20. CONCEPTS OF THE NETHERWORLD AND
MODIFICATIONS IN THE CHINESE ARTICULATION
OF KARMA
Neil SchmidIntroduction
Scholars have typically characterized the historical development of
the Chinese netherworld as bifurcated by the arrival of Buddhism in
China. Previous to Buddhism, notions of the Chinese afterlife were
vaguely articulated and confused, and Buddhism’s arrival provided
the sophisticated ideas to order a variety of beliefs and practices into
a more structured unity. This narrative, however, prioritizes changes
in doctrines and their textual articulations while deemphasizing how
practices, Buddhist or otherwise, served ongoing social and familial
needs. The introduction of Buddhism did indeed furnish new ideas
of the death, postmortem destinations, and the body, but these con-
cepts largely took on their significance insofar as they dealt with the
concerns of the living.^1 What follows is a brief survey of the afterlife
in ancient China illustrating the concerns of the living, which in turn
allows us to chart how Buddhism furnished additional strategies to
navigate indigenous social and conceptual anxieties of death and the
beyond.
Concepts of the Netherworld in Early China
What is striking about early notions of the afterlife in ancient China
is that the sources of information—material, textual, and ritual—are
consistently vague. Detailed articulations of what death is, what hap-
pens to the body, and where the deceased go are not clearly elaborated.
Rather, the import of death, mortuary rituals, and the afterlife lies,
above all, in the maintenance of kinship relations while ensuring that
(^1) For a discussion of encounter paradigms and how they shape academic under-
standing of Buddhism, see Sharf 2002a, Orzech 2006b, and Bokenkamp 2007, among
others.