In his amazing history of what we usually call the Taiping Rebellion, God's Chinese Son: the Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan, (1996) Jonathan Spence takes a long look at the ritual calendar of southern China in the early 1800s. It was astonishingly dense. Essentially every day was sacred to some being or another, from Bodhisattvas to the spirits of local springs, so a superstitious person of the era must have been very busy propitiating all those powers. For example, the first day of the first lunar month belongs to the Maitreya Buddha, who rules the future, usually depicted as a fat and smiling man; he should be propiated with prayer and by vows to respect the will of heaven.
The eighth day, in contrast, belongs to Yan Luo, known to all as the king of hell. Strangely, though, the Jade Record notes that Yan Luo has lost his former proud position as lord of the first of the hellish palaces. In that role, long ago, he proved too compassionate to those who had been unjustly killed, and allowed them simply to return to earth again to lead new lives.
This Jade Record was one of the most widely circulated religious Chinese tracts in the 1820s and 1830s. Because its folk Buddhist theology seemed to Spence to be important background to the rise of Hong Xiquan and his loosely Christian "Heavenly Kingdom," he devoted several pages to its horrifically detailed description of what happened to souls in the afterlife. This disgression within a digression is my favorite part of God's Chinese Son, which may say something interesting about my own taste in history.
According to the text, those who spread copies of the Jade Record and encourage others to read it
not only escape the worst torments of hell, and bring prosperity to their families and descendants, but in the transmigration of their souls may be reborn as human beings, or even move to higher stages of life – men to the happy lands, and women to the lives of men.
but
those who ignore, deface, or mock the tracts will find no such mercy, but be condemned at death to descend to the lower layers hell and, according to their crimes on earth, move through each of the ten hellish places in turn.
Pictures in the Jade Record show, for those who cannot read, how the judged souls are transformed. Only a few return as happy, healthy humans. Of the others, some are allowed to stay human, yes, but condemned to be ugly, misshapen, poor, and ill; while many, according to their sins, return as horses, dogs, birds, fish, or creeping things.
Near the palace of the first hell is a tower 63 measures tall (= 9x7, so the product of two magical numbers; among their other accomplishments the Chinese created the world's most extenisve numerology). Devils take the unfortunate souls to the top of the tower, from where they can view the families they left behind and see that rather than mourning their loss they are
cursing the dead one's memory, defying his instructions, selling off the goods and property he so painfully acquired, and battling through lawsuits for what is left.
After this discouragement they are assigned to one of sixteen dungeons.
Under the Highest God's general supervision, each of the other nine gods of hell has his holy day, and an invocation that, if correctly and respectfully uttered, may war off his rage. Cumulatively, among themselves, they judge every foible of which humans are capable, and few will escape bing punished by them. The role of the god who rules the first hell is a prelimninary scrutiny of the newly dead, prior to passing them on to others. In his palace hangs a mirror, called the Mirror of Reflection, where all must see their own sins through their own eyes.
The catalog of sins and sinners in the Jade Record is very extensive:
Thither go the quack doctors, the priests who deceive children of either sex to be their acolytes, people who sequester other's scrolls or pictures, marriage go-betweens who lie about their clients charms. Hither come shop clerks who deceive their customers, prisoners rightfully condemned who escape from jail and avoid punishment, grave robbers, tax evaders, posters of abusive bills, and negotiators of divorce. . . .
Souls are guided through this process by two demons known as Life is Short (that's him at the top of the post) and Death Has Gradations, above.
It is always hard to know what to make of such notions. On the one hand, there was no shortage in China of all the things the lords of hell were supposed to punish, so the warnings may not have been very effective. On the other, people have devoted a remakable amount of effort to propitiating unseen powers: building temples, performing pilgrimages, carrying out rites of a thousand kinds. Belief, as I have said many times, is a hard thing to quantify, but there are certainly senses in which it matters a great deal.
No comments:
Post a Comment