IN Description

Purposes, Means and Convictions

in Daoism

A Berlin Symposium

Edited by

Florian C. Reiter

2007

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Foreword VII

I. Historical and Ritual Traditions I

ANoRpes FnLorrelr-pR

General Reflections on Religious Purposes, Means, and Convictions. ................ 3

Tpnny Kr-eenaRN

Daoism in the Third Centurv. 1l

JoHN Lecpnwpy

The Old Lord's Scripture for the Chanting of the Commandments. 29

Lru Yr

Myth and History. The Contribution of Six Dynasties Daoism to the

Formation of the Image of the Heavenly Master Zhang Daoling. 57

Grr Rez

Imperial Efficacy: Debates on Imperial Ritual in Early Medieval China

and the Emergence of Daoist Ritual Schemata 83

II. Varieties of Relisious Activities and Functions......... 111

Tnvroruy BenRprr

Daoism in Action? The Princess-Nuns of the High Tang Period. 113

SrepHsN R. BoTpNKAMP

What Daoist Body?...... 131

Lr GeNc

The Subtlety of Body Divinities and their Fortification. A Discussion of the

Basis for Going beyond Life and Death in the Daoist Philosophy of Life. 151

Fr-oRrex C. Rsnpn

The Management of Nature: Convictions and Means in Daoist Thunder

Magic (Daojiao leifa). 183

I VI CoNrnNrs

Lr Yuaxcuo

The Development of Daoist Thunder Magic and its Background in the

Southern Song Period. 201

Vor-r

Chinese Literati and Daoist Sacred Space. A Nineteenth Century Inscription

in Pujiang County (Sichuan Province) .. 221

WaNc ZoNcvu

The Relationship between Quanzhen Daoism and Local Cults. 231

Abbreviations......... 251

Index 253

List of Contributors........... 257 What Daoist Bodv?

Srp,psEN R. BoTpNKAMP

"Little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do, you lcnow," said Alice. "I

don't believe it," said the Pigeon, "bLtt f they do, why then they're a kind of

serpent that's all I can say!"

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

When one opens a text on the history of Greek philosophy, one learns of Homeric

notions of the self and the make-up of the human body, then of those of the pre-

Socratics, of the sources of Aristotle's "three souls," and the like. The mystery

religions of early Greece are studied alongside its philosophy. Things are very

different when one comes to read about early Chinese philosophy. Benjamin

Schwartz' The World of Thought in Ancient China, to take but one notable example

from the survey genre, does not contain the words "self' or "soul" or "body" (nor

the Chinese words for these concepts) in its glossary at all.r

Meanwhile, in modern studies of Daoism, bbdies are everywhere. Like so many

forensic pathologists, scholars of Daoism lay open to our view organs, tissue,

humors, and fluids; souls, spirits, and essences; not to mention enticing descriptions

of bodies that can fly, divide, transform, or disappear. In this regard, a novice reader

in the history of Chinese thought could not be blamed for coming away from the

experience convinced that there was a radical disjuncture between early Chinese

thought and later religious expression. At least insofar as treatments of the body are

concerned, they seem to arise from entirely different cultures.

It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that modern scholars are entirely to

blame for this state of affairs. Daoist texts, along with the nearly cognate genre of

medical texts, provide somatic detail; other sorts of texts do not reveal so much. But

it is not unfair to say that this state of affairs suits us. When speaking of unfamiliar

religions, we want to track down foreign souls; when we try to comprehend

unfamiliar philosophies or literatures, it is convenient to presuppose familiar

mind/body constructions.

I The same is true of A. C. Graham's Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient

China, (La Salle: Open Court, 1989). But similar examples are legion. As late as 1993, Roger

Ames sets out to pen a "preliminary investigation of the classical Chinese conception of body"

in an "attempt to reinstate the notion of body in our understanding of the early Chinese

philosophical literature as a corrective to what I perceive to be an inappropriate 'psychologization' of the materials." (See Roger Ames, "The Meaning of Body in Classical

Chinese Philosophy," in Self as body in Asian theory and practice Thomas P. Kasulis, ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press,1993). t32 SrrpupN R. BorpNr,qlvrp

Thus, from non-Daoist texts, we have become familiar with the Chinese xin ,b,

"heart" or "mind," seat of thought and emotion. We know that it is located in the

chest, rather than the head. From scattered references, largely mortuary in subject

matter, we also know of two sorts of entities we often translate "soul," the hun ffi

(cloudsoul, ethereal soul) and the po frft (whitesoul, spermatic soul) which separate

at death, the former tending to fly up and wander and the latter to sink back into the

earth.' But these later two terms occur rarely and are discussed even more

infrequently in pre-Daoist literature.' It is not unfair to say, then, that what we know

about the body in early Chinese philosophical literature is that it "has heart/mind."

The terms used to describe somatic architecture in Daoist texts, by contrast, are

too numerous to conveniently catalogue here. Clearly, description of the body is

important to the Daoist religion and fully deserving of the many studies that have

been devoted to it.

We thus arrive at an impasse. In that the usual analytic procedure when

comparing two systems of thought is to contrast their vocabularies, terminological

richness and lavish attention at the outset seems incommensurable with

terminological poverty and inattention. More dangerously, because what early

Chinese wrote about the body, as about other topics, is taken unproblematically as

indicative of what they "believed" about the body, Daoist somatology comes to seem

almost an alien intrusion on the Chinese scene." Since pre-Han thinkers reportedly

believed in a suspiciously Cartesian (but unexamined) body and Daoists believed

their bodies to be not only worth the ink, but site of numerous souls, spirits, and

powers, there can be no logical continuity.s

In this essay, I want to attempt to see beyond the perplexities apparent at the

terminological and evidential levels to examine the metaphorical structures both

Chinese Daoists and non-Daoists employ when they talk about the body. In order to

For a useful survey of non-Daoist literature on the two sorts of soul, see Mu-chou Poo, ln Search of Personal Welfare: A View of Ancient Chinese Religion, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), pp.62-66.

For a survey of occurrences, see K. E. Brashier, "Han Thanatology and the Division of 'Souls'." Early China 2l(1996): 125-158. Brashier derives from the contradictions in literary references to the hun and po the conclusion that early Chinese in fact did not believe in two sorts of soul. As he puts it "The texts previously used to justifii this position. . . seem to indicate that (hunpo) dualism belongs to the realm of scholasticism rather then general beliefs on death" (p. ls8).

See Donald S. Lopez, Jr. "Belief," in Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp.2l-35, for a critique of the "ideology of belief. . . that religion is above all an interior state of assent to certain truths." Assumptions are drawn on the basis of such observations. The usual ones are 1) that Daoism represents popular beliefs finally emerging into view; 2) that Daoism is a native reaction to imported Indian religious views; or 3) that Daoism is a perversion of philosophical ideas mixed with popular and/or foreign beliefs. Wuar Deorsr Booy? r33

begin this project, I will employ some of the insights of George Lakoff and Mark

Johnson concerning the way metaphors fundamentally structure thought processes.u

Among possible lines of enquiry, I will here pursue the following three: First, I

would like to argue that the "multi-spirit body," as I shall call it, is but one of the

metaphors that Daoists employ in talking about the self.7 I will provide evidence that

Daoist writers also had recourse to a more universal metaphor for speaking of the

self, one that Lakoff and Johnson describe as the "subject-self' metaphor, in which

"a person is divided into a Subject and one or more Selves." This way of speaking

about the self occurs in early Chinese texts and explicitly coexists with the

multispirit body metaphor.

