This excellent book provides a fresh and provocative intervention in the study of early Chinese religion. The author's stated purpose is to examine “the dialectical relationship between sociopolitical change and mortuary religion from an archaeological perspective.” Specifically, Lai investigates how changing notions of the afterlife and burial spaces in China were related to the enormous social, political, and military changes of the watershed Warring States period (c. 453–221 BCE).
Lai insists that this is not a one-way relationship of political change influencing religion, but a dialectical relationship in which mortuary religion actually played “an important role in the creation of these empires.” Despite this claim to a balanced dialectical model, Lai appears to employ a decidedly materialist approach to the changes in early Chinese religion, arguing that the convulsive effects of inter-lineage conflict, eradication of the social memory of the defeated, and the later high mortality rates of commoners, soldiers, and convicts resulting from mass warfare were the driving factors behind the changes in ideas concerning the afterlife. His approach is also admittedly elite-centered, positing that these changes were first evident in elite funerary culture and only later trickled down to tombs of middle and lower status groups. This view may be correct, but is really necessitated by the nature of the evidence, for elite mortuary remains are by their very nature more elaborate, more expressive through buried texts, and better preserved.
Overall, the book has a very solid theoretical grounding, and is informed by recent studies in anthropology, archaeology, and the study of religion in other parts of the world. This information is brought to the Chinese evidence in innovative ways. Lai expressly follows the model of Buddhologist Gregory Schopen in conducting an “archaeology of religion,” prioritizing archaeological remains over received canonical texts. Lai's methodology does not rely exclusively on tomb sites and buried objects, however, for contemporaneous texts and inscriptions found in tombs provide the linchpin in most of his arguments. The author is also reacting against a long tradition in Sinology which downplays so-called popular religion, as well as against an entrenched Marxist historiography in China which essentially ignores the importance of religious development in historical change.
Though the title of the book refers to the “archaeology of early Chinese religion,” the finds discussed are nearly all from the southern territory of Chu, where the nature of the burials and the archaeological conditions have led to much better preservation of remains than is possible in the north. Lai argues, however, that the developments in Chu territory were only a regional variant of a common, shared early Chinese religion, so that it is justifiable to apply these findings to all of early China. The book also brings to the readership a wealth of new discoveries in Chinese archaeology that have been known only to specialists. Most educated readers will know about the Han tombs at Mawangdui, and perhaps the Baoshan tombs, but few will have heard about the Jiuliandun finds or more recent discoveries of Chu tombs. His interpretation of the evidence is highly original. Many of his interpretations are very revisionist, and a few are quite compelling, but all of them are thoroughly argued and comprehensively documented.
Each of the five chapters of the book examines a different aspect of the changes in mortuary religion and views of the afterlife during the Warring States period. The first chapter, “The Dead Who Would Not Be Ancestors,” seeks to explain why, over this period, people in China began to “perceive the dead primarily as a threat,” rather than solely as beneficial ancestors. Relying on contemporaneous texts like divinations and incantations, Lai demonstrates that the spirits of those who died violent deaths came to be considered more potent than ancestors and had to be propitiated. He argues that this momentous shift was encouraged by the violent lineage struggles of the Spring and Autumn period (c. 771–453 BCE), in which the losers often had their ritual bronzes taken away, were denied burial or ancestral sacrifice, and became angry ghosts to be feared (this chapter also contains a fascinating analysis of ghost narratives in works like Zuozhuan). Later, this fear of the unquiet dead was extended from the deceased of the noble lineages to the millions of war dead from the great battles of the Warring States period. Eventually, all the dead, even those who died without violence, came to be viewed with ambivalence. Through “tie-breaking” rituals like burying the so-called mingqi artifacts (miniature, inferior, or intentionally damaged ritual vessels, musical instruments or daily-use objects), mourners could sever their direct physical ties to the deceased, while still maintaining ritual communication with them, helping them to make a smooth transition to becoming ancestral spirits.
In his second chapter, “The Transformation of Burial Space,” Lai tries to explain the important evolution from the vertical pit-style tombs of the Shang and Zhou periods to the horizontal chamber-style tombs of the Han Dynasty, a transition which occurred gradually over several centuries. In a survey of the archaeology, Lai suggests that these innovations in burial style may have begun in Chu and other areas of south China and eventually spread northward.
