China's Cosmopolitan Empire by Mark Edward Lewis

Author:Mark Edward Lewis [Lewis, Mark Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674064010
Publisher: Harvard University Press

In another passage, people in hell ask Mulian to tell the living that elaborate coffins and expensive funerals with music and song cannot mitigate the suffering of the dead, which can only be alleviated through charity to the Buddhist order. When Mulian finally meets his mother in hell, she tells him that one of her crimes was to engage in ancestor worship—to “slaughter pigs and goats on a grand scale to sacrifice to ghosts and spirits.” While such arguments never led to widespread abandonment of the traditional ancestral cult, they did encourage permanent modifications in the rituals for securing the safe transition of the dead to a new state of existence.33 While many of the ideas underlying these cosmological and ritual systems derived from Buddhism, by the late Tang and the Song they began to merge into a Chinese religion that flourished outside institutional Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism.

One of the clearest examples of Buddhism’s influence was the elaboration between the seventh and tenth centuries of a punitive underworld bureaucracy and a set of rituals to cope with it. Like the invention of purgatory in the West, this development offered an entirely new means by which people could assist their deceased kin. This new purgatory, best described in the tenth-century The Scripture on the Ten Kings, consisted of a series of ten courts through which the deceased must pass. In each court (depicted on the model of Tang courts of law) the ruling king acted as a judge who examined records of the person’s life and, if necessary, imposed tortures to force an exhaustive confession of sins (Fig. 22). After leaving the courts, the deceased would be assigned to his or her state of rebirth in the next life, with good deeds leading to a higher rebirth and bad ones to a lower (Fig. 23).34

In association with the Ten Kings purgatorial system were rituals by which the living could assist the passage of the self or of kin through the realms of torture and judgment. Elements of these rituals had appeared in texts from the Northern and Southern Dynasties, which established the idea that the purgatorial rituals should be performed at seven-day intervals, up to forty-nine days, to coincide with the deceased’s passage through the courts. The Scripture on the Ten Kings, however, contains far more elaborate descriptions of the sufferings that await the deceased if their surviving kin fail to act on their behalf:

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