Mawangdui

Archaeological discoveries constantly fuel historical revisionism. The standard expositions of death culture in ancient China could no longer remain the same after the excavation of the second-century B.C.E. tombs at Mawangdui in the early 1970s.¹ The astounding riches of the well-preserved burial site showcase, with material integrity and visual vivacity, an entire world of funerary culture to which early textual accounts provide only partial verbal testimonials. Not only does the cache enrich our knowledge of death in ancient China; it may also shake it up. The shake-up, however, has taken longer than expected—more than three decades and still counting. The delayed revelation is not for lack of information; on the contrary, it is the embarrassment of riches. One would think that the palpable immediacy of the artifacts would tell a straightforward story, but it does not. The artifacts in fact appear to manifest different and often seemingly conflicting impulses.

Tomb 1, the burial of Marquise of Dai (died after 176 B.C.E.) says it all. The represented afterlife world exists—if divided by modes of representation—in two broad kinds of media, three-dimensional artifacts and painted surfaces; in other words, a tangible material world and a virtual space. The artifacts—household goods, furniture, entertainment pieces, and wooden statues of servants—largely spell out a self-sufficient subterraneous household (fig. 1);

the painted surfaces, comprising lacquer-painted coffin panels (fig. 2) and a T-shaped pictorial banner (fig. 3), appear to chart a flight itinerary for the deceased’s soul in the netherworld, heading for the proverbial Mount Kunlun and, ultimately, heaven.

The two sets of representations thus send conflicting and confusing messages to the tomb occupant, nudging her in different directions. The household setting assures her of the safe haven of this well-furnished home; the paintings beckon her to depart for greener pastures. Even for the departure scenario alone, there are conflicting directives: the painting on the coffin ushers her to the immortal Mount Kunlun, assumed to be somewhere in the west; the painted banner appears to point her to the empyrean above. To stay or to go, and whereto—those are the questions.²

The problem has been met with different proposed solutions. Some regard the tomb as a “polycentric” space where every possible accommodation for the deceased was made on different, and even conflicting, premises of the afterlife. If death entails divergent postmortem scenarios, so the theory goes, the living provided for them all.³ Others attribute the problem to our common subscription to the dubious premise of the soul’s ascent to heaven. They argue that this postmortem flight is a later Chinese aspiration, a notion that had not yet taken hold of the imagination of the common folk in the middle of the second-century B.C.E.⁴ Does not the shamanistic voice in the near-contemporary soul-summoning ritual urge the wandering soul to “climb not to the heaven above. For tigers and leopards guard the gates, with jaws ever ready to rend up mortal men”?⁵ Is not the painted banner part of—or related to—the soul-summoning ritual? If so, it surely leads the roaming soul back into the subterraneous depth of the grave for the eternal hereafter.⁶ So, the issue at stake is not just about the tomb furnishings per se; it is also our understanding of the Chinese view of death and its afterlife in the second-century B.C.E., a crucial transitional period. Do the paintings guide the soul to heaven? Or is there something wrong with the formulation of this question?

The Mawangdui tomb registers the complicated dynamics of an image/ text problem. The tomb presents a deliberate visual program that defies any easy discursive formulation and conceptualization. We find ourselves caught in a hermeneutical circle of sorts. We want the tomb to speak for itself and extricate a new story out of it. However, our extrapolation is mired in verbal formulation. Each visual image leads to varied glossings from a variety of textual sources, none intended for this particular context. Our choice of a particular glossing of the image, which eventually results in a patchwork of citations,⁷ depends on a large picture we form at the outset in view of the Han notion of death. Entrenched in our received wisdom, we risk the danger of fitting the new material into the Procrustean bed of the same old storyline, thereby defeating the purpose of studying the visual material in the first place. However, without the historical bedrock of the textual sources, the visual intelligibility of the program remains an elusive matter of contention.

To many, death ritual is the key link between the tomb burial and textual records. Since care of the dead in ancient China was largely a ritual affair, the visual program of the tomb interment is considered part of the ritual process. Practically all scholars have sought to gauge the significance of the tomb furnishings by way of death rituals, especially the soul-summoning. They avail themselves with a set of key texts comprising the ancient songs of the south and classics on rites from the central plain, which constitute major sources regarding the soul-summoning and related funerary rituals. But the soul-summoning ritual, as constituted from the sources available to us, appears to be at odds with the visual program. The ritual warns of the perils of approaching heaven’s gate; the painted banner in Tomb 1 ostensibly lets the soul pass that leopard-guarded gate to the sublime empyrean of the sun and the moon. The disparity has led some to question the validity of relating the burial to the soul-summoning ritual, or at least to judiciously distinguish the symbols and paraphernalia of the soul-recalling ritual to those deployed in the funerary service.⁸ It certainly exacerbates the problems emerging from the materials: is the soul-summoning ritual related to the tomb furnishings at all? To what extent can death ritual shed light on burial? More significantly, if the riches of the tombs do no more than confirm what we already know about the soul-summoning ritual, what a bore and disappointment they would be! There is surely something going on beyond the soul-summoning ritual. To begin with, the difference in formal properties between the ritual and burial are notable. The ritual is a set of orchestrated actions that amount to a process in a sequential manner; the burial is an arrangement of objects in a spatial layout. This difference notwithstanding, a certain correlation is nonetheless compelling. Both sets of orchestration share a goodwill toward the postmortem welfare of the deceased in the afterlife cosmos. To this extent, they are both premised upon a view of a cosmological structure that governs their ritualistic preparation for the afterlife. A ritual logic governs both the visual programming and the ceremonial performance: one takes the form of a set of images and the other, a set of deeds. Once the living performers of the ritual are gone, we are left with the mute objects mapping out a symbolic space. An eternal virtual ritual continues, albeit in somewhat different ways. What follows is an attempt to pry open the nature of this artifacts-enacted virtual ritual. But first, a brief review of the performed ritual as backdrop is in order.

Our knowledge of ancient Chinese death ritual comes from three sets of sources: the ritual texts recording practices in northern China;⁹ the southern songs of the Warring States and Qin-Han periods; and, lastly, the ethnographic record of modern times. Together, they give us a glimpse into the ritual practice, which can be described as follows.

