Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

We are going to move backwards in time, briefly. Last time we discussed in broad terms the fall of the Han, but we should go back and talk a little about a tomb discovery and motifs from the Western Han. Also note that the idea that writing (such as the Shang oracle bones) influences speech is ridiculous. Because the Shang wrote short snippets on Oracle bones doesn’t imply they were a race of short-spoken stuttering Chinese.

Mawangdui tomb finds (W. Han, 2nd Century BCE)

Mawangdui is in Central China in Changsha of Hunan, where there was the very well preserved corpse of a still-pliant woman. Then they disemboweled her and placed her and her organs into a museum. The most exciting thing from this find was a library of texts written on silk. Silk was more prestigious than bamboo for texts. There were two full copies of the Laozi text, some artwork and astrological charts, and charts of exercises with animal movements corresponding to the positions (see martial arts) found in the philosophical / cosmological portion of the library.

Immortality and Longevity

Dating back to the warring states period there is a growing fascination with immortality. Even the Zhou bronzes contained appeals of longevity for the family to the ancestors. In the Han, this notion has exploded among the elite, and you find that the Han elite are almost always buried in jade suits made from squares of jade sewn together with gold thread. To this day, Jade is considered protective auspicious stones. Cicadas carved from Jade were sometimes placed on the tongue, as the shedding skin is a symbol of rebirth.

How the journey to the afterlife was made is more complicated. There is a large silk banner draped over the coffin of the Mawangdui Lady Dai, an elaborate painting on silk. It took quite a while to interpret this properly, but over time we’ve learned more. From older dynasties back to the Shang we see two male and female deities carved in stone holding the Sun with a raven and the Moon with a toad.

Random rant: “Everyone seems to think humans are nothing but dirt.”

Another carving shows a 9-tailed fox arranged in an upper register, and human forms in a lower register. Xiwangmu (West King Mother), is found in the upper panel. By the Han, she is some kind of Queen mother goddess. There is also a mortar and pestle being ground by a hare in the top-left who is creating the elixir of life. This image of the hare reappears (sometimes in the moon) grinding the elixir of life.

There’s also an ancient Shang myth about there being 10 suns (they had a 10 day week). The notion was that each day was a different sun coming out, and there’s a myth where all 10 suns come out at once and an archer comes to shoot down the other 9.

Past two guardians we see something being pulled up in front of some deity in the silk. From the normal human realm, a creature is being pulled through the canopy of heaven into the celestial sphere. Indeed, the tomb occupant is drawn in the human register, and above, waiting for her, again is the tomb occupant showing her successful transformation into a spirit with a dragon tail, an arms length away from the elixir of immortality. There’s an additional register below which includes long-furry tailed turtles representing the watery depths, the underworld. Thus, this silk is a depiction of Han dynasty beliefs about the afterlife.

Alchemy (inner v.s. outer)

In a quest to transform themselves, members of the elite tried to ingest all kinds of things. In the west, alchemist wanted to turn lead into gold, but the Chinese notion of alchemy was more inclusive. They believed that there must be a process to turn a mortal into an immortal. Inner alchemy is a meditation to transform the energies inside of you to become immortal in a strange sort of way. This concern explodes following the Han.

For example, there are lots of sexual manuals (some of these are called “The manual of how to ride many young women in one day”) which describe how ?? de jing (essence, vital energy) can be saved to become immortal. Having sex will cause your jing to leave you and become depleted. Instead, they allow themselves to have promiscuous sex but never allow themselves to finish. This becomes a physical exercise, like stretching or eating foods. To most of us, this is an unattractive notion, but it was considered a legitimate method of attaining immortality.

Taoist religious practice

By and large, we associate these practices with the Taoists. Buddhist texts are generally critical of these activities. However, the deviant sexual practices and orgiastic sexual initiation rites of the Taoists are confirmed by texts from both sources.

Revealed texts to the Taoists come from the so-called spirits of former teachers initiating people into various techniques. Thus, Taoist sects take off at the time because a Taoist master can claim authority through the spirits of ancestors.

To this day, Chinese want to deny that Taoism has a link to breathing techniques, sexuality, or other practices that are non-philosophical and more religious.

I learned my first real Chinese cognate today, sanmingzhi, meaning “sandwich.” It’s pronounced san1 ming2 zhi4. How cool is that–borrowed words. Leave me more in the comments–US place names don’t count though.

I was absent for lecture 12. I hope to eventually acquire notes from a friend. Julie Geng kindly writes in with fantastic notes:

Silk Road

It’s very difficult to determine exactly qualifies as “Chinese” as there are dozens of languages that exist in this area of the Gansu corridor and the Silk Road. It’s very problematic to trace direct ancestry from today’s Chinese to the Han dynasty, primarily because there are just waves upon waves of people from Central Asia migrating into China.

Buddhism, Enlightenment/Nirvana

Students kept saying that Nirvana is like the Matrix. However, McNeal says this is untrue. There is some denial of reality, but other than that the similarities end. Buddhism is saying that reality is quite convincing, but all of this is just not real. Ultimately there really isn’t any significance in this world. It’s defined by impermanence, imbalance and suffering.

There’s a painting of three philosophers standing around a cauldron of soup: the Buddhist, the Daoist, and the Confucian. The Buddhist says the soup (of life) is bitter all the time, while the Daoist and the Confucian are arguing off to the side. This painting depiction isn’t entirely accurate: The Buddhists aren’t saying life is horrible, but rather that life is okay, and it makes you keep looking for better.

