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chapter 1 Envisioning the Dead The living and the dead form a single moral community, divided by visibility and frequency of contact perhaps, but not by obligation, affection, emotion, or even aesthetic taste. —Robert Campany, Strange Writing One of the most intimate descriptions of the underworld abode of the dead in all of Chinese letters is to be found among the visionary transcripts ofYang Xi (330–86?), as assembled and annotated by Tao Hongjing . In book 5 of his Declarations of the Perfected (Zheng’gao), Tao has transcribed for us the revelations Yang received, both from his celestial informants and by other, unknown means, concerning the six palaces of Mount Luofeng, or Fengdu, as the administrative center of the dead was known.1 Located on and under a massive mountain in the far north, the direction of winter, darkness, and seasonal death according to five-phase thought, the six palaces of Fengdu are all under the control of the Northern Thearch.2 Under his imperial oversight are a number of functionaries , men of remote as well as recent memory, who enjoy titles and func33 1. For previous descriptions of Fengdu that inform this one at many points, see Peter S. Nickerson, “Taoism, Death, and Bureaucracy in Early Medieval China” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996), esp. 537–612; Sandrine Chenivesse, Le Mont Fengdu: Lieu saint Taoïste émergé de la géographie de l’au-delà (Paris: École Pratique des Hautes Études, 1995); and Matsumura Takumi, “ShinkÖ ni mieru RahÖdo kikai setsu,” in RikuchÖ dÖkyÖ no kenkyÜ, ed. Yoshikawa Tadao (Tokyo: ShunjÜsha, 1998), 167–88. 2. According to the cosmology fully developed by the Han dynasty, all existence was composed of and governed by five phases that had the following major associations: wood (east, green, spring); fire (south, red, summer); metal (west, white, autumn); water (north, black, winter); and earth (center, yellow). For more on the system and its importance in Daoism, see Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 15–20. tions similar to those they held in the sunlit world. Indeed, when Yang’s informants do not reveal the offices to which underworld titles correspond , Tao Hongjing sometimes does. Much of the administrative work of Fengdu seems to consist of judging new arrivals and assigning them to appropriate positions in the teeming land of the dead. We hear, of course, only of the elite. ForYang, as for Dante, the common folk are invisible. Presumably they are subject to the administration that forms the sole concern of Yang’s informants. Like Dante, too,Yang is quite aware of the political and social stakes involved when someone is assigned to this or that position in the underworld. Placement might be higher or lower than the rank that person achieved in life. Postmortem promotions and demotions, too, are possible. Yang differs from Dante, however, in that, given Chinese ideas of clan responsibility and ancestor cult, the living prove to be even more closely implicated in the fates of the dead than were the citizens of fourteenthcentury Italy. Then, too, Yang’s material was not meant to be simply allegorical . He presents his revealed material as factual, and Tao Hongjing takes the information Yang provides as an accurate record of the underworld . In his annotations he compares what Yang reports with earlier revelations, allowing us to trace to some extent the tradition within which Yang worked. That tradition, composed of reports on the underworld—by ghosts, usually family members of the person receiving the revelations, or by those who had died and somehow been resuscitated—is known to us from as early as the fourth century bce.3 Because such reports from the underworld were, by their nature, oral and not the sort of anecdote regularly recorded for posterity, we have no way of judging just how widespread or early the phenomenon might have been. The documentary record that does survive suggests that from the third century ce on, either the number of returnees increased dramatically or the impulse to record and circulate such stories became much stronger.4 As we saw in the introduction, the tendency among modern scholars is to attribute this apparent new interest in the structure and denizens of the underworld to the influence of Buddhism and the consequent changes in attitudes toward the dead. As we shall see, Yang Xi’s account of Fengdu does not easily support this hypothesis. 34 Envisioning the Dead 3. Donald Harper, “Resurrection in Warring States Popular Religion,” Taoist Resources 5...

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