Second, I will investigate what early Chinese were trying to accomplish when

they spoke of the body as housing multiple spirits. Under what circumstances was

this particular metaphor employed in place of other, equally available ways of

describing the selflo The multi-spirit body, I will argue, proves a fragmented or

potentially fragmented body, a threatened body or one that has, in glorious fashion,

overcome this threat. In short, I will claim that this way of speaking of the self

occurs, in both Daoist and non-Daoist texts, when psycho-physical wholeness is

endangered, or, conversely, when texts celebrate the restoration or maintenance of

that wholeness. Finally, I want to emphasize that the fragmented, multi-spirit body is

not confined to Daoism, that it pre-dates the development of Daoism as a religion. I

will present evidence that the assumed "religiosity" of such a way of talking about

the body has led modern scholars to adopt interpretive strategies to hide it from

view.

My goals in this essay are modest ones. I am not aiming for a paradigm shift, but

simply for a reconsideration of certain operating assumptions. In place of the

assumption that Chinese views of the body are transparent "belief systemsrl I want

to foreground several of the various linguistic repertoires available to early Chinese

See particularly George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, Q{ew York: Basic Books, 1999). While I will employ some of their insights and terminology, I will not here engage the far-ranging conclusions they draw, especially in the latter book. This is primarily because I am skeptical that conclusions on human thought processes can be drawn from texts, especially classical Chinese texts that do not seem to represent the spoken language of the authors of those texts. Nonetheless, I find their approach to the functions of metaphor in spoken and written language insightful and useful. It is, to use Lakoff 's terminology, an idealized cognitive model, and perhaps the central one for Daoism, but only one of several that were productive of Daoist practice. On Lakoff s "ICM" see his LTomen, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categorie,s Reveal About the Mind, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp.67-74. Several recent studies have emphasized the ways in which cultures are never simple or unitary. Every culture offers a range of possibilities and actors tend to draw promiscuously on this "toolkit" of sometimes conflicting repertoires in justifying and describing their actions. See Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), especially pp. 24-40 and Robert Ford Campany, "The Meanings of Cuisines of Transcendence in Late Classical and Early Medieval China" T'oung PaoXCI (2005), 1-57. 134 SrppspN R. BotcnNraup

in speaking of the self. Where Daoism is assumed "other," I want to assume

continuity with the world of thought within which the religion developed. In sum, I

want to show that, through representing their control over the fragmented body as an

anodyne to physical, cultural, and spiritual dissolution, Daoist texts provide us with

a clear elaboration of one archaic metaphor for speaking about the body.

I want to begin with two illustrations, drawn from Daoist scriptures, of what has

been described as the distinctive Daoist view of the bodv. The first is drawn from the

Shangqing scriptures of Yang Xi (330-386?).

The body of a person contains the spirits of the Palaces of the Three Primes.

Within the Gate of Destiny are the Grand Sovereign of the Mystic Pass and

the spirits of the three cloudsouls.' Altogether, then, there are seven spirits

within the body who desire that the person live a long life. These are the

greatly propitious sovereigns of kindness and benevolence. The seven

whitesouls also are born within the same body, but they are thieves who

attack the body. This is why they must be controlled. If Daoists know only

the methods of seeking transcendence and do not know the way to control

their whitesouls, they can but labor in vain.

As for the placement of the Palaces of the Three Primes: The Palace of the

Upper Prime is in the brain. Its spirit is the Ruddy Infant, with the byname

"Primal Priority" and the alternate name "Thearch's Chamberlain." The

Palace of the Central Prime resides in the Scarlet Chamber, that is, the heart.

Its spirit is "Perfected One," with the byname "Thane Cinnabar" and the

alternate name "shining Durability." The Lower Prime is the Palace of the

Cinnabar Field, three inches below the navel. Its spirit is "Newborn," with the

byname "Primal Yang" and the alternate name "Valley Mystery."l0

These are the spirits of the triple unity. Whenever you wish to secure your

cloudsouls and control your whitesouls, you should always first secretly call

the names of these spirits.' '

My second example demonstrates the centrality of these Daoist ideas about the

body in another way. Drawn from the early fifth century Lingbao scriptures, it

represents a Daoist rewriting of some Buddhist concepts. As we shall see, the multi-

spirit body provides the structural foundation over which Buddhist ideas are draped.

The section translated below comes from descriptions of the first of the "six

penetrating wisdoms" n €ff.H that are associated with vision:

On the Gate of Destiny and the Mystic Pass, as well as the gods that inhabit them, see Robinet,

Medi t at ion t a oi's t e, (Paris : Dervy-livre s, | 97 9), pp. 120-29 .

The names and bynames of the spirits of the Three Primes derive from distinct textual

traditions. See Robinet, La rdvdlation du Shangqing, (Paris: Publications de I'Ecole Frangaise

d'Extr€me-Orient, # 137) 2: 30-32 and 80-82.

Translation from Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1997), pp. 326-27.

l0

1l WHar Daorsr Bopv?

The Celestial Worthy said: Heaven is associated with penetrating vision,

which is to say, celestial eyes enable great and penetrating wisdom, limitless

above and below, in the four directions and to the eight reaches of space.

There is nothing they cannot illumine. Though we name it a single

penetrating wisdom, it encompasses the five colors equally. Since this

heavenly penetration is so of itself, there is no diminution. If a person models

heaven, the scarlet lads f:pupils] within his eyes will also have beams of the

five colors. But if a person does not keep the precepts, the qi of his six senses

will not communicate and his openings will not open in wisdom. When such

a person widely surveys the five colors, the lads in his eyes will fly out wildly

and the light will be occluded. This will cause blindness.r2

Buddhists, perhaps in order to meet expectations they encountered in the

crowded Indian religious landscape, found it necessary to forward a concept that

seems at odds with the goals of the religion, contending that their practices too

resulted in quite this-worldly "spiritual powers" (skt. abhijfio).A standard list

categorrzes feats such as the ability to be everywhere at once into six powers, five of

which masters outside the religion might also boast and one obtainable only by

Buddhists well along the path to enlightenment. In adopting these ideas, Daoists, of

course, claimed all six.l3

Given the remarkable abilities with which Daoists credited their sages, one might

expect a lively exposition of the ways in which the spiritual powers of Daoists

exceed those of the bodhisattvas.ra Instantaneous flight from one spot to another, for

instance, is an art much developed in Daoist scripture, so we might expect them to

fly rings around circumambulatory Buddhist monks. This is not, in fact, what we

find. Instead, this Lingbao acount of the "six spiritual powers" proceeds by

categortzation, organizing its list of powers by the traditional "six sense organs," and

the "six directions" i€ (expressed here as "heaven, earth, and the four cardinal

directions"), both of which are further aligned with a set of six precepts.

