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Two: Ascend to Heaven or Stay in the Tomb?: Paintings in Mawangdui Tomb 1 and the Virtual Ritual of Revival in Second-Century B.C.E. China
- State University of New York Press
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TWO ASCEND TO HEAVEN OR STAY IN THE TOMB? Paintings in Mawangdui Tomb 1 and the Virtual Ritual of Revival in Second-Century B.C.E. China Eugene Y. Wang Archaeological discoveries constantly fuel historical revisionism. The standard expositions of death culture in ancient China could no longer remain the same after the excavation of the second-century B.C.E. tombs at Mawangdui in the early 1970s.1 The astounding riches of the well-preserved burial site showcase, with material integrity and visual vivacity, an entire world of funerary culture to which early textual accounts provide only partial verbal testimonials. Not only does the cache enrich our knowledge of death in ancient China; it may also shake it up. The shake-up, however, has taken longer than expected—more than three decades and still counting. The delayed revelation is not for lack of information; on the contrary, it is the embarrassment of riches. One would think that the palpable immediacy of the artifacts would tell a straightforward story, but it does not. The artifacts in fact appear to manifest different and often seemingly conflicting impulses. Tomb 1, the burial of Marquise of Dai (died after 176 B.C.E.) says it all. The represented afterlife world exists—if divided by modes of representation —in two broad kinds of media, three-dimensional artifacts and painted surfaces; in other words, a tangible material world and a virtual space. The artifacts—household goods, furniture, entertainment pieces, and wooden statues of servants—largely spell out a self-sufficient subterraneous household 37 38 EUGENE Y. WANG (fig. 1); the painted surfaces, comprising lacquer-painted coffin panels (fig. 2) and a T-shaped pictorial banner (fig. 3), appear to chart a flight itinerary for the deceased’s soul in the netherworld, heading for the proverbial Mount Kunlun and, ultimately, heaven. The two sets of representations thus send conflicting and confusing messages to the tomb occupant, nudging her in different directions. The household setting assures her of the safe haven of this well-furnished home; the paintings beckon her to depart for greener pastures. Even for the departure scenario alone, there are conflicting directives: the painting on the coffin ushers her to the immortal Mount Kunlun, assumed to be somewhere in the west; the painted banner appears to point her to the empyrean above. To stay or to go, and whereto—those are the questions.2 The problem has been met with different proposed solutions. Some regard the tomb as a “polycentric” space where every possible accommodation for the deceased was made on different, and even conflicting, premises of the afterlife. If death entails divergent postmortem scenarios, so the theory goes, the living provided for them all.3 Others attribute the problem to our common subscription to the dubious premise of the soul’s ascent to heaven. They argue that this postmortem flight is a later Chinese aspiration, a notion that had not yet taken hold of the imagination of the common folk in the middle of the second-century B.C.E.4 Does not the shamanistic voice in the near-contemporary soul-summoning ritual urge the wandering soul to “climb not to the heaven above. For tigers and leopards guard the gates, with jaws ever ready to rend up mortal men”?5 Is not the painted banner part of—or related to—the soul-summoning ritual? If so, it surely leads the roaming soul back into the subterraneous depth of the grave for the eternal hereafter.6 So, the issue at stake is not just about the tomb furnishings per se; it is also our understanding of the Chinese view of death and its afterlife in the second-century B.C.E., a crucial transitional period. Do the paintings guide the soul to heaven? Or is there something wrong with the formulation of this question? The Mawangdui tomb registers the complicated dynamics of an image/ text problem. The tomb presents a deliberate visual program that defies any easy discursive formulation and conceptualization. We find ourselves caught in a hermeneutical circle of sorts. We want the tomb to speak for itself and extricate a new story out of it. However, our extrapolation is mired in verbal formulation. Each visual image leads to varied glossings from a variety of textual sources, none intended for this particular context. Our choice of a particular glossing of the image, which eventually results in a patchwork of citations,7 depends on a large picture we form at the outset in...