"O Soul, Come Back!" A Study in The Changing Conceptions of The ...

SOUL AND AFTERLIFE 371chronicle of the state of Lu compiled probably in the fourth centuryB.C., will serve to illustrate our point. In 593 B.C. a man namedChao T'ung kiZ1 P behaved erratically at the court of Chou. Oneofficial made the following prediction: "In less than ten years ChaoT'ung will be sure to meet with great calamity. Heaven has takenhis p'o from him. "17 Fifty years later, in 543 B.C., a nobleman namedPo-yu {bt in the state of Cheng (in central Honan) had shown amarked decline in reasoning power and judgment, which also led acontemporary to remark: "Heaven is destroying Po-yu and hastaken away his p'o. '"8 In both cases, the p'o is identified as the soulof the man, something that when taken away, by heaven, causesthe man to lose his intelligence. Clearly, the p 'o must have been conceivedas a separate entity which joins the body from outside.But toward the end of the sixth century B.C. the concept of hun asa soul had also become widespread. In 516 B.C. Yuieh Ch'i V1, anofficial at the court of the state of Sung (in eastern Honan) had thefollowing to say about the Duke of Sung and a guest named Shu-sunA4,Y from Lu because both had wept during a supposedly joyfulgathering:This year both our lord and Shu-sun are likely to die. I have heard that joy in themidst of grief and grief in the midst of joy are signs of a loss of mind (or heart, hsin,L). The essential vigor and brightness of the mind is what we call the hun and thep'o. When these leave it, how can the man continue long?'9Here both the hun and the p 'o are regarded as the very essence of themind, the source of knowledge and intelligence. Death is thought tofollow inevitably when the hun and the p 'o leave the body. We havereason to believe that around this time the idea of hun was still relativelynew. To the mind of an ordinary Chinese, it was probably notvery clear in precisely what way the hun and the p 'o were related toeach other. In 534 B.C. the state of Cheng was deeply disturbed by aseries of events resulting, reportedly, from a nobleman's ghost havingreturned to take revenge on his murderers. This nobleman wasthe above-mentioned Po-yu {MF who had been not only expelled17 The Ch'un Ts'ew with the Tso Chuen, (hereafter Tso Chuen) inJames Legge, tr., The ChineseClassics, 5 vols. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1961 reprint), 5:329.18 Tso Chuen, p. 551.19 Tso Chuen, p. 708.