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Life after death: The Chinese after-life: Taoist approaches to immortality
The Spiritual Bookstore Online World Religion Library
AFTER-LIFE EXISTENCE - AN OCCULT ANALYSIS
Chapter 5: the Chinese after-life
Yin and Yang souls,
and the disintegration of the embodied personality
"After death, when this small troop of colourless spirits [that make up
the personality] was dispersed, how could they possibly be gathered
together and reformed into a unity?"
The Taoist conception of post-mortem personality fragmentation
The Chinese Taoists, like the ancient Egyptians, were greatly concerned
with ensuring the survival of the individual after physical death. Their
metaphysics was based on the ancient Chinese conception of the polarity
of Dark and Light, Negative and Positive, Yin and Yang; the two
fundamental principles in the Cosmos.
According to the Chinese, just as the Cosmos consists of and comes about
through the interaction and interchange of Yin and Yang (as superbly
illustrated in that magnificent Chinese Oracle, the I Ching - pronounced
"Yee Jing"), so, in a similar way, the human personality consists of and
comes about through two principles or "souls", a Yin soul and a Yang
soul, which are welded together during life, but separate at death.
Their separation means the end of the personality as such, even though
the Yin and Yang principles survive. One Jungian writer, Cary Baynes,
summarises the matter as follows:
"In the...bodily existence of the individual...are...two... polarities,
a p'o soul (or anima) and a hun soul (animus). All during the life of
the individual these two are in conflict, each striving for mastery. At
death they separate and go different ways. The anima sinks to earth as
kuei, a ghost-being. The animus rises and becomes shen, a spirit or
god."
[Cary Baynes, ed.; Richard Wilhelm and C. G. Jung, The Secret of the
Golden Flower, (Harcourte Brace Jovanovich, 1962), p.64]
and likewise also in Confucian thought
Ts'ai-wu said, "I have heard the names kuei and shen, but I do not know
what they mean."
The Master said, "The [intelligent] spirit is of the shen nature, and
shows that in fullest measure; the animal soul is of the kuei nature,
and shows that in fullest measure. It is the union of kuei and shen that
forms the highest exhibition of doctrine.
"All the living must die, and dying, return to the ground; this is what
is called kuei. The bones and flesh molder below, and, hidden away,
become the earth of the fields. But the spirit issues forth, and is
displayed on high in a condition of glorious brightness. The vapors and
odors which produce a feeling of sadness, [and arise from the decay of
their substance], are the subtle essences of all things, and also a
manifestation of the shen nature."
Book of Ritual 21.2.1 from Readings from World Scriptures - by Prof
Andrew Wilson
So we have two fundamental principles: the lower, instinctual, dark
principle which after death becomes a ghost or evil spirit ("the
conscious spirit which after death is nourished on blood", as Lu-tsu
puts it [p.28, Ibid]); and a higher, light, spiritual principle, which
after death becomes a daimon (shen).
Sometimes the Chinese sages used other pairs of terms, such as shin and
kwei [J. J. Poortman, Vehicles of Consciousness - the Concept of Hylic
Pluralism, vol 1, p.274]. And sometimes, as with the Egyptians, they
postulated a multiplicity of principles; as many as three superior or
yang souls (hun), and seven inferior or yin souls (po).
Yet for all this, the Chinese philosophers often had a rather
pessimistic view of post-mortem existence. As one writer, speaking of
the multiplicity of souls, explains:
"In life, as in death, these souls were most indefinite, vague, and
feeble. After death, when this small troop of colourless spirits was
dispersed, how could they possibly be gathered together and reformed
into a unity? ...(T)he body is unique, and serves as the dwelling place
of all these spirits...."
[Henri Maspero, Le Taoism, Paris, 1950, p.17, quoted in D. Howard Smith,
"Chinese Concepts of the Soul", Numen, V, p.177]
Here we see the contrast between the Egyptian and the Chinese position.
For the Egyptians, bodily death means the release of the separate
soul-principles, all of which maintain their identity. Thus the person
has not one but half a dozen simultaneous after-life existences. But for
the Chinese, although death likewise means the release of the separate
soul-principles, this constitutes the end of the person as such, for
"how could they possibly be gathered together...into a unity?"
But the problem is not one of contradiction but complementarily. Both
say the same thing; they only approach the matter from a different
direction; the Egyptian from the perspective of the after-life, the
Chinese philosopher and Yogic Taoist from the perspective of this life.
Taoist efforts towards personality-immortality
The ancient Egyptians considered the preservation or continuation of the
personality of the deceased as a social function. The deceased family
would provide offerings to ensure the departed one's continued
existence, whilst the state, in the form of the priesthood, would
provide the religious impetus: prayers and in some cases, initiation.
Thus everything was provided from without.
The Yogic Taoists on the other hand approached the problem from within.
As with the Buddhists, they felt that one should rely on no-one except
oneself. One's only hope lies with whether one can transforming the
personality while one is still alive, to "crystallise" it so to speak,
so it no longer would disintegrate at death. In this way, they developed
techniques to attain immortality by constructing a kind of immortal
spirit body, some-times referred to as the "Immortal fetus". These
techniques involved the retention of the vital force (ch'i), or
"circulation of the light", and various other processes of spiritual
transmutation.
But if we assume that the Higher Self is immortal in any case, it could
be supposed that what these Taoists were striving for was the
immortality of the personality; which is presumably the same thing as
the Sufi-taught Russian-Armenian Sage G. I. Gurdjieff taught.
Gurdjieff's teaching was that man is not immortal, but man can attain
immortality, and that this can be done either on the physical (or
etheric) level - "the way of the fakir" - the emotional level - "the way
of the monk" - the intellectual level - "the way of the yogi" - or all
levels simultaneously; the so- called "Fouth Way".
In the Yogic-Taoist and the Gurdjieffian paths there is no reference to
Divine guidance from without, as the individuality is now developed to
the degree that it can survive unaided in the after-life environment.
from: http://www.kheper.net/topics/bardo/chinese.html
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