Beyond this systematization of what must have appeared as a somewhat chaotic

Buddhist list, our attention is drawn to the fact that the Daoist account is actually

less fantastic than the Buddhist sources on which it drew. While the Bodhisattva

possessed of "heaven's eyes"r5 for instance, might observe the past and future lives

HY 177, Taishang dongzhen zhihui shangpin dajie XLiEFtrH-tffiifil, 10b1-6. The Buddhist list, drawn from the Avatamsaka-siltra, includes, simply expressed: 1) supematural vision, 2) supernatural hearing, 3) the ability to know the hearts of others, 4) the ability to know the past lives of others, 5) the ability to travel anywhere at will, and 6) knowledge of the exhaustion of kle6a or "defilement." The Daoist list, by contrast, coincides only with the first two, the remainder being, again simply expressed: 3) supernatural sense of smell, 4) supernatural taste, 5) supernatural heart/mind, and 6) supematural sense of touch and ability.For a lively catalogue of such Daoist feats, see Isabelle Robinet, "Metamorphosis and Deliverance from the Corpse in Daoism," History of Religions 19.l(1979),pp. 57-70. I have purposefully translated not the Sanskrit term divyacaksus "spirit vision," but the Chinese

135

12

l3

T4

l5 t36 SrBpuPN R. BorBurauP

of any person with whom he comes into contact, the Daoist is promised only a vague

..penetrating vision into the ten directions of space."16 More surprisingly, instead of

repeating the attractive promises found in any number of Daoist scriptures or indeed

those of its Buddhist model, the Lingbao text expends ink discussing nurturance of

the specific spirit in charge of the elyes (the Scarlet Lad)' since the failure of this

spirit results in poor vision or blindness. There are, in fact, bodily spirits invoked in

each of the examples given. To take another example, for the heart/mind' which is

not in the Buddhist abhijfia list at all, our Lingbao text states:

When wisdom does not penetrate, the spirit of the heart shakes about wildly,

giving rise to emotional attachments and desires' These fattachments and

desires] cause a person to lose their way, destroying fthe heart] spirit and

shortening life."

This reformulation of Buddhist abhiifi o descriptions reveals something

fundamental about Daoist claims to knowledge of the body. Daoists assert that they

can identifz, name, and thus control, not only trre hidden triggers that set bodily

forces in motion but, more importantly, the forces that destroy physical equilibrium'

This control arises out of their intimate knowledge of, and control over, the hidden

"spirits" that inhabit the bodY.

Descriptions of the body such as those recounted above are well-explored terrain

in Daoist studies, so well explored, in fact, that we confidently label them examples

of ,,theDaoist UoO""ts;ut is the body thus described the only one to which Daoists

laid claim? And is it exclusively Daoist?

ffiouldhavesignifiedtothoseunschooledinSanskrittechnica1vocabulary'In early medieval ctti".t.."ti"'vlthis latter group,includtd 11l *11*^,Y^i*?j",:t1""'.:T

population, but a g""OfV nu*t", of learned Chinese monks as well' That is to say'

commentaries written in ihina more often deal with the nuances of a Chinese translation term

than those of the Sanskrit term underlying it. Modern scholars, on the other hand' still too often

tend to regard chinese as a transparency revealing unproblematically the "underlying Sanskrit."

on some of the implications of ihis practice, r"" go,,.htr (19912) and' for an interesting case'

Bokenkamp ,,chinese Metaphor, Again: Reading - and Understanding - Imagery in the

Chinese poetic Tradition,', Journal of the Americin oriental Society, 109'2 (1989), pp' 211-

221.

16 HY t77,l0bl-4

17 HY 177,12b7-9.

18 And it has been so labeled. See Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body' Karen c' Duval' tr'

(Berkeley: University of california Press, 1993iand the even more detailed Taoist Ritual in

chinese society and History, (New York: Macmillan Publishing company, 1987) by John

LagerweY. Wser Daorsr Boov?

The Subject/Self Body

Since reason is shaped by the body, it is not radically free, because the possible human conceptual systems and the possible .forms of reason are limited.le

Lakoff and Johnson

In their recent book, Philosophy in the Flesh, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson describe in detail the fundamental metaphors we use to describe our inner lives. According to Lakoff and Johnson, we conceptualize ourselves as bifurcated into a Subject "locus of consciousness, subjective experience, reason, will, and our 'essence,' everything that makes us who we uniquely are" and the Self or Selves, "everything else about us, our bodies, our social roles, our histories, and so on."26 They describe five instances of this metaphor. The four based on experience - manipulating objects, location in space, social relationship, and empathic projection

- seem to me common to all languages with first-person pronouns and reflexive grammatical structures.'' The fifth, which they call ihe "Foik Theory of Essences,, (capitalization theirs) seems more linguistically problematical, though the examples they use to illustrate it are mundane. According to this ..folk theory,',

Eeach person is seen as having an Essence that is part of the Subject. The person may have more than one Self, but only one of those Selves is compatible with that Essence. This is called the "real" or "true" Self.22

Thus expressions like "I (self 2) feel fully myself (self 1) today" indicate that we hold a notion of a real self, our essential self, that should be compatible with our essence (Subject), evidenced in the metaphorical equivalence of self one with self two. Denial of this assertion ("I'm not myself today" - the example they actually provide) also entails identification of a Subject with which self 1 is associated and from which self 2 deviates. Apparently, Lakoff and Johnson derive this category to cover ontological statements that atrfirst do not specifically seem to be embodied in everyday experience. But, as is shown by some of the examples they forward in this category - "She went to India to look for her true self," or "He retreats into himself'

- the folk theory of essence is compatible with the other four instances they adduce.

19 Philosophy in the Flesh, p.5. 20 Philosophy in the Flesh, p.268. 21 Philosophy in the Flesh, pp. 269-28L For those unacquainted with the work of Lakoff and Johnson' typical examples of these four types of metaphor will help to clarify their claims: l) Subject motivation of self as manipulating an object: "You are pmhing yourself too hard.,' 2j Relation of subject to self in space as a container: "I'm just beside myselfioday." 3) Relation of subject to self as a social relationship: "I need to be kinder to myself.', 4; Th" subject,s empathic projection of self onto another: "Given what I've done, if i *.." you, I'd hate me too." 22 Philosophy in the Flesh, p.269.

t37 138 SrBpupN R. BorpNr,A.N{P

"She went to India to look for her true self is a type of spatial emplacement

metaphor and "He retreats into himself is an example of the "body as container"

metaphor. What is important here is the reahzatron that we regularly locate our true,

essential self in the "subject" and posit further "selves," depending on how we feel,

whether we want to dissemble, etc. In normal, healthy conditions, we locate our

essential self unambiguously in the controlling Subject. In times of stress or illness,

we might posit one or more Selves - "One side of me tells me to go, another to

stay." - but the Subject, the essential self, the "me" of this example, remains that

aspect of our imagined self with which we most closely identifi'' That is to say' the

"Folk Theory of Essences" applies in most cases when we talk about self.

