death and otherwordly journey guolong lai Death and the Otherworldly Journey in Early China as Seen through Tomb Texts, Travel Paraphernalia, and Road Rituals .he geography of the afterlife altered significantly during the tran- T sition from the Warring States (ca. 480–221 bc) period to the uni- fied empires of Qin (221–207 bc) and Western Han (206 bc–9 ad). One such alteration involved the abode of the dead, with resulting no- tions about an otherworldly journey. In recent years, bamboo and silk manuscripts, paintings, sculpture, and other artifacts excavated in south China have provided evidence for this. Since the conditions for pres- ervation in southern China are better than in the north, excavations in the Chu cultural sphere of the Warring States period, including present- day Hunan, Hubei, southern Henan, and Anhui provinces, provide us with a diachronic section of continuing cultural deposits rarely seen in other regions. Chu and its adjacent areas, at times viewed as barbaric, exotic, and decadent, were in fact quite influential in the development of Chinese concepts of cosmology and the afterlife. Images, texts, and objects excavated from tombs in this region show us that burial rites furnished a tomb with proper travel outfits. Death was imagined by con- temporaries as a journey during which travelers required protection. It is also evident, from both the ritual canons and excavated manuscripts, that funerary rites incorporated road rituals, the purpose of which was to ward off evil influences on this postmortem passage. The notion of otherworldly journeys has been the subject of sev- eral recent scholarly treatises and academic conferences.1 Related This article was first presented at a panel of the Fifty-sixth Annual Meeting of the Associa- tion for Asian Studies, San Diego, California, March 4–7, 2004. I would like to thank Lothar von Falkenhausen, Suzanne E. Cahill, Edward L. Davis, Mark E. Lewis, Yuri Pines, and Erica Brindley for their stimulating discussions. I am also grateful to the two anonymous readers for their criticisms and suggestions, and the editors of Asia Major, John Kieschnick and Howard L. Goodman, for their assistance and guidance. I am responsible for any errors. Funding for this project was partly provided by the University of Florida Office of Research and Graduate Programs through the Fine Arts Scholarship Enhancement Award Fund. 1 Carol Zaleski, Otherworld Journey: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (New York and Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1987); I. P. Couliano, Out of the World: 1 guolong lai phenomena have also been discussed by scholars of early and medi- eval Chinese literature.2 But the origins of this idea and its early de- velopment have not yet been fully explored. In what follows, I utilize archeological finds, both texts and objects, to explore the religious di- mensions of these journeys. First I briefly discuss the changing abode of the departed, and the temporal and spatial conceptions related to travel in early China. The clear distinction between the tame and the wild worlds motivated the construction of the tomb as a waystation — a liminal place for preparing and outfitting the departed soul. Then I discuss both the tomb objects that can be termed travel paraphernalia and funerary rites that were, in some sense, road rituals. This vision of the afterlife as an otherworldly journey resulted from an expansion of geographical knowledge of the outside world and from new and much- discussed models of cosmology during the Warring States period. The afterlife and its journey became a source for later literary, poetic, and figural representations. BEYOND THE TOMB: THE NEW ABODE OF THE WAR DEAD The cult of the dead has a long history, starting at least from the Neolithic period in China. During the Shang (ca. 1500–ca. 1050 bc) and Western Zhou (ca. 1050–770 bc) dynasties, the dead, at least those who were members of the royal families and the nobility, were gener- ally thought to reside underground in family cemeteries. It seems that later on they were thought to reside in the Yellow Spring, or huangquan ”,႓ੈ, as suggested in a Zuozhuan ؐႚʳstory,3 or in the “underground Otherworldly Journeys from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein (Boston and London: Shambhala, 1991); John J. Collins and Michael Fishbane, eds., Death, Ecstasy and Other Worldly Journeys (Albany: State University of New York P., 1995). 2 Robert Ford Campany, “Return-from-Death Narratives in Early Medieval China,” Journal of Chinese Religions 18 (1990), pp. 91–125; idem, “To Hell and Back: Death, Near-Death, and Other Worldly Journeys in Early Medieval China,” in Collins and Fishbane, Death, Ecstasy, pp. 343–60. David Hawkes and David Knechtges have discussed the literary conventions of spirit journeys in the Chuci and in the rhapsodies of the Han; see David Hawkes, “The Quest of the Goddess,” in Cyril Birch, ed., Studies in Chinese Literary Genres (Berkeley: U. California P., 1974), pp. 42–68; David R. Knechtges, “A Journey to Morality: Chang Heng’s The Rhap- sody on Pondering the Mystery,” in Chan Ping-leung et al., eds., Essays in Commemoration of the Golden Jubilee of the Fung Ping Shan Library (1932–1982): Studies in Chinese Librarian- ship, Literature, Language, History and Arts (Hong Kong: The Fung Ping Shan Library of the University of Hong Kong, 1982), pp. 162–82. 