Once it has been checked and confirmed that a person’s breathing has stopped, he or she is declared dead. A soul-summoning ritual immediately follows. The ritual is premised on the conviction that upon a person’s death, his soul leaves his body and wanders abroad. The living make an effort to call back the wandering soul. A ritual specialist climbs to the rooftop from the east and proceeds to its middle. Facing north, he shouts, “come back, so-and-so [the name of the deceased]” while waving a garment of the deceased. He then throws down the clothes to the front of the house, where they are received in a garment basket. The soul caller descends from the rooftop from the north. The dead person’s clothes are then used to cover his corpse. Food (dry meat and jam) and wine are placed on the east side of the corpse, and curtains are drawn in the hall.

A banner made out of pieces of black and red cloth,¹⁰ on which is inscribed “so-and-so’s body (jiu 柩),” is hoisted on a three-foot-long bamboo post on the terrace west of the house. A ritual specialist (shangzhu 商祝) dresses the corpse in layers of clothes worn by the deceased person in his lifetime and the outfit specially made for the funerary occasion; the specialist then ties the body with ribbons. Vessels containing sacrificial animal meat are arrayed outside the bedroom. A geomantic augur (shi 筮) surveys and determines “the netherworld residence” (youyu 幽宅) for the deceased to make sure that he encounters no hardship in the afterlife. A diviner (buren 卜人) scorches a turtle shell and scrutinizes the resulting pattern to determine the whereabouts of the wandering soul. An auspicious day is chosen for the burial. On that day, the body is placed in the coffin and lowered into the grave. Two baskets of cooked millet are placed respectively at the head and rear ends of the coffin, which is then covered with wood and sealed with mud. The “spirit articles” are arranged from the south to the north.¹¹

The southern songs register more specifically the program of the soul-summoning ritual. The procedure involves a master of dreams (zhangmeng 掌夢), who divines the condition or whereabouts of the soul, and a shaman, who specializes in recalling the soul. The shaman does this by incantation, addressing the soul directly: “O soul, come back! Why have you left your old abode and sped to the earth’s far corners, / Deserting the place of your delight to meet all those things of evil omen?” The soul-summoner then paints, through rhetorical devices of enumeration and persuasion, a terrifying verbal picture of the horrors awaiting the wandering soul in all quarters of the cosmos. The east, peopled by giants who catch the soul for game, is a land scorched by ten flaming suns that melt metal and dissolve stone. The south is owned by the people with tattooed faces and blackened teeth who sacrifice human flesh and pound human bones to paste; it is a place teeming with speedy foxes and nine-headed coiling serpents who relish the taste of human heart. The west presents just as much peril: the moving sand, the “Thunder’s Chasm,” the vast, dry, and barren desert, the elephant-sized red ants, and the gourdlike wasps. The north presents a chilling prospect of layered ice and endless sheets of snowflakes. The “heaven above” does not seem to be any better: the tigers and leopards guarding heaven’s gate can harm human beings, not to mention the nine-headed monster that can uproot thousands of trees and the werewolves given to throwing humans into an abyss. Nor does the “Land of Darkness” underground offer a safe haven: the triple-eyed and bovine-bodied “Earth God,” with its tiger’s head, sharp horns, and bloody claws, is surely a menace.¹²

The shaman then contrasts the horrors of the outside world with the comfort of the domestic abode. He tries to coax the wandering soul back through the city gate and to its old home. Then, he lays out in elaborate detail the architectural splendor, the exquisite furnishing, the charm of young female beauties, the lavish banquet, the enticing dance and music, and the liubo 六博 game—all in an attempt to lure the nomadic soul home.¹³ The soul-summon-ing ritual as recorded in ethnographic observations bears a strikingly similar rhetorical structure of enumerating the dangers of all regions of the universe and pleading with the wandering soul to return to its previous home.¹⁴

Granted, the differences among the sources are self-apparent. The classical ritual texts are methodic, fastidious, and exclusively anchored in this world with special attention to the careful mortuary procedures. The southern songs are passionate and imaginative, reaching all quarters of the universe. It is hard to determine whether it is the variations between the north and south regional traditions or the distinct generic dispositions (i.e., ritual how-to manuals vs. lyrical songs) that account for the different impressions we gain from the two sets of texts. More likely it is the formal requirements of the genre that predispose the songs to do what they are supposed to do. In any case, the two sources combine to give us a larger picture of the practice of death ritual in early China.

What these sources have in common is a premise about the structure of the postmortem world divided into two spaces: the numinous space in which the out-of-body wandering soul roams, and the immediate physical surrounding of the dead body that needs care. The classical ritual texts, for all their fastidious worldly care, still affirm the need for soul-summoning and pay special attention to directions: mourners are required to do this or that toward the north or northwest, depending on the specific procedures. In this regard, the death ritual revealed in the ceremonial texts aligns itself with the southern songs that emphatically map out imaginary quarters. They both call attention to—and acknowledge—the space out there, away from our world. The southern songs, for all their far-roaming imagination, urge the wandering soul to return to the familiar world to enjoy the pleasures of the household. In doing so, they align themselves with the this-world anchorage of the classical ritual texts.

Add the Mawangdui tombs to this state of affairs, and the result is both enriching and unsettling. For those unsatisfied with the verbal picture present-ed in the texts, the tombs provide additional pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. For those ensconced in the knowledge of death ritual in ancient China derived from textual sources, the palpable physical tombs present hard evidence pointing to unknown dimensions. It soon becomes apparent that we can find resonances of the texts cited previously in the material arrangement of the tomb furnishings. Meanwhile, disparities are just as—if not more—notable.

The real question concerns what to make of the disparities. Are they of our own making, that is, our failure to understand the structure of experience behind the death ritual? There is, first of all, the question of why we need to relate the ritual to the tomb furnishings. The obvious answer is that we want to understand the line of thought behind the funerary culture of which both death ritual and burial are manifestations. Granted, ritual and art have different, incommensurable formal properties. Ritual, as mentioned previously, is a set of actions; art is a set of visual forms. One unfolds sequentially and procedurally in time, the other eternally laid out in—and mapping out—space. Where they intersect and interpenetrate is, first, the fact that visual images are deployed and embedded in the ritual process. Then, in addition to their shared context of care of the dead, both presuppose a certain postmortem condition of the deceased individual (wandering spirit, etc.) and a structure of the imaginary universe of the afterlife to be inhabited by the deceased’s spirit; both make preparations in anticipation of an alternative reality awaiting the dead. This shared premise bridges the gap between the two forms of cultural expression and allows ritual itself to be a mapping device and art to be a special order of experience.