Later in the work, Lakoff and Johnson discuss briefly the implications of their

findings for the truth claims of religious views of the soul, arguing that the

metaphorical ways we have of speaking about the Subject lead naturally to such

conceptions. Interestingly, they note that

One might imagine a spiritual tradition in which. . . a Soul is fundamentally

embodied - shaped in important ways by the body, located forever as part of

the body, and dependent for its ongoing existence on the body. The results

about the mind discussed throughout this book in no way rule out the

existence of that kind of Soul, an embodied Soul.23

Given the relentless corporality of Chinese views of soul and the afterlife,

Daoism might seem the perfect candidate for such a religion. I will argue, however,

that it is not. I want to claim instead that the early Chinese "multi-spirit" metaphors

function precisely in the ways Lakoff and Johnson describe.

Early Chinese writers regularly employ the subject/self metaphor in the four

everyday senses Lakoff and Johnson delineate. The Chinese language further leads

Daoist writers to speak of the self in terms that look very much like the Folk Theory

of Essences, despite their reference to the multiplicity of spirits that make up the

body. Three examples are presented below.

The following is from the Lingbao scriptures and comes from a passage

describing Daoist notions of rebirth:

When one is resolute in one's practice and joins with the Dao, the body and

the spirit are unified. When these are unified, this is the true fperfected] body.

This return to the father and mother [:the Dao] who originally gave birth to

one is to complete the Dao. Within the Dao there will be no further trouble

then and one will not die. lf one is obliterated and crosses over, the spirit will

depart and the body will not be destroyed. Then the entire body will ftogether

with the spirit] return to its root, never departing from it. But, when one

commits the myriad transgressions and dies, this is called 'death.' Death is

obliteration and destruction. The self then returns to a father and mother and

23 Philosophy in the Flesh, P. 563. Wunr Daorsr Booy? 139

entrusts itself to the womb. So long as the karma of these transgressions is

not exhausted, one will never return to the true father and mother. flnstead] the spirit will join the ranks of those who labor in the earth, the body will

become dust and ashes. . .24

In translating, I have rendered "spirit or spirits" lF in the singular, as if I had not

been informed that Lingbao Daoists most frequently describe the body as composed

of multiple spirits. But translating the term in the plural would make little difference.

We see at death a body returning to dust and "spirit" or "spirits," locus of the "true

self' (described above in the text as the single "self' (fd) proceeding either into the

underworld or rejoining the body, like the Christian soul its original body at the final

trump. The picture is thus to us a familiar one. Death might be dissolution, but the

essential "self," or Subject in Lakoff and Johnson's terms, is lodged in some

spiritual entity that might with justification be called a single o'soul." This is an

iteration of the "folk theory of essences."

Another example might be found in a meditation procedure for securing the

spirits of the body to promote healthy sight and hearing that is found in the Zhen'gao

fDeclarations of the Perfected]. The incantation accompanying this method

commands the various spirits of the body, including the three cloudsouls, seven

whitesouls, the gods of the eyes, the ears, and of the five viscera, to purify and

perfect themselves. Then, thp incantation states "all are to join with me +i. If

anything dares to block my #i ears and eyes, the Most High will pulverize them with

the Flowing Bell."2t Here, despite the recitation of bodily spirits, even some that we

regularly translate as types of "soul," the essential self remains in control.

Another highly interesting example comes from a non-Daoist poem by Ruan Yu

(d. 2I2) in which the poet imagines himself as a corpse in his grave. Emerging, he

finds that his family has departed. While other spirits are feasted, he is destined to be

a hungry ghost. The last three couplets of the poem read:

My body fl gone,my qi energies x-:,1 bound,

My essences and cloudsoul ftrfi have no way to return.

When fine foods are spread, I am not served;

Sweet liquors fill only banquet flagons and cups.

I come forth from my funeral vault to gaze on my old home-

But see only mugwort and broom.26

HY 456, Taishang dongxuan lingbao sanyuan pinjie gongde qingzhong jtrg lt |_ilE{,ffiH= ;r,FlffithIE+SEf;S, 34a-b. For a slightly different translation and discussion of this passage, which I have excerpted here, see my forthcoming Ancestors and Anxiety: Daoism and the Birth of Rebirth in China. HY 1010, Zhen'gao F;9,9.8b2. Ding Fubao TIF{R, Quan Han, Sanguo Jin Nanbeichao shi AiE=EFffiJhSfi;+, ,.euan

Sanguo shi," 3: 267. The first person pronouns are not in the text, but are mandated by the Chinese poetic convention.

2526 140 SrnPuBNR. BoreNreuP

Ruan Yu catalogues several parts of the "mu1ti-spirit" body (qi, essence, cloudsoul),

but treats them as "Selves," locating his essential self as "Subject."

I would suggest that, given what we now understand of Daoism, familiarity

causes us to pass in silence over such passages in our texts. Since scholars of

Daoism want to establish the distinctiveness of the religion, we focus instead on

what seems to us strange, the body depicted as housing multiple spirits. In doing so,

we unpack such metaphors as readily as those working on non-Daoist texts repack

them in familiar Cartesian boxes.

Body as Kingdom/Cosmos

The heart is the principle organ par excellence which gives vital blood, heat,

and spirit to all other members of the entire body. It is located in the vety

middte of the chest, as befits its role as king in the midst of his kingdom.

Henry of Mandeville2T

If, despite the fact that Daoists believed their bodies host to multitudes of spirits,

they speak of the self in ways identical to those employed in lands where single

souls are the rule, what need was there to speak of a multi-part body? Complicated

modes of discourse such as this one are created to answer some need. We should

then attempt to isolate what that purpose might be. For example, one of the

foundational Daoist texts expressing the metaphor of the body as kingdom proceeds

as follows:

Of the myriad things to which heaven gave birth, humans are the most

exalted. A single human body enfolds heaven and earth, sun and moon.

mountains and streams, rivers and oceans. . . [The list extends through spirits

and entities of heaven and earth, to] bamboo, trees, and all the plants. All are

imaged therein. There are also established the emperor, the three Lords and

nine Chamberlains [through all the levels of imperial bureaucracy down to

1ocal|y-appointed officials]; palaces and residences fthrough domestic

necessities down to the nourishment necessary for this pantheon].28

The text then lists coffespondences between the human body and the macrocosm.

These are of the "the human head is round and images heaven; feet are square and

modeled on earth" type common to Chinese correlative cosmology. Here too

bureaucratic imagery is employed, associating specific body parts with the list given

above. Finally, we are given the secret names of a number of the body's resident

deities.

Cited in Jacques Le Gofi "Head or Heart: The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Middle

Ages," Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Michel Feher, ed. (New York: Zone,

1989) 3:23.

Hy 388, Taishang lingbao wufu xu f I--ffiHAf+E 1.19b3-21a3, mercifully abbreviated.

