246 neil schmid
the living and the dead inhabit separate realms.^2 The “great boundary”
daxian between this world and beyond demarcates the afterlife,
which consisted of multiple options, none of which were mutually
exclusive.^3 Concerns about how that boundary was negotiated were of
paramount interest.^4
Our earliest written sources of information, inscriptions from Yel-
low River valley oracle bone and bronzes, offer few specifics in the
postmortem lives of the departed.^5 Within each realm and across their
divide, hierarchies of status and kinship configured power. Changes in
mortuary practices reflect changes in social structures.^6 Scholars once
held that the Shang-period organization of ancestral hierarchical power
was a result of mapping the models of this world onto that of the dead.
However, it is now generally accepted that the early Chinese polity
found organization and legitimacy in the contractual and bureaucratic
dynamics of the depersonalized yet generationally based hierarchy of
the afterlife.^7 Kinship concerns in early in Chinese religious beliefs and
the power of the dead would remain a common determinative thread
shaping the adaptation of Buddhist concepts of the afterlife.
The earliest written reference to a “netherworld” is of the Yellow
Springs, Huangquan , the watery underworld of the dead, in a
story recorded under the year 722 B.C.E. in the Zuozhuan. In the
story, Duke Zhuang of Qing, betrayed by his mother, swore at her
and said they would not meet until after death in the Yellow Springs.^8
(^2) A fundamental idea, codified in Confucius’ Lunyu (6:20). On the
separation of the living and the dead in early China, see Lewis 2006, 125 and 370,
n. 213, for a full bibliography. 3
Wu Hung 1994. On the nonexclusivity of afterlife options, see Loewe 1982, 114.
(^4) Nickerson 2006 surveys how mortuary rites in the late Warring States, Han, and
early medieval period increasingly formulated these concerns through bureaucratic
means. 5
For a survey of materials related to ancestor worship in the Neolithic period, see
Li 2000. 6
For Neolithic developments in mortuary practices reflecting social changes, see
Li 2000. 7
Keightley 1998.
(^8) For a discussion of the Yellow Springs and its place in early mythology, see Allan
1991, 29–30, who also identifies it with the Ruo River found in earlier Shang myth,
64–67. The Yellow Emperor, Huangdi , was originally the stygian equivalent of
his celestial counterpart, Shangdi. Huangdi’s later associations both with the
cult of immortality and with Mt. Kunlun in the west, the abode of the Queen
Mother of West , possessor of the elixir of immortality, point to growing con-
cerns about the body and corporeal soteriologies.