Moreover, the correlations between ritual and art call attention to the modes of address involved in two formal devices. The soul-summoning ritual, for instance, achieves its effect by way of painting terrifying verbal pictures, enticing, pleading, and repeating. These modalities of addressing the spirit do not translate easily into the painted images and made objects. However, to the extent that ritual and art cohere in the mortuary context and that art is part of the ritual, it pays to keep these modalities in mind when we consider the overtones of the images: are they doing the same thing?

A number of traits in the physical disposition of the deceased’s body resonate with the ritual prescription. The use of an “eye kerchief” (mimu 幎目) to cover the deceased’s face,¹⁵ the layered wrappings of the corpse, and the use of silk string to fasten the arms are among the ritually prescribed treatments that materialized in the actual burial.¹⁶ The physical features of the painted banner covering the innermost coffin in the tomb, in particular, harmonize with aspects of the soul-summing ritual. The assemblage of three silk pieces—two “arms” attached to one long “trunk”—results in an ostensible T-shape, which strongly suggests a symbolic garment. The “fei-garment” (feiyi 非衣) mentioned in the tomb inventory confirms our sartorial impression.¹⁷ (To recall, the deceased’s garment is used in the soul-summoning ritual to call back the wandering spirit.¹⁸ ) The stick hanger at the top of the banner suggests that the T-shaped painting (fig. 3) had been lofted or hung somewhere, presumably in some part of the ritual process.

More importantly, the painting appears to have been intended as more than just a stage prop for one-time use during a ritual performance. The 205-centimeter-long banner covering the inner coffin was apparently designed to approximate the latter’s length of 202 centimeters.¹⁹ The close fit suggests that the painting was an integral part of the coffin complex and that its symbolic function was tied to the coffin, whose primary significance resided in the netherworld. The painting was doing something down there in the grave. The pictorial evidence internal to the banner testifies to this point.

It sounds odd to speak of the inanimate object in human terms. This vocabulary is in part compelled by the hermeneutical challenge inherent to the situation of dealing with an ancient burial circumscribed by the dearth of contextual information. Presently, there is no way of knowing now who designed the banner. Even if we had information about the artisan who executed the painting, it would still be wide of the mark to regard him as the sole agency responsible for the conceptual scheme underlying the design. Larger cultural forces, conventions, and habits inform an individual artisan’s execution. Much of the intelligence and thought process that went into the composition are discernible on the basis of the internal pictorial evidence, provided that we are observant enough. The agency of the painting appears pointedly salient if we gauge the compositional decisions against prevalent notions and conventions current in second-century B.C.E. China.

The painting has been the focus of much contention since its discovery. Over the years, the attention has shifted from scattered iconographic identification of its specific images to more fundamental questions. There is a shared premise that the painted banner fulfills the symbolic function of a road map for the deceased’s soul (hun 魂) in its fumbling and faring in the numinous realm. Questions remain concerning where the banner directs the soul. For some time, the majority opinion maintained that the painting guides the flight of the deceased’s soul to heaven.²⁰ Since then, revisionism has emerged to cast doubt on this received wisdom. Some argue that the idea of the soul’s ascent had not yet gained currency in the middle of the second century B.C.E. Instead, the painting more likely beckons the soul to return to the underground home.²¹ Accordingly, the placement of the painted banner on the innermost coffin underground is explained in this light. Although this revisionist view gains ground in some ways, it loses in others. The theory obviously comes up short of accounting for the force of the painting, which does show an ascent, led by soaring dragons and other creatures, culminating at the celestial sphere. To explain this, an ingenious solution proposes that the entire pictorial space—ranging from earth to heaven—pertains to the numinous realm of death, with its own sun and moon.²² While this suggestion leaves too many loose ends, its merit rests on the insight that we treat the fictive space pictured on the banner as something other than physical space. Taking this insight as a cue, we may further reconsider the nature of this pictorial space. The painting certainly depicts a cosmos encompass-ing heaven and the underworld. However, keeping in mind the entangled body/space conception governing the painted coffins, we soon realize that our problem with the painting stems from the formulation of the question, that is, does the painted banner guide the soul to heaven or summon it to the underworld? Neither “heaven,” “underworld,” nor “soul” is an absolute entity in second-century B.C.E. thinking. These notions need to be revised before they qualify as significant pieces to the jigsaw puzzle. With this kind of body-as-space and space-as-body interplay on the lacquer coffins in mind, we may need to posit a different kind of cosmos here as well.

The composition on the painted banner (fig. 3) is divided into four sections. From the bottom up, they are as follows: (1) the underworld, whose upper limit is defined by a platform upheld by a giant Atlas-like figure (fig. 4);

(2) the human world, between the previously mentioned platform and the jade disc with intertwining dragon bodies weaving through it (fig. 4); (3) the in-between space (probably the Hanging Garden associated with the sacred Mt. Kunlun), between the jade disc and the canopy (fig. 5);

and (4) heaven, whose entrance is defined by a pair of inverted T-shaped devices and guarded by two gate-of-heaven porters in official robes (fig. 6).

The tomb occupant, leaning on a staff and attended by a group on either side,²³ is positioned between heaven and earth (fig. 5).

The event in the human world (fig. 4) is relatively easy to ascertain. The array of vessels and the attention of the deferential figures focused on the pots on the table indicate that a ritual offering is taking place. A significant detail is the object with a rounded top, borne on a pair of carrying poles, which appears to be a garment box.²⁴ The resemblance of its decorative pattern to that of the robe of the deceased in the middle section at least establishes its affinity with the deceased, thereby indicating the focus of the ritual offering. Everything about the scene suggests the living’s mourning rite. That much seems clear. The remaining matter of contention is what we make of the underworld below, the heaven above, and the traffic in between.

