Abstract
According to David Keightley, “One striking feature of the early Chinese written record is its view of death as unproblematic. Death was simply not the issue it was for the ancient Mesopotamians or the ancient Greeks.”1 Indeed, in early China we do not have the kind of complex eschatology and soteriology of the religions of the ancient Near East nor the kind of existential attention to death that we see in epics like Gilgamesh and The Odyssey. Having said that, to the extent that the early Chinese considered life as good and death as something that extinguishes not only the continuation of life but also the enjoyment of goods that life brings, we can say that death for the early Chinese, while not the existential aporia that it was for the cultures of the ancient Near East, was nevertheless a question that engendered competing visions of the afterlife, appropriate rituals and emotional responses for its observation, and sophisticated theories about the nature and metaphysics of death.
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Notes
David N. Keightley, “Early Civilization in China: Reflections on How It Became Chinese,” in Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization, ed. by Paul S. Ropp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 33.
I should note at the beginning of this chapter that I am not suggesting that there was one monolithic model of death or the afterlife in ancient China but merely trying to locate the ideas of the Zhuangzi within the intellectual context of pre-Han China, discerning where the authors may have diverged from contemporary understandings of death and the afterlife. On this point, see Mark Csikszentmihalyi, ed. and trans., Readings in Han Chinese Thought (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006, 140–145.
Michael Loewe, Faith, Myth and Reason in Han China (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 25.
See David N. Keightley, Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
See also Guo Moruo 郭沫若 and Hu Houxuan 胡厚宣, eds., Jiaguwen heji 甲骨文合集 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1978–1982).
See D. C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching, eds., A Concordance to the Fa yan and Tai xuan jing 法言逐字索引太玄經逐字索引, ICS Series (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1995).
James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics, Volume V: The Ch’un Ts’ew with the Tso Chuen (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1961), 329. All of the translations from the Zuozhuan are mine, though I will list the corresponding page numbers in the Legge translation.
This is unlike the conception of psuchê in classical Greece, particularly in pre-Socratic philosophical works and Homeric poems, where the presence of a soul does not depend in any way on the favor of the gods. It would be odd indeed to have someone comment that the gods are harming Achilles’ soul or that Zeus is taking it away. Although by the end of fifth century the soul comes to be identified more and more with the moral and intellectual qualities of a person, there is still no connection between the character of a person, her soul, and the wishes of the gods in ancient Greece. See Jan Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
Mu-chou Poo, In Search of Personal Welfare: A View of Ancient Chinese Religion (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998), 64.
Angus Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), 328.
John S. Major, Sarah A. Queen, Andrew Seth Meyer, and Harold Roth, trans. and eds., The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Early China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 296.
Yu Ying-shih argues that we can interpret the T-shaped painted banner from Tomb 1 at Mawangdui containing the body of Lady Dai 軚 as a visual chronicle of the fu ritual. See his “ ‘O, Soul, Come Back!’” 365–369. Cf. Michael Loewe, Ways to Paradise: The Chinese Quest for Immortality (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979), 17–59.
See Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Ancestors and Anxiety: Daoism and the Birth of Rebirth in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 8; “Ancient Chinese mortuary cults, with their lavish and painstaking care of the dead, apparently left no detailed records explaining why the Chinese did such things.”
D. C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching eds., A Concordance to the Shuoyuan 說苑逐字索引, ICS Series (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1992), 18.31/ 160/12–14.
Mu-chou Poo, “Ideas concerning Death and Burial in Pre-Han and Han China,” Asia Major 3.2 (1990), 33.
Gu Yanwu, Rizhilu jishi 知隻釋 (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1994), 1079.
See Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 2: Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Magisteries of Gold and Immortality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 98. Hu Shih, though not as definitive as Needham, also suggested that the ancient Chinese did not have a proper conception of the afterworld until the arrival of Buddhism. See his “The Indianization of China: A Case Study in Cultural Borrowing,” in Independence, Convergence, and Borrowing in Institutions, Thought, and Art, Harvard Tercentenary Publications (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 224–225.
David Hawkes, trans., The Songs of the South: An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 224.
For a philosophical analysis of the deprivation account of death, see Thomas Nagel, “Death,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–10.
John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegal, trans., The Annals of Lu Buwei: A Complete Translation and Study (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 227.
Book/page/line references from the Analects are from D. C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching, eds., A Concordance to the Lunyu 論語逐字索引, ICS Series (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1995).
Guolong Lai suggests that by the beginning of the Han, death was imagined as a “journey during which travelers required protection” largely as a result of the expansion of geographical knowledge of the outside world. I would argue that even in this travel model, the purpose of outfitting the corpse for postmortem travel would be to domesticate the journey so that a “safe trip” could ensue. See Guolong Lai, “Death and the Otherworldly Journey in Early China as Seen through Tomb Texts, Travel Paraphenalia, and Road Rituals,” Asia Major 18.1 (2005), 1–44.
For more on the concept of death as annihilation, see Fred Feldman, “The Termination Thesis,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 24 (2000), 98–115.
Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus,” in The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers: The Complete Extant Writings of Epicurus, Epictetus, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, ed. by Whitney J. Oates (New York: The Modern Library, 1949), 30–31.
On the existence requirement, see Jeff McMahan, “Death and the Value of Life,” Ethics 99.1 (1988), 32–61.
D.C. Lau and Chen Fong Ching, eds., A Concordance to the Xunzi 荀子逐字索引, ICS series (Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1996).
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© 2014 Jung H. Lee
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Lee, J.H. (2014). The Great Returning: Death and Transformation in the Zhuangzi . In: The Ethical Foundations of Early Daoism. Palgrave Macmillan’s Content and Context in Theological Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137384867_6
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