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

382 YING-SHIH YUpears to be "refreshing" because it is rather differently conceived.But to say that there was no such thing as an "other world" and noheaven or hell at all is obviously an exaggeration and a position thatis contradicted by known historical and archaeological facts.We have noted that as early as the Shang period there hadalready arisen the idea of a "heavenly court" which, however, mayhave been reserved only for the long-lasting, if not immortal, soulsof the kings and lords as a depository of social authority.45 Fromabout the eighth century B.C. on, the term Yellow Springs (huangch'uian X7%) began to be used in historical and literary writings todenote the home of the dead. The Yellow Springs was imagined tobe located beneath the earth, a place conceived of as dark andmiserable. But the idea is on the whole a vague one and very littledetail about it exists in the written record.46 As we have seen, inthe "Summons of the Soul, " one of the Elegies of Ch 'u, the soul is advised"not to climb heaven above" or "go not down to the Land ofDarkness" (yu-tu Nm). Thus, for the first time, we encounter both"heaven" and "hell" in the same poem. However, Chinese imaginationof the afterlife did not become fully developed until theHan period. With the tremendous progress of Han archaeology inrecent decades, we are now able to reconstruct in its general formthe early Chinese conception of afterlife, including the relatedbeliefs of heaven and hell.As noted earlier, the two T-shaped silk paintings from Ma-wangtuiclearly reveal the belief that at death the hun-souls immediately"return to heaven," just as the above-quoted Li-chi passage says.Although we are in no position, given our present state ofknowledge, to identify each and every one of the mythologicalelements in these paintings, the two paintings do provide us withconcrete evidence that by the second century B.C. the Chinesealready had a vivid conception of a heavenly world above and anunderworld below.The notion of a government in heaven overseeing human activitieswas developed later in Han popular culture. In the earliestTaoist canon T'ai-p'ing ching &1+!, datable to the second century45 Jacques Choron, Death and Western Thought (New York, 1963), p. 24.6Needham, Science, pp. 84-85.