To begin with, the painting gives an interesting twist to the conventional postmortem scenario. At the outset, the early Han binary opposition of heaven/spirit and earth/body appears to provide a neat conceptual scheme to account for the composition. Human existence stems, according to a classical second-century B.C.E. formulation, from the interplay of the yin and yang divinities, which congeals into the human organism. Heaven endows it with “essential spirit” (jingshen 精神), and earth supplies it with “bodily form” (xingti 形體). Upon death, one’s “spirit enters the gate of heaven and the bodily remains return to its ground (jingshen ru qi men, er guhai fan qi gen 精神入其門, 而骨骸反其根).”²⁵ The pictorial composition appears to largely correspond with this binary state.²⁶ The spirit soars into heaven’s gate, and, presumably, the bodily form delves into the underworld—except that the second half of the equation is not quite there in the picture.

The neat scheme founders in the underworld as presented in the painting. There is no hint whatsoever of the deceased’s bodily form settling for eternity in the underworld. The rather distinct disposition and ambience of the underworld also stand in sharp contrast with its traditional portrait. A third-century B.C.E. poet paints a horrifying picture of this place:

O soul, come back! Go not down to the Land of Darkness, Where the Earth God lies, nine-coiled, with dreadful horns on his forehead, And a great humped back and bloody thumbs, pursuing men, swift-footed:

Three eyes he has in his tiger’s head, and his body is like a bull’s.

O soul, come back! Lest you bring on yourself disaster.²⁷

The painting has no use for such a horror; its underworld is cast in a different mood. The Earth God’s double images (that is, the pair of horned blue quadrupeds standing on fish tails) are sidelined and hardly intimidating. They are in fact cheerful sidekicks to a prominent pot-bellied squatting figure at the bottom center presiding over two pairs of conjugating aquatic creatures. Between his parted legs is a blue fish overlaying a red serpent; below that is a pair of fishes whose snouts are ostensibly marked blue and red—yin and yang—joyfully intertwining their tails in copulation.²⁸

The presiding figure can be identified as “the Grand One” (Taiyi 太一). The ancient text on Chu bamboo slips from Guodian presents him as a procreative god who resides in water and generates yin and yang forces whose interplay spawns the four seasons and thus cosmic movement.²⁹

The silk painting in Mawangdui Tomb 3 amounts to a diagram of this cosmic process of generation (fig. 7).

The accompanying inscription identifies the top-center figure as the Grand One. With his legs symbolically spread apart, the deity presides over cosmic creation and generation. At the bottom is the meeting of a pair of dragons, respectively in dark (yin) and bright (yang) colors. Their interplay generates the ascending force of a yin creature (the dark-colored lizardlike dragon) holding the sun (yang),³⁰ signifying a consummate state of spiritual illumination. As a result, four figures—the “Four Seasons” or “Four Quarters”—spread out horizontally, completing the cosmic picture. The inscribed character she 社 (altar) indicates the locus for the offering to divinity and festival occasion of yin/yang (nature) and male/female (culture) copulation.³¹

The T-shaped banner in Tomb 1 replays with a vengeance this scenario of yin/yang intercourse. The squatting figure with parted legs, similar to the Grand One in the silk painting from Tomb 3, likewise hosts the copulation of aquatic creatures in the initial stage of generating yin/yang forces (fig. 4). The Mawangdui medical literature confirms one’s intuitive grasp of the entangled fishes as a veiled visual euphemism of joyful copulation. “Conjoining yin and yang” specifically alludes to sexual intercourse,³² which in turn leads to procreation and rebirth.³³ Just as significant is the squatting giant himself. Interweaving between his parted legs are—yin and yang again—a red serpent overlaid with a blue fry (fig. 4). While not identical in referents, the giant’s squatting posture closely resembles that of a figure in the illustrated Book of the Generation of the Fetus (Taichan shu 胎產圖) from Mawangdui Tomb 3 (fig. 8).³⁴

Signifying a newborn baby, the squatting figure in this book’s illustration serves as a diagram for prognostication of the newborn child’s fortune.³⁵ Its association with procreation is suggestive and, indeed, illuminating about its counterpart in the Mawangdui Tomb 1 painting (fig. 4). It is no coincidence that this similarly posed figure in the Tomb 1 painting pertains just as well to birth or rebirth. The serpent/fish overlay ostensibly recalls the scene painted on the lid of the dark-ground coffin. There, a series of bird-fighting-serpent vignettes offsets and highlights the singularity of a bird-carrying-fish scene (fig. 15).

As noted previously, early texts characterize the serpent-turning-fish transformation as a symbolic process attending the “re-awakening” (fusu 復蘇) or revival of life.³⁶

Since the theme here pertains to death and rebirth, let us turn to Mawangdui medical manuscripts for the period conceptualization of the matter. The manuscripts frequently mention life and death and ways of “exiting from death and entering into life (chu si ru sheng 出死入生).”³⁷ What is most striking is that “death” in the Mawangdui literature is rarely treated as a categorically absolute state in the sense of the cessation of all life function of the human organism. Rather, enmeshed in the give-and-take parsing with regard to “life,” “death” breaks down into varying degrees of loss and deficiency in vitalizing elements, that is, yin and yang vapors and even phallic vigor. “To exit from death” (chu si 出死) may in fact mean expelling the stale or deadening air stored in one’s body.³⁸ “To raise the dead” (qi si 起死) may specifically denote the restoration of penile erection.³⁹ Since death is rarely treated as irrevocable and terminal, there is always the hope of turning it around, that is, “exiting from death and entering into life.” It is conceivable that some kind of line may have been drawn between the ambiguous physiological “death” in the medical literature and the brute reality of the marquise’s biological death. It is just as conceivable that, in the care of her death, the symbolic means and ritual procedures whereby the living made token efforts to revive her must have followed the same premise underlying the vitalizing macrobiotic hygiene described in the Mawangdui manuscript (or else there would have been no need to inter these manuscripts in the tomb of the marquise’s son). To sustain life and prevent death, according to the medical literature, it is essential that yin and yang vapors are kept in good supply and continually replenished when deficient. To this end, one is advised to practice dietetics, breath cultivation, and “conjoining yin and yang” (i.e., sexual intercourse), also called “coitus with yin” (jie yin 接陰) and “conjoining vapors” (he qi 合氣).⁴⁰ For the living handling the marquise’s death, therefore, these are the necessary components of the symbolic means of reviving her life. Such is not to say that the painting illustrates the Mawangdui sex manual, nor does it picture the deceased’s sexual activity. Rather, “conjoining yin and yang” as an abstract phrase comes down primarily to sexual intercourse. Premised on the union of opposite forces in the cosmos, the metaphor inevitably and inextricably brings the cosmic interplay into the topography of the body. To the extent that the painting amounts to a symbolic means of reviving the deceased’s life, it has no other visual vocabulary than these tropes.