27

28 Wuar Deorsr Boov?

Perhaps exhausted by the drzzyrng specificity of all of this, modern scholars rarely

emphasize the express purpose of the catalogue.tn The list ends with a series of

injunctions that one should call out the names of the spirits at times of particular

peril - when one is about to sleep, when one is ill or in pain, when the season is a

dangerous one, or simply to "secure the cloudsouls and control the whitesouls" - the

last a concern we have met with above.30 The purpose of knowing one's body houses

multiple spirits, then, is so that one might keep them at home.

The kingdom of the body proves, then, to be a kingdom not unlike the ones

Daoists experienced in their quotidian lives; over-articulated, refractory, and of brief

duration, the kingdom harbored competing focii of authority and the ever-present

danger of rebellion. The fractious self was simply not something upon which one

could rely. That, I think, was the point of adopting the multi-part body mode of

discourse. The metaphor speaks to our daily adult experience of diminution and loss

as our powers lessen and our sense of control weakens. It speaks to the fear that what

is most intimate and personal to us, our bodies, will def,, us; that our proper

impulses and passions will betray us, leading in directions that will result in the

ultimate dissolution of death. But, we need to notice even this way of describing the

matter implies an essential self that holds these concerns. And always, in such

invocations of the multi-spirit body, that essential self is enjoined to reassert control,

reverse the decline, and tame the errant spirits of the body.

At first glance, such considerations do not seem to hold for one other frequent

case in which Daoist texts mention the multi-spirit body, that of the Daoist master

conducting ritual. While Daoist ritual is enormously complex and developed greatly

over time, one irreducible component seems to be the dispatching of petitions to the

celestial bureaucracy on behalf of individuals or of the community. To accomplish

this, the Daoist master often summons from his (or, more rarely, her) body the

resident spirits, either to deliver the petition themselves or to form a suitably august

procession as the master ascends for that purpose.3' The procedure is sometimes

known as chuguan IEH, literally "exteriorizing the officials." Such descriptions

would seem to have nothing in common with those we have surveyed so far, for the

Schipper, for instance, calls such accounts "beautiful vision[s]. related to a rich and meaningful mythology." (Taoist Body, p. l0a). Here, too, the Subject is invoked as the essential self of the person performing the rite. Given that the procedure is prescriptive, however. the essential self is expressed with the second- person singular pronoun 'oyou" T, while the various spirits, aspects of the self, are designated with the third-person pronouns "them/their" /_lH. See HY 388, I .21b7-22a1. The procedure seems to date back to the earliest days of the Daoist religion. See Ursula- Angelika Cedzich, Das Ritual der Himmelsmeister im Spiegel fiiiher Quellen: Ubersetzung und Untersuchung des liturgischen Materials im dritten chr.ictn des Teng-chen yin-chiieh, Wiirzburg: Ph.D diss., Julius-Maximilians-Universitiit, 1987, pp. 65-77. For more examples, see Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, p. 414, and Judith M. Boltz, "Opening the Gates of Purgatory: A Twelfth Century Technique for the Salvation of Lost Souls," in Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R.A. Stein, Michel Strickmann, ed. (Bruxelles: Mdlanges Chinois et Bouddhiques XXI, 1983) 2:488-510.

t4l

31 142 StBpssN R. BorsNraup

body of the Daoist master is described in such cases as powerful and competent,

rather than threatened and fragmentary.

But, on closer examination, threat is involved here in at least two ways. First, and

most obviously, the Daoist master is responding to threatened dissolution in the

social body with which his own, personal body is allied. Through the metonymic

chains of interconnection that underlie correlative cosmology, calling the spirits of

an individual body to heal the greater body is precisely the same calling on the self

in meditation to heal an errant part of the individual body. Second, the Daoist

master's own body is often portrayed as implicitly "threatened" by this act of

compassionate disembodiment. Chuguan invocations are thus regularly preceded by

meditations or incantations meant to guard and secure the body's forces.32 A simple

example might be found in the directions for correct recitation of the Scripture of

Salvation:

On the days on which you practice this Dao, you should bathe in perfumed

water. Then, having purified and observed the prohibitions, enter your

chamber. Facing east, knock your teeth thirty-two times to alert the Thirty-

two heavens on high. Then mentally bow thirty-two times.33 Shutting your

eyes, in stillness imagine yo-ur body seated in the midst of tri-colored clouds

of green, yellow, and white.'o Both within and without it is obscure and dark.

To the left and the right, anayed closely beside you, are the green dragon, the

white tiger, the vermilion sparrow, the murky warrior, the lion, and the white

crane.3t The sun and moon, in fulI luminescence, shine penetratingly into the

chamber. From the back of your neck emerges a round image which, with its

beams, shines into the ten directions.'u When all of this appears clearly before

you as described, secretly incant as follows:37 "Most High Lord of the Dao of

See, for instance, Schipper, Taoist Body, p. 96 and Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, pp.

413-14. For a description of a modern parallel, see John Lagerwey, Taoist Ritual, especially

pages 70-71.

Li Shaowei specifies that each of these prostrations should be performed facing the direction of

the heaven to which the obeisance is directed and accompanied by visualizations of the thirty-

two thearchs. (See HY 87, 1.30b-31a)

These are the colors of the three original pneumas: the mysterious pneuma is green, the prirnal

pneuma yellow and the inaugural pneuma, white. Here, their function is to protect the body in

primordial unity.

The green dragon, white tiger, vermilion sparrow, and the "murky warrior" are the directional

animals of the east, west, south and north, respectively. Beginning in the Han period, these

animals are commonly depicted on the walls of tombs as guardians in the four directions. The

"murky warrior" is usually depicted as a turtle wrapped about with a snake or sometimes a

turtle with the head of a snake. The lion and the white crane seem here to be symbols of the

center, below and above.

This "round image" is in fact like the halo that appears on Buddhist and Daoist images of

deities in this period. The "ten directions" are the eight points of the wind rose, above and

below. 37 The names of these deities were listed in the registers bestowed on each initiate. See HY 352,

JZ

JJ

34

35 Wsnr Daorsr Boov?

the ultimate Mysterious and Primordial pneumas, summon from this seryant's

[:my] body the official envoys [names excised]. . . to inform those on high of

what I say.t*

In this metaphorical understanding of the self, placement of the subject is, at least

potentially, a site of contention. Thus the body of the officiant is symbolically

returned to the state of primordial wholeness and gird about with spiritual protectors

before the "officials" of the body can be confidently sent forth.