For example, when you’re doing homework, and you begin to think about the candy bar in the vending machine upstairs. When you go to get the candy bar, for a moment, life is not suffering anymore. You go back to your work, and in the end, you’re brought back to suffering. Nothing will really fulfill you, they’ll just pull you deeper down.

Imbalance & Suffering

But, Buddhism says there is a path out of this: learn to break away from attachments in this world, learning to disappear from this world. If this world isn’t real, neither are you. None of you are lasting, permanent.

Another example of this cycle is that “Humans are piles of shit.” We’re just something that’s in transition. All you are is a cycle. (There are piles of shit outside the city, and then you take the shit back into your garden and you grow some plants and you eat the plants and you shit and you bring it back outside and you bring it into your garden etc.). The path from escaping all of this is a very arduous lengthy process: there is faith to find someone who’s already well on the path who is willing to help others to find the way, with a big boat called Mahayana.

Period of Disunion

Just following the Han, there is a breakdown to three large powerful kingdoms. These maps are not all that meaningful. This period of disunion there is a constant shuffle of changing of boundaries (The Three Kingdoms). Most of what we know about the Three Kingdoms is literature that is written much later. There’s no doubt it’s been romanticized. This is the prime time for Buddhism to take a good hold in China. At the end of the Three Kingdoms, China is reunified.

Organized Taoism

New religions have easier access when there is social breakdown (as the Han collapses); Daoism becomes a popular religion because there is indeed a social and political vacuum caused by the decline of central authority.

There is an enormous endeavor to figure out a way to translate Buddhism into Chinese. They took a lot of Indian words and phonetically kept it the same when translating it to Chinese. They also look to Daoism to find ready-made terms that can be used in Buddhism. You begin to see that Buddhism goes in phases: there is a time when it is very foreign, then it’s somewhat Daoist, then it slowly becomes more indigenous and nowadays Mandarin has many terms borrowed from Buddhism/Sanskrit.

Aristocracy reemerges

The power of the Han court has been somewhat diminished, and suffers a little bit because of the reappearance of the aristocracy (which had disappeared). This is a different aristocracy/nobility that had wiped itself out while trying to compete with itself in the state of Jin. They formed clans while trying to fight each other in the Spring and Autumn period but eventually conglomerate into three states. The three states chose to slice up the state of Jin, but this continues to weaken them and eventually eradicate them. The Han dynasty tried to restrict the intervening lineages (that were reemerging) and they envisioned themselves as the protector of the commoners from the aristocracy. They are successful to a certain extent, but eventually a powerful nobility emerges in the Eastern Han which sends its sons into the Han’s capital and dramatically weakens the Han’s central bureaucracy.

The Han ruled for 206 BCE - 220 AD, a considerably long time, with a minor break for a temporary usurper. To this day, the Han are remembers for their imprint on modern Chinese civilization, primarily the notion of the unified empire. This notion never goes away–to this day, China is one large politically unified entity, more or less. Ethnically, the Chinese people call themselves Han, after this dynasty. Their empire reaches into the Korean peninsula and down into the south east and an arm into the north west–the silk road, carved into the mountains above Tibet. Vis-a-vis the Turkish middlemen, the Chinese are able to interact with the rest of the world. This has been very much downplayed in China in the way the Chinese civilization is taught.

Sima Qian writes about the Xiongniu mostly as a nuisance, but it’s clear that the Xiongniu were major economic threat to the empire. In Europe, we would have called them the Huns. We suspect that the Xiongniu were around in the Zhou period and only became a major nuisance in the Han.

Liubo, “Cosmic board game”
Microcosms

A board game invented in the Warring States period and is enormously popular in the Han. The board is an intricate carved board with a square in the center, and an L shaped tile in the corners, a T shaped tile in the sides, almost like Tetris pieces. It is also a microcosm of the way the cosmos works, with constellations, planetary bodies, comets, cardinal directions, the sun, and the moon.

Why was this made a board game and not an instructional manual? To play this game with 18-sided dice and move your tigers and dragons was difficult and we no longer are sure what the goal was. A few people who paid attention to divination suggested that there is a connection between divination and gambling, and this game may have been involved in a notion of dice-throwing energy in divination and explaining the universe.

TLV Mirrors
Configuring space

The vast majority of people in the Chinese empire, according to a Han census, live either around the capital or the North China plain. There are others around the Delta as well as what is now Sichuan. The Han is spreading out, but by and large, when we talk about Han, we talk about the North China plain.

The other way we see the configuring of space is in official documents, where everything is made organized and symmetrical. For example, marketplaces are not laid out in a grid pattern and are not orderly. They are governed by no rules, and do not take an official shape. However, in the Han, rows of shops and lanes are laid out to systematize and well-order everything. Although this was contrary to fact, it gave the higher-ups a feeling of peace at night.

Spiritual efficacy

The fundamental principles of Feng Shui involved positioning the house or positioning the grave. Underlying all of this is a belief that events can be explained by the great unseen energies of the world. Cosmic order requires regular human effort to draw it out. The role assigned to humans is to mediate the relations between heaven, earth, and the spirits. Even today you can find the notion that people must perform duties at an assigned time and place–this is so efficacious that it sets the system in motion.

High v.s. Low culture
Rise of Religious Daoism

By the end of the Han, they appear. There is a lot of popular folky religion going on in China at this time. At the local level, you’re more susceptible to charismatic local leaders than to a traditional theology due to a shortage of scholars. As the government loses power in the late Han to do public works, the new group of religious Daoists is able to.

Arrival of Buddhism

We will discuss this in more detail next time. However, Buddhism and Daoism arrive at the same time!