The owl-on-turtle images (fig. 4), which have befuddled scholars, thus make sense in this context. The underworld, a phase of darkness signified by its slimy denizens (fishes and a serpent), is bracketed by a pair of turtles, each carrying an owl on its back. The owl/turtle images mark points of solar movement. In ancient China, the sun’s movement was envisioned as following a cyclical course. Sunset means the solar descent into an abyss in the west where the sun goes through a dark watery phase.⁴¹ The solar bird, or bird-in-the-sun, accordingly turns, in its nocturnal phase, into an owl. The turtle serves as the vehicle that transports the sun during its subterraneous journey from the western extremity to the eastern horizon for it to rise again. Thus, the turtle on the right is shown unattached to land (i.e., at the beginning of submersion into the watery underworld), signaling sunset and dusk; the turtle on the left is climbing into the human world, thereby signifying the dawn and sunrise.

The cloud pattern the turtles carry in their beaks, signifying vapor, is notable. The images recapitulate the yin/yang theme that starts at the bottom of the painting. For revival of life, according to the Mawangdui medical literature, it is essential that one replenish stale yin/yang vapors in the body by practicing breath cultivation. Dusk and dawn are the most significant moments for this exercise. The breathing at dusk exhales the stale vapor (“death”); the breathing at dawn inhales the fresh vapor (“life”).⁴² The rhythm makes it possible to exit from death and enter into life. Breath cultivation is also related to sexual hygiene—both activities are premised on the need for replenishment of yin/yang vapors. So, we may understand the owl/turtle images as marking the moments—dusk and dawn—of renewing these vapors, through breath, sexual cultivation, or both.

The process of conjoining yin and yang vapors is continued by acts described in Mawangdui medical literature in the metaphorical language of nourishment. One is advised to “empty [one’s] five depots (wucang 五臧[藏])” to make room for the arrival of the “dark winepot” (xuanzun 玄尊), out of which one “sucks” and drinks the “heavenly beverage.” This may allude to anything from the breath cultivation involving the accumulation of saliva to the sexual cultivation involving “drenching the yang blaze” (i.e., penis) in the “yin water” (vaginal discharge).⁴³ In any case, the macrobiotic hygiene practice here creates a situation in which “drink and food enter the body as guests (yin shi bin ti 飲食賓體),” and the ingestion of the “spirit vapor” allows one to “penetrate the spiritual illumination (tong yu shen ming 通於神明).”⁴⁴ The description of this process puts the human-world scene in the painting—long regarded as representing a sacrificial offering to the deceased—in a new light. Even if we refrain from making too much of the five vessels (i.e., that they may hint at the Five Viscera), the much-touted “numinous winepot” and the “drink and food” that supply the “spirit vapor” mentioned in the medical literature are all too suggestive. Their bearing on the scene of vessels (fig. 4) ought not be lost on us.

A revitalization regimen aimed at resurrecting the dead thus underlies the successive scenes in the painting. Read upwards from the bottom, the copulation of the red and blue fish signifies the initial phase of “yin/yang conjugation.” The force of this union is continued by the paired dragons, also in red and blue. The yin and yang forces are thus set in motion. The next stage is the replenishment and nourishing of the vital breath. It is for good reasons that the food and drinks are aligned with the pair of owl/turtle images (i.e., dusk and dawn as moments of replenishing yin/yang vapors), and that they bring the red and white dragons closer together (fig. 4), or “conjoin the yin/yang.” The assortment of heterogeneous images comes together in a coherent regimen in light of the following instruction on the macrobiotic hygiene practice of “joining vapors” (i.e., sexual cultivation) in a Mawangdui manuscript:

Suck in the spirit mist; drink that heavenly beverage. Bring it to the five depots, with the aim of storing it deeply. Perform dragon breathing at dawn; the vapor and form, then, become hard . . . near water. Essence and vapor are congealed, hardy, and long lasting. Spirit harmony is obtained inside; ethereal-spirit and earthly-spirit are gleaming. The five depots become firm and white, their jade color having a renewed glow. Your longevity forms a triad with the sun and moon; and you become the blossom of Under-heaven.⁴⁵

This passage well casts the vessels (containing “heavenly beverage”) and the dragons and the owl/turtles (“performing dragon breathing at dawn”). The “heavenly beverage,” following Harper, may refer to the vitalizing fluids, simultaneously generated products of sexual cultivation in combination with breath cultivation.⁴⁶ The “dragon breathing” (longxi 龍息), a measured breathing that leads to the firming of “vapor and form,” apparently indicates a controlled breath-cum-sexual cultivation at dawn. We begin to see the symbolic act referenced by the configuration of the dragons and owl/turtle images, in particular, the cloud pattern (“vapor”) held so ostensibly close to the wine and food vessels. Revitalization regimens such as breath cultivation at dawn and dusk and dietetics (that is, the intake of wine and food laid out in the offering scene centered on a table) are among the means of nourishing the vital breath, allowing the so-called dragon breath to form and soar.⁴⁷ The facing pair of half-human, half-bird hybrids—wind lords of spring—signify the arrival of a new season and the promise of life.⁴⁸

The revival of life in the early Chinese schematic concept is not primarily a somatic phenomenon; it occurs instead in a cosmic framework. The turbulent heaven-earth interplay crystallizes into some “culminant essence” (zhi jing 至精), cosmic exudates of sorts, which informs human life as well. Once the “essence” enters the human body—through proper breath cultivation and other means—it could accumulate, under proper care, into a critical mass known as the “concentration of essence,” thereby connecting to “spiritual illumination” (shen ming 神明), a form of cosmic consciousness and intelligence.⁴⁹ One way of concentrating the essence is through the use of the so-called jade closure (yubi 玉閉) to prevent the vapor and essence from leaking out while admitting the arrival of the “spirit illumination”:

The procedure for living long is to carefully employ the jade closure. When at the right times the jade closure enfolds, spirit illumination arrives and accumulates. Accumulating, it invariably manifests radiance. When the jade closure firms the essence, this invariably ensures that the jade wellspring is not upset. Then the hundred ailments do not occur; thus you can live long.⁵⁰