Lai argues that there were three main “driving forces” behind this change. The first was an ideological change from an attempt to “hide” the corpse, seen in Shang and Zhou burials, to one in which the deceased was lavishly and publicly displayed in a form of status competition. The second was a desire for practical joint husband-wife burials (where one could easily reopen the tomb for the burial of the partner who died later). While noble husbands and wives used to be buried in separate pits, changes in social structure from a concentration on the larger lineage to the nuclear family now required that they be buried together. (Imperial couples continued to be buried separately throughout the Han dynasty.) The third causative factor in this transition, and the one which Lai identifies as the most important, was related to the new concept of the dangerous dead, outlined in the previous chapter. To pacify the spirit of the deceased during a long liminal phase, a place for sacrifice needed to be created for mourners inside the tomb, necessitating a horizontal layout. Lai argues that this sacrificial space began an an “abstract notion” of a sacrificial chamber described in funerary texts, and only later took on physical form in the tomb. This part of his argument is not completely convincing.
In his third chapter, “The Presence of the Invisible,” Lai examines the abovementioned shift in attitudes toward the dead from the perspective of image making. It has long been noted by scholars that the human figure (or that of an anthropomorphic deity) was not a common subject for representation during the Neolithic or Bronze Age in early China, unlike the situation in the Near East. Building on his earlier published work on the subject (Orientations vol. 30, no. 6 (June 1999)), Lai argues that the earliest depictions of persons in Chinese art were all of low-status individuals (e.g. criminals, captives, slaves), and their representation was meant as an act of subjugation and control. In contrast, figural image making in the Near East served as an “act of worship.” This is an important conclusion made possible through the comparative perspective.
The key development during the Warring States period, Lai argues, is that this mode of image making was transferred to recently deceased members of the elite. Their relatives wanted to care for them and help them maintain their social identity, but they also feared them and wanted to pacify and control them during their journey to becoming ancestors. The chapter closes with a discussion of the use of hybrid zoomorphic/anthropomorphic forms to depict gods and demigods during the Warring States period, employed to evoke feelings of awe and suggest divine presence. The impact of this section is blunted somewhat by a long digression into the iconography of the so-called tomb guardian figurine found in Chu tombs, which Lai interprets as a fecundity god derived from the representation of a phallus.
The fourth chapter, “Letters to the Underworld,” explores the Warring States transition in views of the afterlife from the perspective of the written word. Although many different genres of text have been found buried in tombs from this time period, Lai focuses on two special genres in particular, funerary-object lists and memorials addressed to an underworld bureaucracy. Lai argues that the object lists initially served as a kind of bookkeeping and sumptuary control for elite burials, but that they later took on a more magico-ritual function in lower-status tombs (where the listed objects were often not actually found in the tomb), read aloud at funerals in a declaration that affirmed “the relation between the dead and the living.” The so-called letters to the underworld (gaodishu) have fascinated scholars for years, for they reveal a kind of underworld bureaucracy that mirrored the growing bureaucracy of the royal and imperial realms. While earlier scholars have focused on received texts and have identified elite authors as the creators of this mirror-image world, Lai argues that the underworld bureaucracy was the bottom-up creation of local officials and ritual specialists who performed the funerals and created these unique texts.
The fifth and final chapter, “Journey to the Northwest,” expands on Lai's earlier published work (Asia Major 3rd ser., 18:1 [2005]) to advance a provocative and original argument. Lai argues that many objects found by archaeologists in tombs, especially things like lamps, mirrors, makeup kits, and maps, were not to serve as daily-use objects for the deceased in his or her “happy home” in the tomb, but were objects to be used for travel outside the tomb, in a journey of the soul to a cosmic destination in the far northwest. He further argues that this western/northwestern destination laid the groundwork for the later cult of the Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu) and the Buddhist pure lands, which would also focus on western paradises for the dead. While the theory about some objects in the tomb serving as travel paraphernalia is fairly well demonstrated, since funerary-object lists from sites like Baoshan identify them as “paraphernalia used for travel,” the hypothesis about the northwestern destination for a postmortem journey is a little less grounded. Much of this argument rests on a single incantation from Jiudian tomb no. 56, which mentions the mythical “wilds of Buzhou” in the far northwest as a destination for those who died by weapons. Lai suggests that the war dead were compelled through rituals to travel to this far-off place to control their dangerous spirits, building on his argument in chapter one. However, Lai appears to extend this one piece of evidence to suggest that the souls of all the dead traveled to this same place (161, 165). Still, it is a stimulating theory which requires serious consideration and should be reexamined in the light of future excavations.