Other attempts to come to terms with potential physical fragmentation include

meditational and what we would call "medical" interventions, as well as

technologies for mapping the cosmology of the body such as the wang-xiang or

"king-minister" system, which view the five major organs as ruling in a regularrzed

cycle.3e These technologies and descriptions of the body do fit Lakoff and Johnson's

Folk Theory of Essences. That is to say, no matter how powerful, threatened, or

elusive the spirits of the body might prove, there is always an implied "essential"

Subject that is specifically enjoined as unifying the forces of the body and ensuring

wholeness. This essential self is never designated by any of the words we have

regularly translated "soul." It is neither the "cloudsoul(s)" ffi, nor the "whitesoul(s)"

EH - terms I will henceforth not use in my translations. Neither is it the heart/mind,

ruler of the body. True, each of these are sometimes portrayed as potentially (and

sometimes actually) appropriating the role of self, but the true desired self is, as in

the cases Lakoff and Johnson have studied, always located in the Subject. This

Subject, the essential self, is most reliably identified in grammatical structures, since

rules of propriety mandate that the first person pronoun is seldom used in Chinese

writing. In the example given above, for example, there is no Chinese word, beyond

"this seryant" ffi - a common humilific first-person pronoun, to identify the self.

The self who is, in the second person description of the practice, to "knock the

teeth," "mentally bow," and "imagine" (or "visualize"), etc., is understood by the

rules of Chinese grammar. Since we understand this to be the case, multi-spirit

metaphors have in some contexts proven difficult to locate, and easy to ignore.

Taishang dongxuan lingbao chishu yujue miaojing

^-tild*ffiHfrgE-F*fr9lr#,3.30a-32a for the portion of the Lingbao investiture in which the gods first are charged to descend into the

initiate.

Bokenkamp, Early D aois t Scriptures, pp. 413 -41 4.

HY 388, the text cited at the beginning of this section is one of these. According to its

description, the spirit of the liver is the 'oruler" of the body in spring, the spirit of the heart in

summer, or the lungs in autumn, of the kidneys in winter, and of the spleen during a special

series of days in the lunar sixth month. (HY 388, 1.16b-18b.)

143

38

39 r44 SrppunN R. BotcnNxarup

The Erasure of Multi-spirit Body Metaphors in pre-Daoist texts

Can you think of anything more frishtful than that it might end with your

nature being resolved into a multipliciQ, that you really might become many,

become, like those unhappy demoniacs, a legion, that you thus would have

lost the inmost and holiest thing of all in a man, the unifuing power of

personality?

Ssren Kierkegaarda'

Having outlined some of the ways in which the multi-spirit body metaphor is

employed in Daoism and having freed ourselves from the necessity of looking for

specific terms, whether ^hfrh or fF -& ot iF, that we might feel comforlable in

translating "soul," we will now look at occurrences of similar metaphors in earlier

texts.

Before we begin, there are a few impediments in our path that need to be, if not

removed, at least noticed at the outset. First, my definition of "pre-Daoist" depends

unabashedly on Strickmann's definition of the term "Daoist" as denoting the social

entity that arose in the 2nd century CE and those movements descended from it. This

is not a universally-accepted definition. Indeed, Kristofer Schipper, Isabelle Robinet,

and others trace the religion back to pre-Han times, to the ideas of shadowy figures

and perhaps master-disciple lineages whose existence is attested in texts that later

Daoists took to be their patrimony. Second, in a related definitional mood, those who

study pre-Han traditions of Chinese thought seem quite willing to relinquish

anything that seerns too closely related to what later became Daoism to these same

shadowy figures. The result of all this is that scholarly terrain has sometimes been

mapped out in ways that discourage our further investigation. Even if I am able to

show that philosophers, while they did not employ it in all cases (but neither did

later Daoists!), took recourse to the multi-spirit body metaphor on occasion, these

passages can be dismissed as "Daoist influence" or perhaps as "religious belief'that

has somehow been transubstantiated in the crucible of Confucian thought.This latter

danger is the most pressing. Translation obliterates the metaphorical systems in

favor of those of the target language and all modern observers unwittingly

superimpose the metaphorical structures with which they think over the "dead

metaphors" of bygone times. Thus, even excellent scholars will sometimes miss the

clear implications of texts with which they deal. Part of this failure can be attributed

to our modern attempts to make clear distinctions between what we see as "religion"

and "philosophy." Witness A. C. Graham's discussion of the term shenming IFDE as

it occurs in the "Inward Training" chapter of the Guanzi. Acknowledging that the

term generally refers to macrocosmic spirits and citing an interesting passage from

the Sayings of the States lflifi to demonstrate the way in which early mediums, in

40 Ssren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Walter Lowrie, (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959),

vol.2. p. 164. Wuar Deolsr Bopv? 145

calling down such spirits, experienced "brightening of the senses" and increased

wisdom, Graham goes on to argue against what seems to me the commensensical

view that shenming {FEE might likewise mean "spirits" when the term refers to the

body or its operations. Graham writes:

But by this period, the gods and ghosts, like Heaven itself, are in the direction

of becoming depersonalised though still vaguely numinous forces of nature.

One scarcely meets a named spirit in the philosophical literature. . . Man

himself can aspire, not indeed to omniscience (since Chinese thinking does

not deal in absolutes), but to that supremely lucid awareness which excites a

shudder of numinous awe. . . The shamanic origin of the exercise ffound in

the "Inward Training"] is plain. The point of it however is not to become a

medium for the gods or for deceased ancestors. . Its purpose is to clarify

senses and heart to a numinous owareness . . The exercise, by stilling

personal desires, opens the heart to be overwhelmed by spontaneous forces

from outside the self.al

Notice how ardently the boundaries are defended. As we have seen above, later

Daoists "name" the body's resident deities for specific pu{poses. Here, the fact that

"philosophers" do not name them indicates not that philosophers might have been

engaged in a fundamentally different enterprise than were contemporary mediums,

ritualists, and later Daoists, but that the gods themselves "are becoming

depersonalized," since gods can have nothing to do with "awareness." The proper

forces "from outside the self' for philosophers are "spontaneous" and contribute to

clear thinking, not mediumship.a2

So strongly are the barricades built, that we can see that Graham has recognized

that the single word IFEE should refer to one category of thing, whether described as

in the body or out of it. ln place of "spirit(s)," he substitutes words that, while

accounting for the spiritual dimensions of the term, reflect more closely the religious

thought of his own time and place: "numinous awareness," by which he seems to

mean something like "heightened awareness" (an intellectual quality as denatured as

the modern senses of "inspiration") and "daimonic and clear-seeing" for shenming

+FW.ot Graham further borrows, apparently from Rudolph Otto, Western concepts

4l Graham, Disputers, pp. 100-105. (Emphases my own). 42 Graham's assertions here are at least in part stimulated by his desire to free "lnward Training" from any taint of Daoism. He states the matter forcefully: "this is not yet Daoism, for the Way is still the practice of the familiar moral virtues." 43 I do not mean to suggest that Chinese thinkers were not using concepts of shenming to explore the workings of the heart/mind, but rather that shenming were not in any simple way equated with concepts like "thought" or "knowledge." Treating the word as if one hall lF, referred to "spirits" while the other, !,[, refers to operations of mind is, I think, scarcely defensible. For the way EE refers to spiritual qualities, see Henri Maspero, "Le mot ming" Journal asiatique, 223(1933), 249-56" Terms connoting "brightness, luminescence," shuang N. for instance, appear frequently in early discussions ofspirits and ancestral practice. T46 SrppupN R. BoreNrerrp

on the nature and universality of religious sentiment in suggesting that the term

might have seemed appropriate for practices that "excite a shudder of numinous

awe."44 How does he know all this? As no passage of the text is cited in support of

these views, Graham's assumptions seem to be based solely on his presumption that

ancient Chinese imagined their bodies to be much as moderns so often imagine

theirs - a Cartesian machine-like container for a singular "self."45 The result is a

satisfying account, but only in terms of Western metaphorical systems, not those of

the author of "Inward Training."

