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

390 YING-SHIH YUly, the idea of "grandson of the Heavenly God" was derivedanalogously from that of the "Son of Heaven," that is, theemperor.Second, like the supreme ruler of the human world, it was believedthat the Lord of Mount T'ai also had a bureaucracy to assisthim in governing the dead. Judging by the various official titlesfound in Han tombs and other texts, the bureaucratic structure ofthe underworld was closely modeled on the administrative systemof the Han empire. The first thing the newly dead had to do was togo to the capital of the underworld to register. There is further evidencesuggesting that the underworld government could send forthe souls of those whose alloted span on earth, according to the Registerof Death, was up. As time wore on, the idea of post-mortempunishment also found its way into the Han belief about the afterlife.The T'ai-p'ing ching of the second century A.D. has the followingvivid description of the administration of justice in the underworld.If a man commits evils unceasingly, his name will then be entered into the Registerof Death. He will be summoned to the Underworld Government (t'u-fu ?Nf) wherehis body is to be kept. Alas! When can he ever get out? His soul will be imprisonedand his doings in life will be questioned. If his words are found to be inconsistent,he will be subject to further imprisonment and torture. His soul is surely going tosuffer a great deal. But who is to blame?70This new conception of the underworld may well have been afaithful reflection of the cruel realities of interrogation and torture inthe imperial and provincial prisons, especially during the secondcentury A.D.7DThird, we have reason to believe that as the supreme ruler of theunderworld, the authority of the Lord of Mount T'ai was originallyconceived to be exercised over the hun-souls. Several historical andliterary sources specifically link the hun, but not the p 'o, to MountT'ai, which itself calls to mind the underworld in which the Lord70TPC, p. 615 and also pp. 598-99. In contrast to ancient Greece, the Chinese idea ofpost-mortem punishment is a much later development. See Emily Vermeule, Aspects of Death,p. 8, and E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press,1951), pp. 137, 150-51.71 Lii Ssu-mien RO,, Ch'in-Han shih f 2 vols. (Shanghai: K'ai-ming shu-tien,1947), 2:704-09.