250 neil schmid
of their forebears. Although chengfu differed from Buddhist karma in
the scope of its responsibility, the profound persistence of a deeply
ingrained concern for family, community, and state transfigured the
discourses of karma in Chinese Buddhism into beliefs and cultic prac-
tices of karma that brought to the forefront the creation and transfer-
ence of merit. Postmortem judgment in underworld realms provided
the scaffolding on which an elaborate bureaucratic system of karmic
assessment and punishment, integrating Buddhist notions of hell, was
built in the medieval period.^26
The keen interest in the body and maintaining its integrity, which
permeated Chinese mortuary rites and cultic practices and which pro-
vided an alternative postmortem existence to the bleak netherworld,
would inform Buddhist understanding of the afterlife in radical ways.
In stark contradiction to canonical Buddhist doctrines, the possibility
of a permanent self or soul shen was fundamental to Buddhism in
China.^27 Shangqing Daoism appealed to Buddhist ideas of rebirth to
support the notion of death as reincarnation consonant with deliver-
ance from the corpse shijie.^28 Drawing on previous Chinese concepts
of immortality, Shangqing in this sense offers a specialized mode of
rebirth, while Lingbao, adapting Buddhist notions of samsaric reincar-
nations, presents a generalized system of rebirth.^29 Buddhism in China
readapts the cosmological model of the six paths of rebirth liudao
along this fundamental divide. By the Tang period, the sixth path
of heavenly rebirth tiandao becomes commonly conflated with
rebirth into paradisiacal realms (inclusive of Pure Lands), central to
which is the possibility of the transformation of the adept into a bud-
dha chengfo with an incorruptible body.^30
(^26) See the extensive work of Stephen Teiser 1986, 1988a, 1988b, 1994, 1996 on the
evolution of Buddhist netherworlds and their implications for the development of
Chinese religions. 27
For a philosophical articulation, see Huiyuan’s “On the Indestructibility of the
Soul” Shen bu mie lun discussed in Liebenthal (1952). For early Chinese
conceptualizations of the Buddha in terms of longevity and the afterlife, see Wu 1986.
(^28) Cedzich 2001, 54–55.
(^29) Bokenkamp 2007, 163, distinguishes two basic modes of rebirth in medieval Dao-
ism. “What I am characterizing here as ‘generalized rebirth’ supposes an unchanging
system in which all individual deeds are directly and causally linked to future states
of being.... What I characterize as ‘specialized rebirth’ lacks such a system for all
beings. Instead, it is a sort of rebirth into heavens or other future states of being that
is granted, usually by deities, as a special reward for select individuals who earn it.” 30
Schmid 2008. For examples in Dunhuang Buddhist literature where lay practitio-
ners are granted buddha bodies by deities, see Schmid Draft manuscript.