For our own purposes, one wants to know whether we should perhaps read IFEB in the plural, as Graham himself does when the term refers to spirits in the

macrocosm. The usually cautious scholar is silent on why the same word might

express a plural in the macrocosm, but needs to be read in the singular when it refers

to the body. Further, Graham does not speculate as to what it might have meant for

those who wrote his texts to "open the heart" or "still the desires" - indeed he

provides no account of the body at all. Sensitized by our reading of the Daoist

passages above, the following, even in Graham's translation, seems to present the

heart as anodyne for the threatened body, meant to control if not separate spirits, at

least a network of potential sources of dissolution:

With the heart fixed within,

Sight is clear, hearing distinct,

The four limbs are hard and firm.

And can become an abode for the quintessential.

The "quintessential" is the quintessence of ch'i l:pneuma]46

John Knoblock, in his full translation and study of the Xunzi, provides an interesting

appendix on the term shenming, reprising Graham's strict division between

supposed senses of shenming. For Knoblock as well, whenever shenming draw near

the human body, they transform, this time into "spirit-like intelligence." He deduces

three aspects. Shenming is "1) efficacious, being able to relate to the Way and to

produce fortune or misfortune;2) it is within the person and possessed by him and 3)

it is a faculty or state involving mental functions."aT

See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, John W. Harvey, tr. (1rtrew York: Oxford University Press, 1958), especially pages 12-19 wherein Otto describes the "shudder" and "daemonic dread" that accompanies recognition of the sacred. If he was not thinking of Rudolf Otto, I am not certain why Graham thought that the term "daimonic" an appropriate translation for his depersonalized shen. He provides no explanation in this book. Nor does he seek to justifu his assertion that the Gods were depersonalized in the Chinese thought of this period. He does demonstrate that Confucius, and those that follorved him, refused to discuss whether or not spirits existed, believing their proper concem to be human affairs (Disputers, pp. l5-18,241). But this is a difTerent issue. Graham, Disputers, p. 102.

John Knoblock, Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, I 988), Vol. l, pp. 252-55.

45

4647 WHar Deorsr Boov? t47

Unaccountably, in one passage that Knoblock translates, the "spirit-like intelligence"

loses the simile marker, which was supplied at any rate by the translator rather than

by anything in any Chinese text, to become "spiritual intelligence."

The mind is lord of the body and master of the spiritual intelligence

lshenming]. It issues commands but does not receive commands. On its own

authority it forbids or orders, renounces or selects, initiates or stops. Thus, the

mouth can be forced to be silent or to speak. The body can be forced to

crouch down or stretch out.a8

,L,#,MLtr&, mi+wz+&,. H+mffiFfr-y+ E+e,. Hfte,. H€e,.

E 4x e,. fr ft #,. H lh &,. frft tr E] *lr ffi 'ft ffi x, YtEf Htffij'fF ;t 4+ .

The terms used here for the executive actions of the heart/mind - forbid or

proscribe ff, order or despatch {F, renounce or dismiss from office @, select E-!, put

into circulation f1, stop lt - are precisely the actions a ruler takes with respect to his

officials, their proposals, and his orders governing them. This is why the heart is

described as "lord and master" EL. And who are the "officials" of this "lord"? The

normal assumptions of parallel construction in classical Chinese do not require that

we see the body and the shenming as two separate entities. Indeed, it would seem

imperative grammatically to translate shenming in the plural and take "mouth" and

"bodily form" as synecdoche for a range of physical powers, each controlled by

shenming.ae

The threat that calls forth the above metaphor is that the heart will not be unified

and so not properly fulfill its executive function, so Xunzi does not here contemplate

the fact that these officials might arrogate to themselves the ruling role of the heart.

Elsewhere he does. Knoblock translates:

When the work of Nature ltian f, "heaven"] has been established and its

achievements perfected, the physical form becomes whole and the spirit ffi is

born. Love and hate, delight and anger, sorrow and joy, are stored within -

these are described as "the emotions given us by nature." The eye, ear, nose,

mouth, and body each have the capacity to provide sense contact, but their

capacities are not interchangeable - these are termed the "faculties given us

by nature." The heart/mind that dwells within the central cavity is used to

control the five faculties - it is called "the lord provided by nature." The mind

Knoblock, Vol. III, p. 105.

In his Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripfs, (London:

Kegan Paul International, 1998, pp. 121-22), Donald Harper accepts the interpretations of

Graham and Knoblock, yet detects a different meaning of shenming in the early medical

literature: "whereas philosophical texts use ideas of spirit and spirit-illumination to speculate on

the nature of the mental faculties, in macrobiotic hygiene spirit illumination is a kind of mana

which those who practice cultivation can concentrate in their body...I suspect that the

macrobiotic concept of spirit illumination is older than the philosophical one." The word

"mana" is, I suspect, another way of avoiding discussion of bodily spirits.

48

49 148 SrppupN R. BorBNrnrrap

takes advantage of things not belonging to the human species and uses them

for the nourishment of humans - these are termed "the nourishment provided

by nature." The mind calls what conforms to the properties of its category

"fortunate and what rebels against the properties of its category "cursed" -

this is called "the rule of order in nature." To darken one's natural lord, bring

confusion to the natural faculties, reject one's natural nourishment, rebel

against the natural rule of order, turn one's back on the natural emotions, and

thereby destroy the achievement of nature - this is indeed called the "Great

Calamity."so

XffiFtU, XrhgfiFk, ytfutnl#+. {T-H, E*, F#rfitr . *frziHx,lE.

HFJ, FE, Y"fr?, &HWtrnTfHFE&,.*frZ-nHXH ,L'E+, ffiJ)/ifitrH.

*EZ;H7ta_.FT)F^HXF,!IE^H+F.*ft Z="HXE.IIF^H{F#,"==HZ+E.U

HXEA, ;HZliE. X tZdH f &. HEtrXE, ffi LH

^H,

F^H { E, EHXrt{,

HFX{E, DlWXrh, XtA;Ht X.