What precisely this magical “jade closure” is remains a point of contention in modern exegeses. It could mean either “a physiological metaphor designating a place inside the body where vapor and essence are enclosed” or “the act of ‘enclosing vapor/essence,’ ” “the technique of either holding the breath or enclosing vapor,”⁵¹ or simply a means of controlling ejaculation in sexual cultivation.⁵² The referential ambiguity notwithstanding, its visual representation is more readily identifiable. The jade disc (yubi 玉壁), a round, flat piece of jade frequently found in ancient burials, may well be the symbolic artifact embodying the notion of the proverbial “jade closure” (yubi 玉閉); the circular shape of the enclosing form and its homonymic status lend credence to the connection. While the object has been explicated in general terms—described as a conduit between heaven and earth, for example—the Mawangdui medical literature provides us with a more precise exposition of its function: it is a symbolic device to enclose the essence and vapor while providing a channel for the arrival of spirit illumination.

The jade closure is certainly pressed into service in the decorative program of the Mawangdui tomb. On the Tomb 1 banner, the goumang birds converge on a jade disc—the jade closure—above (fig. 4). Its symbolic function is to “firm the essence” while allowing for the arrival and accumulation of spiritual illumination. More specifically, in the parlance of sexual cultivation, it simply means the control of ejaculation. The disc either embodies the physiological act of “jade closure” or visualizes the phrase “jade hole” (yudou 玉竇),⁵³ a veiled reference to the vagina in Mawangdui medical literature. In any case, the sexual overtone of the pair of dragons of yin and yang colors interweaving through the jade disc is all too self-apparent.⁵⁴

The yin/yang conjugation, intensified by the ingestion of the “spiritual liquor” (symbolized by the food-and-wine scene), produces a heightened state of sublimation. Early literature compares this state to the scaling of the transcendent heights of mythical Mount Kunlun, with its “Hanging Garden,” running beasts, and “jade spring.” The topography is shown here. Beyond (i.e., above) the jade disc is a ramp guarded by two leopards, leading to a platform (fig. 5). The ramp has been identified as the “Tilted Palace” (qinggong 傾宮) and the platform the “Hanging Garden” (xuanpu 悬圃) associated with Kunlun.⁵⁵

It is for good reason that Mount Kunlun is the next stop following the beverage scene. The prime mover of the ascent to heaven is the exhilarating and vitalizing act of the breath-cum-sexual cultivation that includes the ingestion of the “heavenly beverage” (vaginal discharge), conservation of vigor and “essence” (i.e., semen) by way of the jade closure. It is notable that the Mawangdui medical texts repeatedly use metaphors, such as “the blue-gem wellspring and numinous winepot” (yaoquan lingzun 瑤泉靈尊), with regard to this physiological act. The beverage metaphor, to recall, clearly evokes Mount Kunlun. This alerts us to the use of the mountain metaphor to map and capture the practitioner’s sensation of feeling “high.” The ingestion of the heavenly beverage produces a giddy state of altered consciousness and sustained elation best captured in the language of mountain climbing. It is for this reason that, in a classical second-century B.C.E. text, the prelude to the ascent up Kunlun is “the sacred springs of the (Yellow) Thearch, from which can be concocted all kinds of medicinal substances to bring physical well-being to the myriad creatures.” The ingestion of the “spiritual spring” then launches the ascent: one first scales the peaks of Kunlun, then the “Cool Wind Mountain,” then the hanging garden, and finally heaven.⁵⁶

This parallels the process laid out in the Mawangdui medical literature on breath-cum-sexual cultivation. Drinking “heavenly beverage” (tianjiang 天漿) from the “blue-gem wellspring and numinous winepot”—which evoke Mount Kunlun—leads to the “dragon breathing at dawn.” “The person who is capable of it [going through this process] invariably becomes a spirit. Thus, he is capable of achieving release of the form. The person who perceives the great way skims the clouds as he moves. From the beautiful jade above, like water flowing, he can range far; like the dragon ascending, he can rise high, quick and untiring in strength.”⁵⁷ The process is capped by a climax: one’s “longevity forms a triad with the sun and moon (shou can ri yue 壽參日月).”⁵⁸ But we are jumping the gun here.

Let us return to the image of the lady standing in profile between heaven and earth (fig. 5). Here, according to the Mawangdui medical manuscripts, the revitalized breaths “flow into form,”⁵⁹ much as a liquid mass is poured into a mold to solidify. The yin/yang conjugation and the consolidating jade closure bring together the deceased’s scattered breaths, which now morph into a human form—the image of the marquise at the center of the painting. Before this stage, the deceased is present in the painted banner only as an unformed or amorphous flowing breath. The ritual-offering scene in the human world—comprising five food and wine vessels and tripods and seven human figures in reverent attendance—presents the deceased only in terms of her absence. Between the six attendants is an embellished garment box or “suitcase” (qie 篋) used in the soul-summoning ritual. Following the attempt to summon the departed spirit by waving her garment and calling out her name, the caller would descend from the rooftop; the deceased’s garment would then be dropped and placed in the case.⁶⁰ The case depicted in the painting is covered with either patterned brocade or a painted design, which decidedly echoes the marquise’s robe above. As a container of the deceased’s garment, the box registers her erstwhile existence, now a mere absence, and points to its visual echo—the lady’s standing figure positioned between heaven and earth—as a departed and unattached apparition taking human shape. Incidentally, it is significant that the “banquet scene” is exclusively peopled by male figures. In contrast, the corresponding scene on the banner from Tomb 3, that of the marquise’s son, features only female attendants.⁶¹ This arrangement is inexplicable except in symbolic—rather than physical—terms: the female tomb occupant’s dominant yin disposition would need the complementary replenishment of yang elements to achieve the revitalizing restitution. Likewise, her son’s primarily yang constitution would require the yin force to be revitalized.

The successful yin/yang conjugation is seen to crystallize into human form. The common characterization of this image as a “portrait” of the deceased is therefore misleading. Serving memorial functions, portraits seek to fix permanently the memory of the dead. Here, however, the human “form” is transitional in nature, a short stop in the extended process of revitalization. Its subsequent disappearance in the next stage is as significant as its appearance in this one.

