Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

China 49
The priest looked at the victim intensely,
gathering all his inner strength; beads of
perspiration appeared on his thin face. “Come
out! Come out! I command you to come
out!” He was repeating in a strong metallic
voice with great force. “I am using the power
of the One compared to whom you are
nothing. In His name I command you to
come out.” Immobile, he continued to focus
his powers on the [possessed person’s] face.
The man was struggling in the bed with
incredible strength against the four men who
held him. Animal growls and howls issued
from time to time from his mouth which
became square, he teeth gleaming like the
fangs of a dog....Terrible threats poured out
of the contorted mouth, now fringed in white
foam, and interspersed with such incredible
obscenities that women had to plug their ears
with their fingers. (Goullart 1961, 87)
Not all kuei are demons in the same sense
Westerners use the term. Rather, this is a comprehensive
category that encompasses a variety of
different types of negative spiritual entities. Kuei
include the “hungry ghosts”—ancestors who have
become angry and negative because their descendants
have ceased sacrificing to them. Thus in the
seventh month of the Chinese calendar, the gates
of hell are opened and these kuei are free to roam
about. The full moon in the middle of that month
is a special kuei festival during which an effort is
made to comfort the hungry ghosts.
Particularly after the importation of
Buddhism, the Chinese developed a bureaucratic
system of hells in which demons were employed to
torture morally bad people, not unlike their
Western counterparts. In good Buddhist fashion,
however, these hells were purgatories in which the
condemned were tortured for a set period of time
before being reincarnated.
The Chinese tradition tended to locate infernal
as well as the paradisiacal realms in remote areas
beyond the borders of China. The idea of the
netherworld draws from different traditions that
were mingled together. After the introduction of
Buddhism, which came from west, the mountains
located in the western part of the country were
considered to be netherworld realms. An important
part of the landscape of the afterlife was, for
example, Mount T’ai, originally considered the
point where life began. Mount T’ai became,
during the Ch’in and Han empires, the dead’s
administration center, where souls were judged by
a lord of the dead, thus reflecting the structure of
political power and highly centralized bureaucracy
that characterized those dynasties.
When Buddhism spread into China, a more
organized netherworld was developed: a bureaucratic
system of palaces and offices emerged in
which the officers were the immortals of the Taoist
tradition. Prayers came to resemble an official
petition within a bureaucracy. A pantheon of
divinities ran the system, assigning positions to
officers based on their merits. On the other hand,
the infernal dimension of the netherworld was a
projection of the Chinese prison system of the
empire, in which criminals were punished and
money could be given in the form of bribes to alleviate
the punishment. Thus spirit money, offered
to the dead by the living family, assured the lightening
of the punishment for the dead. Ancient
Chinese graves were typically filled with items that
could assure assistance and help at the moment of
one’s judgment in the netherworld.
Neither heaven nor hell were considered to be
permanent states for the dead, who were being
rewarded or were suffering due to the law of
karma. Thus punishment lasted as long as it was
needed, and then one had to reenter the cycle of
rebirth. The belief in the possibility of lightening
one’s pain was an important point in Chinese spirituality,
as it increased ethic and moral responsibility,
and strengthened the idea of compassion.
See also Buddhism; Demons
For Further Reading:
Burkhardt, V. R. Chinese Creeds and Customs. 3 vols.
Hong Kong: South China Morning Post,
1953–1958.
Eliade, Mircea, ed. Encyclopedia of Religion. New
York: Macmillan, 1987.
Goullart, Peter. The Monastery of Jade Mountain.
London: John Murray, 1961.
Messadie, Gerald. A History of the Devil. New York:
Kodansha International, 1996.
Obayashi, Hiroshi, ed. Death and Afterlife:
Perspectives of World Religions. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1992, 49–64.