits together, like a thread holding beads, and provided them with a habitat, thereby ensuring the individual personality of every human being. Hence, only through preservation of the body could one achieve an everlasting continuation of the living personality without allowing it to disintegrate into fragments with existences of their own. Immortality in the sense of “not passing away” (busi 不死) is, however, only one aspect of the xian state, which more fundamentally involved a transforma tion of the psychospiritual complex of the individual and thereby a change in the very mode of his being. Many Daoist texts explicitly emphasize the distinc tion between xian and mere longevity or nondying.3 The achievement of longevity might be conceived as a preliminary stage of attaining xianship, or these two states might be presented as separate options altogether. In fact, the term xian designates a variety of different beings, from “earthbound xian” (di xian 地仙), existing on the terrestrial plane or under it in the grottoheavens, to celestial beings proper. Stephan Bokenkamp aptly summarizes this aspect of Daoism: One quality these beings share is that they have been “transferred” … from the common human state to a more subtilized form of existence, closer to the nature of the Dao. There is thus not a single chasm between mortals and immortals, but a chain of being, extending from nonsen tient forms of life that also experience growth and decay to the highest reaches of the empyrean.4 A Historical Survey of Immortality Cults Although the roots of the immortality cult are still the subject of much contro versy, scholars agree that it was formed at the end of the fourth century BC in the eastern Chinese states of Qi 齊 and Yan 燕. In general, it can be said that the cult comprised traditional longevity concerns, traditions of ecstatic shaman ism, and philosophicmeditative currents. This complex also incorporated cosmological, astrological, and medical theories that had developed indepen dently but were absorbed into immortality teachings early on. 3 E.g., Zhen’gao 12.3a (Zhen’gao jiaozhu, 381). 4 Bokenkamp, Early Taoist Scriptures, 22–23. .

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