The revitalizing process culminates in a celestial state of sublimation. “Releasing the form . . . like the ascending dragon,”⁶² the revitalized spirit flies to the ethereal realm of transcendence to merge with the nebulous mass of spirits. Heaven is here signified by the celestial canopy, beneath which hovers the “canopy bird” (yiniao 翳鳥), the messenger of the celestial god.⁶³ Above the celestial canopy is the heavenly gate guarded by porters (dihun 帝閽); beyond the gate is the “celestial court” (tianting 天庭) illuminated by the sun and the moon (fig. 6).⁶⁴

This sublimated state also entails the loss of the individual self and the shedding of one’s identifiable form and bodily frame. Early texts characterize this exultant finale as a return to the origin⁶⁵ —a vague state of affairs best left unspecified, since the force of the scenario resides in nebulous merging and formations. However, the imperative to visualize abstract states leaves the painter with no choice but to be concrete and specific.

The Tomb 1 banner parses this scenario into, among other things, two key images. A young female in a plain blue robe in the upper-left corner reaches the crescent moon on the wing of the yin dragon (fig. 6). That a male heads for the sun in the T-shaped painting from Tomb 3 (fig. 9) confirms the gender difference here.

In the Tomb 1 painting, the lady’s spirit returns to the moon, the yin origin (fig. 6). In its capacity to “grow once more after its death,”⁶⁶ the moon figures the state of periodic death and rebirth. To the moon was accrued the lore of Chang’ e, the legendary’s Archer Yi’s wife. She is said to have flown to the moon on the strength of the elixir of immortality she had stole from her husband, only to become the toad in the moon—a creature of periodic skin-shedding, hence, cycles of death and renewal—thus further embodying the regenerative nature of the moon.⁶⁷ The configuration in the painting of the crescendo moon, the female figure in flight, and the toad thus harmonizes with the symbolic force of the Chang’ e lore; the marquise’s gender lends further aptitude to the situation.

Meanwhile, the yin/yang conjugation in the macrocosm and her microcosm—the two are indistinguishable—finally reaches closure, as signified by the top-center figure with a serpent tail (fig. 6). The mysterious identity of this figure has long been contested;⁶⁸ two crucial pieces of evidence may clarify the matter.

First, the painting offers a key visual clue. The top-center figure visually echoes the writhing red serpent between the Grand One’s parted legs at the bottom (fig. 4). The reprisal of the serpentine motif suggests the beginning and end of a regenerative process. The Grand One in the watery domain spawns yin and yang breaths, whose conjugation sets in motion a vitalization in both macrocosm and microcosm. The serpentine ring at the top (fig. 6) signifies the final closure of this movement.

The revitalization process as such also finds its support in the Mawangdui medical manuscripts. The conjugation of yin/yang breaths, nourished by breath renewal and food and wine replenishment, leads to the soaring of the “dragon breaths,” which then “flow into form.” The process eventually culminates in an exalted state: “your longevity forms a triad with the sun and moon; and you become the blossom between heaven and earth.”⁶⁹ This aptly describes the scene at the top of the banner.

That much is clear. More difficult to pinpoint is the ambiguous identity of the figure at the top (fig. 6). The visual and textual evidence creates the impression of the image as the deceased’s spirit in celestial transcendence. Yet to recall, the revitalization process is supposed to culminate in a nebulous state characterized by the loss of individual identity. The afterlife scenario was often imagined in early China as a return to the origin,⁷⁰ a primordial state populated by a cumulative community of the collective dead and emblemized by the primordial ancestor. The half-human, half-serpent hybrid therefore conveys the primal character. Hence, the legendary primordial thearchs—Paoxi, Nüwa, Shennong, and Xiahou—are all said to have a “serpentine body with a human face.”⁷¹ The iconic top-center figure in the banner (fig. 6) likewise embodies the spiritual and primordial nebula of ancestry or even mankind, joined by the deceased’s ascending spirit. It is a nebulous state of “longevity” forming a “triad with the sun and moon.”

A comparison with the T-shaped silk painting from Tomb 3 is instructive. The celestial realm depicted therein comprises, along its central axis, a succession of paired figures: first, a pair of deer-riding capped male figures; above, two fishes flank a pair of intertwined half-human, half-serpentine figures (fig. 9), presumably Fuxi and Nüwa, the legendary creators of mankind. The underlying idea here is that the copulation of yin and yang forces leads to the creation of life.

The T-shaped painting from Tomb 1 (fig. 6) ostensibly revises this composition. A single half-human, half-serpent figure replaces the intertwined pair. Instead of filling the celestial realm with multitude of stars, as in the Tomb 3 painting (fig. 9), here the Tomb 1 painting shows a group of eight red dots underneath the sun.⁷² This revision was made presumably to fit the tomb occupant’s female gender. The top-center half-human, half-serpent figure (fig. 9) is very likely the “Mother Star” (Nüqi 女岐), known to have given birth to “her nine children without union.”⁷³ The practice of painting the Mother Star in Han times is well known.⁷⁴ This harmonizes with our painting here, if we count the sun as one more “luminary” in addition to the eight small red dots beneath it, totaling nine. Number crunching is less relevant than the symbolic situation of the Mother Star in relation to her progeny of starlets. The ancestral pedigree is thus made more specific to highlight the female ancestral icon in the numinous heaven, tailor-made to fit the marquise’s memorial situation.

Alternatively, the astral signs make sense if we once again rely on the Mawangdui medical literature as a guide and continue our interpretation of the composition as a depiction of “conjoining yin and yang” that draws on the language of sexual cultivation. One Mawangdui medical manuscript contains a litany of the benefits derived from withholding one’s sperm, despite sexual excitation, from ejaculation during intercourse as a means of macrobiotic hygiene:

In the way of coitus with Yin, stay the heart, settle and secure it; and the form and vapor secure one another. Thus it is said at the first arrival without emission, ears and eyes are perceptive and bright; at the second arrival without emission, the voice’s vapor rises high; at the third arrival without emission, skin and hide glow; at the fourth arrival without emission, spine and upper side suffer no injury; at the fifth arrival without emission, buttock and ham can be squared; at the sixth arrival without emission, the hundred vessels pass through; at the seventh arrival without emission, your entire life is without calamity; at the eighth arrival without emission, you can have a lengthy longevity; at the ninth arrival without emission, you penetrate spirit illumination.⁷⁵

The key graph, now commonly corrected as “emission” (xie 瀉), is rendered in the manuscript as “star” (xing 星).⁷⁶ Even though it ought to be correctly spelled and treated as “emission,”⁷⁷ the graph “star” 星 may have cued the painter to take the word literally by picturing a star in the form of a red dot following the pictorial convention of Han times. Eight unspent “stars” (meaning emissions; 星=瀉) already promise “a lengthy longevity.” The climactic ninth—signaled in the painting by the sun—as the stars and sun are often treated more or less equally as celestial luminaries—reasonably leads to “spirit illumination,” a state that fittingly involves the sun (fig. 6).

