Death in Traditional Chinese Culture
Settling souls into their new homes.
In traditional Chinese culture, the dead may move on in one sense, but in another sense, they don’t move on, and they stay with us. We give them a certain role among the living, for example, as ancestors. Some of you may have shrines to your ancestors in your home.
In Chinese culture, we have the cosmology of yin and yang (陰陽) which are correlated with “Heaven and Earth” (tian di 天地). There are two different kinds of souls: one is the hun (魂) and the other is the po (魄). In some Chinese sayings, we have “three hun and seven po.” The hun is yang and goes up towards Heaven, and the po is yin and goes down towards the Earth. The hun is associated with spirits and the po will become ghosts.
In traditional Chinese culture, the dead always stay with us and remain literally at the centre of the house. If you go into a traditional Chinese home in the countryside, you will often find the altar for the ancestors in the very central room of the house. As most of you know, the ancestors are represented by portraits and tablets. The tablets in some sense are considered to be “alive” and have some kind of spiritual energy linked to the spirits of the ancestors. Daily offerings, food, and incense are given to the ancestors. Why are these daily offerings given to the ancestors?
You may hope that they can live better in the afterlife. Or you may think that they did not enjoy life enough when they are alive. Or there is also the idea of burning money for them, to bribe the officials of the underworld, to ensure their safe passage to heaven or to a better reincarnation for the ancestors. The ghosts will go through the tribunal, a kind of court, where they have to undergo the tortures for all the sins that they have committed. They need to bribe the officials of Hell so as to pass on to Heaven.
Many Chinese Buddhist temples contain simulations of the “Buddhist Hell”. Sculptures depict the tortures of the dead, gouging their eyes out and tearing their bodies apart. The dead a being punished for all their sins. But at the very end, they will be released to the heavenly world, the world of ultimate bliss (jile shijie 極樂世界). And just as in this world, sometimes the officials of hell are not so honest and you need to bribe them on the way.
In traditional Chinese culture, people give offerings for their ancestors. This implies the idea that the dead have never really left us. We feed them as if we feed our family members — we include them. Especially in Chinese culture, if you don’t eat with somebody, this means that person is not really your friend or family member. The sense of belonging is demonstrated through the sharing of food and drinks. You offer food and drinks to the ancestors; you feed them. And in a sense, they continue to be a part of the family. The family includes not only the living, but also the dead. That’s why in traditional Chinese culture, the tablets of the dead are placed right in the middle of the house.
According to the traditional Chinese worldview, what would happen if we do not give offerings to the ancestors? What would happen if you ignore them? You might dream of them asking you for something. They come to you and ask more. This may also mean that you don’t have filial piety so they won’t be happy about that. Just like grandma and grandpa will not be happy if you ignore them even here in this world.
We don’t have time to go into the stages of the funeral ritual, but we have to know an important point regarding funeral rites. In any culture and religion, a funeral is the rite of passage that changes the status of the people who have died. In the Chinese context, the funeral is the ritual separation of the hun and po souls — the hun will become the ancestor and the po will go into the tomb. This is the ritual transformation of a person from life to death. In other cultures or religions, for example in Christianity, there is the separation between the soul and the body — the soul will go on to Heaven and the body will be buried.
There are different notions of souls, the body and so on in different cultures and religions. But in funerals, the idea is always that the different parts will be assigned to a new, fixed home — in heaven, in the tomb, in the shrine — and won’t wander around lost between the world of the living and of the dead.
To learn more about death in Chinese religion, see Oxfeld, Ellen. “Life-cycle rituals in rural and urban China; birth, marriage, and death.” Handbook on Religion in China 110 (2020): 131.
In this essay, I have talked about what happens to souls after the death of the body on Chinese religion. How about in other religious traditions? See this essay in the Re-Assembling Reality series on Models of the soul: vitality, personhood, consciousness and spirituality.
We’ve been talking about the meaning of death, but what about life? See this essay in the Re-Assembling Reality series on different ways of defining life.
See the next set of essays in the New Mindscape series, on Observe your mindscape. Sit back and watch your objects of consciousness.
See the previous essay, on Death: a passage in life. Funerals as rites of passage.
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This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.