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THE DEMON STATUTES OF NÜQING AND THE PROBLEM OF THE BUREAUCRATIZATION OF THE NETHERWORLD IN EARLY HEAVENLY MASTER DAOISM

BY

LAI CHI-TIM The Chinese University of Hong Kong

I. Introduction: Arguments for an Early Daoist Bureaucratic Order in the Netherworld

Based upon the evidence of the closing formula “According to the statutes and ordinances” (ru lüling ) in the funeral texts found in Han tombs, Anna Seidel, in her influential essay “Traces of Han Religion,” links the religion of “tomb ordinances” (muquan ) of the Han in the second century A.D. with early Heavenly Master Daoism.1 In her view, the formula ru lüling adopted in the tomb ordinances, especially the grave-securing writs (zhenmuwen ), is similar to the one used in one of the earliest codes of law in early Heavenly Master Daoism, namely the Demon Statutes of Nüqing (Nüqing guilü ).2 The similarity of the closing formula used in both the funeral texts from Han tombs and this particular early Daoist scripture leads Seidel to postulate a kind of continuity between them characterized by the existence of a celestial code of law governing the relations with the netherworld administration. Presupposing this continuity, Seidel concludes that the notion of a celestially governed

The research for this article was supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. (Project no. CUHK4019/99H). The author is grateful to Kristofer Schipper and Franciscus Verellen for their advice during the writing of this article. 1 Anna Seidel, “Traces of Han Religion in Funeral Texts Found in Tombs,” in Akizuki Kan’ei , ed., Dôkyô to Shûkyô bunka (Tokyo: Hirakawa, 1987), 39-41. 2 Ibid., 41. The present Daoist Canon version of the Demon Statutes of Nüqing is found in HY 789. All scriptures in the Daoist Canon are cited here according to their number in the Combined Indices to the Authors and Titles of Books in Two Collections of Taoist Literature , Harvard-Yenching Institute Sinological Series, no. 25, edited by Weng Dujian (Beijing, 1925), preceded by the abbreviation “HY.” © Brill, Leiden, 2002 T2oung Pao LXXXVIII Also available online – www.brill.nl

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bureaucracy of the netherworld was brought from the religion of tomb ordinances of the Han to the “soteriological paradigm” of early Heavenly Master Daoism. Based upon the fundamental notion of a celestially governed bureaucracy of the netherworld, the two religious traditions are paradigmatically separated from the mediumnistic popular religion.3 Thus, as a descendant of the religion of tomb ordinances of the Han, early Heavenly Master Daoism also enforces a celestial code of law for the bureaucratic government in the netherworld, which “has cognizance of and power over humankind and the world of the dead.”4

3 Ibid., 46. 4 Ibid., 46. On this point, Seidel’s work has had considerable influence upon recent studies on both the religious beliefs of the pre-Han period and early Heavenly Master Daoism. See for instance Lothar von Falkenhausen, “Sources of Taoism: Reflections on Archaeological Indicators of Religious Change in Eastern Zhou China,” Taoist Resources 5.2 (1994): 1-12; Donald Harper, “Resurrection in Warring States Popular Religions,” Taoist Resources 5.2 (1994): 13-28. On the celestial bureaucracy in the Warring States, see Jeffrey K. Riegel, “Kou-mang and Ju-shou,” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 5 (1989-90): 55-79. On Heavenly Master attitudes towards the dead and their redemption, see Angelika Cedzich, “Ghosts and Demons, Law and Order: Grave Quelling Texts and Early Taoist Liturgy,” Taoist Resources 4.2 (1993): 23-35. Cf. A. Cedzich, “Das Ritual der Himmelsmeister im Spiegel früher Quellen－Übersetzung und Untersuchung des liturgischen Materials im dritten chuan des Teng-chen yin-chüeh,” Ph.D. dissertation, Julius-Maximilians-Universität, Würzburg, 1987. The scholarly discovery of the Chinese “religious commitment” to a bureaucratic understanding of the afterworld of the dead, corresponding to the royal administrative system, can be traced back to David Keightley’s essay on Shang ancestral religion in 1978. More recently, von Falkenhausen’s and Harper’s studies of pre-Han religions, making use of archaeological records of the late Eastern Zhou and Warring States periods such as the late Warring States Qin tomb at Fangmatan 放馬灘, Tianshui (Gansu), have shown that by no later than the end of the fourth century B.C. the ancient Chinese underworld already resembled a bureaucratic state. Both von Falkenhausen and Harper trace the “proto-Taoist” idea of a bureaucratically governed netherworld five centuries earlier than Seidel’s observation concerning the bureaucratic nature of the late Han popular religion of “tomb ordinances.” By expanding Seidel’s idea of a proto-Daoist celestially governed order of the netherworld, Angelika Cedzich points out the differences or even break between the religious beliefs of the popular religion of tomb ordinances of the Han and early Daoism. On the one hand, Cedzich, like Seidel, emphasizes the direct link between celestial administration and the netherworld bureaucracy underlined in both the afterworld beliefs of the tomb ordinances of the Han and early Daoism. On the other hand, she stresses that early Daoism stands in contrast to the religion of Han tomb ordinances because it administers a different soteriological paradigm of the dead based on a more legalistic and bureaucratic “liturgical framework.” Rather than stressing the separation to be enforced between the living and the dead in all late Han funeral texts, early Daoism promises salvation for the vengeful demons of the dead by means of ritual merit.

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