Mortality in Traditional Chinese Thought: Mortality in Traditional Chinese Thought

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Death is universal, the common fate of all human beings. Yet while all people die and the mortal condition is a foundational feature of human experience, these mere brute facts can elide the rich variety of responses to death found among individuals and societies. In responses to mortality we can see the complexity and creativity of human beings. The effort to understand death and render it manageable generates a diverse range of approaches to mortality that register what people and societies prize, as well as what they fear. The chapters in this volume consider the phenomenon of death from a variety of disciplines and perspectives and capture some of the most important and distinctive ways people in traditional China understood and responded to death. As the historian David N. Keightley has argued, death in traditional China was not the sort of problem it was in the early West.1 We do not find, for example, grand narratives of tragic heroes who realize who they really are and manifest their highest virtue in the poignant moment when they meet a violent and inevitable end. We do not find explanations of how death first entered or disrupted an earlier, happier state of the world, one in which mortality had no place or meaning. In early China, death tends to be regarded as less extraordinary and more acceptable as a natural feature of life. We do not find philosophical sentiments that readily lend themselves to the anguished existentialist formulations of mortality characteristic of certain trends in more recent Western philosophy. Even when we do discover the familiar in early Chinese responses to death, such as intimations of an afterlife in which some form of the personal self survives death to enjoy a continued existence, it is far from clear how deeply the apparent affinities reach. These different and distinctive features of Chinese responses to death make the study of Chinese views important not only for what they reveal about Chinese culture but also for what they imply for more general theories or accounts of human responses to mortality. What we do find in traditional Chinese attitudes toward and responses to death is difficult to represent in any summary fashion; this difficulty reflects not only the diverse media and forms of expression evident in Chinese culture but also the great variety of beliefs, attitudes, and practices 1 2 MORTALITY IN TRADITIONAL CHINESE THOUGHT found throughout the Chinese tradition. As the essays gathered here amply demonstrate, there are multiple understandings of death operating in and influencing all cultural forms in traditional China. These understandings register in diverse contexts and different forms, appearing in the physical spaces and artistic ornaments of the tomb, in ritual performances aimed at answering and addressing the sorrows of loss, in military documents that recognize war’s cost even as they counsel and guide those who would make war, and in religious and philosophical efforts to limn the conditions under which a life may flourish while simultaneously attending to the inevitability of that life’s end. The works in this volume traverse these large and unexplored territories in an effort to assay the distinctive practices and strategies used in traditional China to engage in the dramatic and familiar human effort to tame death, to render it—at least to some degree—subject to human management and understanding. Given their diversity in themes, media, theories, expressions, and practices, we forego an attempt to create any singular theoretical frame in this volume. We aim instead simply to sketch the remarkable range and richness of Chinese responses to mortality, allowing the chapters to illustrate the distinctive features and qualities of the Chinese tradition. While this study targets death as the locus of attention, it must be acknowledged that, as the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi explicitly avers, life and death form a “single strand.” To investigate one end of this thread naturally leads one to discover and attend to the other. As a result, the strategies for managing and responding to death described in this volume are at once about life as well. Contemplating these essays, we may begin to appreciate the degree to which death can serve as a uniquely powerful lens for bringing into focus the values that structured lived experience in traditional China. When we survey phenomena as diverse as early China’s tomb culture or later Chinese Buddhist philosophical treatments of mortality, we are invited to consider just what sort of life and values these strategies illuminate, both directly as well...