Based on a passage from the Zuo zhuan, Knoblock claims that "Xunzi is clearly

using shen llfl, "spirit"] in a sense different than that discussed in the Introduction to

this book," but the sense he ascribes to the term turns out to differ little: "[it is] the

animating spirit within the body and . . . the refinement of this into intelligence and

reason."5r More to the point, while noting that it exists, Knoblock ignores the

metaphorical system Xunzi employs in this passage in translating guan "official," as

"faculties." Now, there is no doubt that in ancient Chinese texts, guan ff denoted the

bodily organs, or more properly the activities and orbits of influence exerted by the

bodily organs, but the term guan metaphorically represents these faculties in a

precise way, as officials of the bodily administration that we have described.52

Xunzi describes the heaven-granted ability of the heart to rule in terms of the

economy of the realm. The properly attuned heart can "make resources F4 of what is

not its type [the nurturance of Heaven] to nourish what is of its type," that is, the

officials of the body. These officers, though they also "receive" +* sense

impressions from outside the body, are not to appropriate to themselves capabilities

Knoblock, Vol III, p. 16. Knoblock, Vol III, p. 297, note 20. Note that there is no evidence of the "refinement" of the shen in the Xunzi. Knoblock requires some text that will move from the alien shen of Xunzi to naturalized shenming so that he might connect the sense of the term once more to "mind." This the Zuo Zhuan provides fbr him. Donald Harper has recently suggested that Chinese thinkers first imagined the organs metaphorically as "storehouses" and "official residences" in the body and only later conceived of a spirit administration to occupy the inner architecture. (Harper, "Metaphorical Body" **get**) This is a possible scenario. Notice here, though, that ff is the normal word for "officer, official...". If the orderly development Harper hypothesizes occurred, it was completed by Xunzi's time. Judging from the range of evidence I have surveyed in this preliminary stage of my work, it seems likely that the "multi-spirit" metaphor first appears in texts associated with the Jixia Academy in the 4'n century BCE. This does not mean that other forms of the metaphor did not exist earlier.

50

5l

52 WHar Daorsr Boov? r49

that go beyond their specific functions. The "lord" fheart/mind] who is not vigilant,

or becomes benighted EE, in this task this risks insurrection [ffil, U]. The emotions,

associated by juxtaposition with both the officers of the body and spirits that animate

it, provide the only possible motive forces in the passage that might actuate such

rebellion. Thus the lord should "remain empty [or passionless] in order to rule them"

ffiUhZ (there is no mention of bodily "cavities" here). Absent the conceptual

logic of this metaphorical framework. the passage loses its purpose and becomes

little more than an imasinative list of bodv functions.

Conclusion

It seems to me undeniable that the metaphors describing the body explored above are

continuous with the Daoist metaphors I cited at the beginning of this paper. This

continuity resides not in the names given or even in the specifics of the body

metaphors employed, but in the fact that texts over a long span of time and

originating from different schools of thought employ variants of a basic metaphor

describing the body as potentially divided between different power centers and

requiring reunification or control. What I am suggesting, in short, was that the

"multi-spirit body" was a metaphor employed for a specific purpose. That purpose

was to describe the dangers of psycho-physical dissolution.t'Absent that pu{pose,

both earlier and later Chinese writers were free to speak of the self in other ways,

much as we do. In fact, even when speaking of the multi-spirit body, there is always

an essential self that is called upon to unify the diverse forces of the body, counter

dissolution, and return the self to psycho-physical wholeness. This essential self,

located often in the grammatical understandings of literary Chinese, often takes for

us Western translators center stage, leading some to overlook the place and roles of

the multi-spirit body metaphor in the texts we study.

53 I have not used modern computer resources to collect examples of this deployment of the multi- part body in pre-Han texts, but I have collected a number of examples from my own reading. I

here append one more from the "Explaining Laozi" chapter of the Han Feizi: Glossing the

opening of the De section of the Laozi, he writes "Virtue (d" t,*) is internal; attainment (de t3) is external. _tf*4l* means that one's finternal] spirits do not overflow if to the outside.

When one's spirits do not overflow, one's body is whole. When one's body is whole it is called "attainment" f$. What is "attained" is (wholeness of) body. 1F#,f1&. 'I+#, ,lM. '-fJ,*T

{H' -^Hl+Ti.dfiAtl&,. lfiTi+ftrf, FUH+. H+i-AHE. E#, tlH. (Han Feizi jijie,

Zhlzi jicheng edition, 20:95) For this gloss to make sense, the text would have to be recited

rather than read with the eye. I suspect that Han Feizi reads the Laozi passage tf$Tf$ as

"those of higher [internal] virhre do not [need to] attain [externally]. That is, since their spirits

do not "overflow" and leave their body, they have inner "attainment" rather than external. Later

in the chapter, he is even more explicit concerning the body's spirits: "What is called 'demonic

calamity' fi comes about when the cloudsouls and the whitesouls depart and the essences and

spirits are thrown into disorder. When the essences and spirits are thrown into disorder, this is

to lack virtue." nFftAHH#, "ftfrHffnffifFffit fElFffiLFUftfF (p. los) 150 StspHnN R. BorENrRnp

We might fruitfully extend our discussion by searching for similarities and

differences in the ways various Chinese thinkers employed the multi-spirit body

metaphor. Here, I will only briefly mention what I regard as promising lines for

future research. It may prove the case, for instance, that writers employing the multi-

spirit body metaphor also held similar cosmogonic views, regarding the universe as

originally whole and pure and devolving into a potentially chaotic state as it divided

to constitute the myriad forms of existence. Such concordance between the

microcosmic body and the macrocosmic kingdom and cosmos is a familiar feature of

Chinese thought. By this view, the task of returning to healthy wholeness for both

"philosophical" and "religious" thinkers would reside in recognizing and warning of

possible sources of dissolution.

The differences between pre-Han deployments and later Daoist deployments of

the multi-spirit metaphor are many and well worth further exploration. Pre-Han

texts, with their concern for the self-cultivation and efficacy of the Sage, use the

metaphor sparingly and primarily to describe the dangers inherent in unbridled

emotion or overindulgence in the senses. As we saw in the case of the Lingbao

version of the "six penetrating wisdoms" adduced at the beginning of this essay,

Daoist writers sometimes employ the metaphor in this way as well, but they are

much more concerned with mapping the kingdom of the body. And this greater

concern points to a wider range of purposes. Portrayals of the multi-part body are

important to cultivation practice, ritual description, and to depictions of the gods,

models for emulation with their perfectly unified bodies, to name but a few areas of

concern. We might further expand the range of our researches to include Chinese

Buddhist texts which, while they do not do so often, also find occasion to portray the

multi-spirit body in pursuit of their religious goals.

Finally, though, I want here to stress again the concern with which I began this

essay. Daoist texts cry out to be brought into conversation with the other texts of the

society that produced them. It was, naturally, the frequent mention of the multi-part

body in Daoist scripture that brought me to pursue this subject at all. That Graham

and Knoblock, though aware of research on the Daoist religion, chose not to even

mention its findings or allude to the possibility that something similar might be

occurring in their texts says more about the distinctions modern scholars make than

about those to be found in the history of Chinese thought. We cannot, I think,

assume that when early Chinese texts refer to guan in the body they really mean

'oseats of emotion;" that when they speak of shenming, they actually mean to say

"intelligence," and so on. To do so is to make serpents of little girls. Our task is

rather to explore insofar as possible the metaphorical systems by which various

Chinese writers expressed their conceptions, and through which they understood

them.