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Purposes, Means and Convictions in Daoism

A Berlin Symposium

Edited by Florian C. Reiter

2007

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C ontents

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<ER Or-lps 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

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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.

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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.

25 26

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

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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

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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

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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-32afor 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.)

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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

46 47

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

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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.