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SEVEN ALLOTMENT AND DEATH IN EARLY CHINA Mark Csikszentmihalyi Different kinds of deaths resonate in different ways. Questions such as “Why did a person die?” often arise when a death is unusual—accidental, earlier than usual, or particularly prolonged or painful. Behind these questions is an implication or expectation that there is a “typical” death: a normal life span and process of dying. A grieving person might ask about divergences from this norm. What is the reason that some people have usual deaths and others are denied them? Is it a matter of luck, a plan, or a function of the way the people lived their lives? In English, the term “allotment” connotes the process of dividing into lots and comes from the meaning of “lot” as an object used to determine a person’s share or portion—similar to when we “draw straws” to see who has to take on a particularly dangerous or unpleasant task. The word “allotment” is used to talk about life span, or the share of time that is apportioned to a person. As in the expression “casting lots,” the random element introduced by shaking or hiding a set of lots is central to many explanations of differential life spans. The metaphor implies that the length of each person’s life is usually determined by external forces, and if he or she dies young, it is just bad luck. While there is usually no single explanation for complex cultural phenomena , one function of the idea of allotments may be therapeutic. It allows the question “Why did a person die?” to remain fundamentally unresolved (because the person’s lot is determined arbitrarily) while at the same time ruling out certain troubling answers (because the random process of casting determined the person’s lot, other types of causation are ruled out). In other 177 178 MARK CSIKSZENTMIHALYI words, the idea that a person’s death is a matter of “blind fate” is not trivial, because it denies the possibility that the unusual death was a punishment or otherwise a reflection of behavior. In ancient China, the term ming 命 played a role somewhat analogous to that of “lot.”1 At the popular level, the former word may have performed the therapeutic function outlined above, but it also was something thought to have been affected by the actions of the living. In pre-imperial China, a popular view was that one’s lot was arbitrarily determined in the celestial bureaucracy, but it also was possible for one to petition and sacrifice so as to affect one’s own or another person’s time of death. By contrast, in the early Confucian picture, views of contingency were more complex. When the Kongzi of the Analects (Lunyu 論語) mourns the “short allotment” of his favorite disciple, there is no indication that this lot could be changed. This essay will contrast the popular view of life span as an initially arbitrary lot that may be affected through practice to two related views in the Analects that comment on death based on rather different cosmological premises. In so doing, it will argue that these different views of death entail alternative views of the cosmos. THE “MANAGER OF ALLOTMENTS” AND POPULAR NOTIONS OF ALLOTMENT The “Manager of Allotments” (Siming 司命) was a deity concerned with life span who was the object of sacrifice as early as the fourth century B.C.E. Sacrifices to the Manager of Allotments, sometimes literally to his apotropaic likeness, were carried out by individuals, and he was also the object of official state sacrifice and liturgical performances. There is circumstantial evidence from the late Warring States period, and direct evidence in the Early Empire, that one of the ends of such sacrifice was influencing the registers that he managed, registers that kept track of people’s life spans. The earliest reference to the deity Siming is from a late Spring and Autumn period bronze inscription on a vessel known as the Huanzi Meng Jiang 洹子孟姜 hu 壺 vessel. The inscription commemorates the offering of jade rings, a pair of hu vessels, and eight ding 鼎 vessels to a “great” (da 大) “Manager of Allotments.”2 Archaeologically discovered texts—such as the Chu bamboo slips discovered at Tianxingguan 天星觀 and Baoshan 包山—show that the Manager of Allotments was seen as a powerful deity in the fourth century B.C.E. The former set of slips mentions two sacrifices to him, once of a sheep and once of a “sacrificial animal.” At Tianxingguan, the deity is paired with...

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