Han Thanatology and the Division of “Souls”

Abstract

Modern scholarship has repeatedly maintained that the separation of the hun and po souls at death was a popular Han belief, but a re-examination of the received literature suggests that hunpo dualism was at best only a scholastic model. Sources ranging from the Zuo zhuan to Han medical texts depict the hunpo as an inherent part of the properly functioning body complex, and any deficiency in the hunpo did not necessarily result in death but in distress and disease. Grave stele texts, which also never distinguish between a hun and a po suggest a different dualism—that between the hun or po with its corporeal associations on the one hand and the more rarefied shen on the other. This dualism may have found a practical expression in ancestral worship because the hunpo and body were generally confined to the cemetery but the mobile shen enjoyed its sacrifices at the lineage shrine.