3 The story of lord Yin ឆֆʳmeeting his estranged mother in an underground tunnel is in -୺, annot., Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu ਞટؐႚࣹ (Beijing: Zhong܄Zuozhuan; see Yang Bojun ᄘ hua, 1981; hereafter, CQZ Z ), pp. 14–15. See also Xiao Fudeng ᘕ壂࿆, Xian Qin Liang Han .৸უ൶଺ (Taipei: Wenjin, 1990), ppט٣఻ࠟዧଭ੺֗壀 mingjie ji shenxian sixiang tanyuan 16–23; Mu-Chou Poo, In Search of Personal Welfare: A View of Ancient Chinese Religion (Al- 2 death and otherworldly journey as mentioned in bronze inscriptions.4 Family ties were as important in the afterlife as in life. The fact that the family of the diseased willingly invested so much energy and resources in the disposal of the dead body is a good indication of the great religious power the dead possessed. Moreover, the souls of the ancestors were thought, as the oracle bone and bronze inscriptions testify, to ascend and to descend ℉૾ from the place of the High God (disuo ০ࢬ, or ০ݪ) and bring blessings to their descendants below. Thus, clearly there existed the idea of a vertical axis between the place of the High God and the human realm (and by extension, the Yellow Spring and the “underground”), through which the royal ances- tors communicated with their offspring. Their passage between Heaven and Earth is technically also a journey, but this journey differs signifi- cantly from the otherworldly journey that I plan to explore in the fol- lowing pages. First, in the Shang and early-Zhou cases, the protagonist in the journey was either one of the venerated and almighty ancestors or a religious specialist (such as a spirit medium),5 while in the other- worldly journey in the Warring States period, the protagonist was, as Robert Ford Campany has explained, “an ordinary guy,” who “could be anybody.”6 The ordinariness of the protagonist brings to light a de- fining characteristic of the everyday religion that emerged during the Warring States period. The second difference between these two types of journeys is the shift in the orientation of the axis from a vertical one to an East–West horizontal one. The idea of a “journey to the west (or northwest)” in the afterlife became prevalent during the Warring States. Along with this change was the relocation of postmortem paradises to this world. The mythical places were located at the margins of the universe, such as Mount Kunlun ࣒ࠗ՞ in the west and the Penglai ᓒဒ archipelago in the east. They were parts of the imagination about the afterlife. And after the middle of the Western Han, transcendental paradises, such bany: State University of New York P., 1998), pp. 62–68; Laurence G. Thompson, “On the Prehistory of Hell in China,” Journal of Chinese Religions 17 (1989), pp. 27–41. ײ ࠸ቓᤩ֮, in Guwenzi yanjiuګZhang Zhenglang ്ਙ≅, “Aichengshu ding shiwen” ঩ 4 ઔߒ 5 (1981), collected in Zhang Zhenglang, Zhang Zhenglang wenshi lunji ്ਙ≅֮׾ᓵڗ֮ ႃ (Beijing: Zhong hua, 2004), pp. 581–86; Hayashi Minao, “Concerning the Inscription ‘May Sons and Grandsons Eternally Use This [Vessel],’” Artibus Asiae 53.1–2 (1993), pp. 51–57. 5 K. C. Chang, “The Animal in Shang and Chou Bronze Art,” H J AS 41.2 (1981), pp. 527– 54; idem, Art, Myth, and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1983), pp. 44–55. 6 Campany, “To Hell and Back,” p. 343. 3 guolong lai as the realm of the Queen Mother of the West, 7 Mount Tai ௠՞,8 and other local, sacred gathering places of celestials and immortals,9 be- came the destinations to which the departed souls were supposed to make their otherworldly journey.10 The picture of the afterlife during the crucial six centuries between the early Warring States and the middle of the Western Han is, however, still far from clear. Various theories have been proposed concerning the abode of the dead.11 The dominant one is that “[b]efore the idea of a transcendent paradise had been fully developed, a happy conclu- sion to the soul’s story might simply be to return to its homeland,”12 and the tomb is considered as the “happy home,” or the underground “permanent home,” of the deceased.13 Certainly, as many scholars have pointed out, the compartmentalization of mortuary space does evoke the organization of a domestic dwelling, for instance, the famous early- Warring States tomb of marquis Yi of Zeng at Suizhou, Hubei, with its four compartments resembling the ruler’s private quarters, ceremo- nial court, armory, and harem.14 Furthermore, replicas of buildings, servants and domestic animals, rice fields, and even toilets, in later Eastern Han tombs give the impression that the tomb was designed to copy the domestic house.