The images in the painting therefore repeatedly alert us to the physiological overtone of what at the outset appears to be a cosmographic description. Instructions on sexual cultivation in Mawangdui manuscripts in fact often read like topographic accounts. In one account, the geography traversed encompasses “chambers,” a “basin,” a “ford,” the sea, a mountain, and a “gate.” That all this comes down to a geography of the human body becomes clear only when the text flags body parts and positions:

The recipe for whenever you will be conjoining Yin and Yang: Grip the hands, and emerge at the Yang side of the wrists; stroke the elbow chambers; press the side of the underarms; ascend the stove trivet; press the neck zone; stroke the receiving canister; cover the encircling ring; descend the broken basin; cross the sweet-liquor ford; skim the Spurting Sea; ascend Constancy Mountain; enter the dark gate; ride the coital muscle; suck the essence and spirit upward. Then you can have lasting vision and exist in unison with heaven and earth.⁷⁸

Significantly, the ascension narrative culminates in the subject’s “unison with heaven and earth.” The climax is identical with the description cited previously: one’s “longevity forms a triad with the sun and moon.”⁷⁹ The half-human, half-serpent figure in the banner is therefore precisely this envisioned “longevity” in the company of the sun and moon (fig. 6).⁸⁰

That a figure other than the earthly image of the deceased is presented should not surprise us. To the extent that the whole ascent to heaven is all but a trance-induced vision and an out-of-body experience, there is indeed an ambiguity concerning the subject of the ascent. It is rarely considered in Han discourse as the whole individual being. Instead, it is often the nonboldily part of the self, that is, the ethereal spirit (hun 魂)—by some accounts some form of will-o’-the-wisp (“essence and spirit”), in others the abstract and elusive spiritual well-being of “longevity” (shou 壽 in one Mawangdui manuscript), or simply an unspecified, vague alter ego of the implied reader of the text.

Practically all the Mawangdui manuscripts on macrobiotic hygiene aiming to achieve longevity specify that the ultimate goal is to attain “spiritual illumination” (shenming 神明). One manuscript discusses how to achieve this goal:

You must face the sun and moon and suck in the rays of their essence; . . . drink running beasts’ wellspring blossom. You can repel agedness and restore vigor, becoming lustrous and glowing. . . . Use the sun to cook and boil. Then the spirit becomes keen, [the ears] perceptive, and [the eyes] bright. . . . Suck in the spirit mist; drink that heavenly beverage. Bring it to the five depots, with the aim of storing it deeply. Perform dragon breathing at dawn; the vapor and form, then, become hard. [. . .] nears water. Essence and vapor are congealed, hardy, and long lasting. Spirit harmony is obtained inside; ethereal-spirit and earthly-spirit are gleaming. The five depots become firm and white, their jade color having a renewed glow. Your longevity forms a triad with the sun and moon; and you become the blossom between heaven and earth.⁸¹

The celestial scene in the painting perfectly captures this exultant state of spiritual illumination (fig. 6). The sun and moon constitute this illumination, or the source of the “essence.” The end result is the achievement of one’s spiritual illumination on a par with the sun and moon. We can easily transpose to the burial situation the ritual specialist’s address to the interlocutor of the text. With the painted banner facing the deceased, its implicit exhortation is very likely as follows: “You must face the sun and moon and suck in the rays of their essence; . . . drink that heavenly beverage. . . . Your longevity forms a triad with the sun and moon; and you become the blossom between heaven and earth.”

The scheme of a graduated regeneration process or narrative mapped out by the banner is pictorially reiterated on the painted coffins from Tomb 1. The central chamber of the tomb, surrounded by four side chambers, contains a set of four nested lacquer coffins (fig. 2). The outermost is a dark coffin, followed by a dark-ground coffin with animal and cloud motifs painted in bright colors, then a red-ground coffin with figural and geometrical patterns, and finally an inner brocade-covered coffin. The innermost coffin holds the body of Xinzhui 辛追, Marquise Dai of Changsha, lying in state, her head toward the north. Featuring pictorial images of clouds, animals, monstrous spirits, and topographies, the lacquer coffins form a deliberate and well-orchestrated visual program, as each coffin possesses a distinct surface decor, iconography, and color scheme. The vivacity of the images clearly creates a pictorial world surrounding the coffin occupant’s body. It is therefore tempting to view the pictorial world as an imaginary space traversed by the tomb occupant’s spirit. This body/space distinction, however, soon leads to a conceptual quagmire: does the painting on the nested coffins suggest an outside-in or an inside-out movement? As the coffins’ color scheme shifts from outer/black to inner/red, hence from yin to yang and death to life, the implied movement of the tomb occupant’s spirit appears to be outside-in. Yet how do we account for this impossible spatial logic, namely that the pictorial program pulls the occupant’s spirit away from the comfort of the tomb’s household setting? Does not the soul-summoning ritual attempt to call back the wandering spirit, warning of the perils of all quarters?

This problem is of our own making. It stems from the entrenched modern habit of separating the body from space. In second-century B.C.E. China, the human organism was perceived as a much more fluid construct drawing on cosmic and spiritual sources.⁸² Heaven endows it with essence while earth imbues it with form.⁸³ The body is something of a vessel that allows for the passage and dwelling of external vital “essence,” yin and yang vapor and spirits. Death is caused by the loss or imbalance of yin and yang. To restore life to the dead is to have these cosmic forces in proper supply and coordination. The revival of life is thus visualized in cosmic terms involving the traffic of vapors, spirits, transcendent topographies, and the like. Consequently, rather than depicting the tomb occupant’s distinct body in space, the painted coffins lay out the process of bodily transformation as part of cosmic flux. The numinous space, teeming with vapor and spirits, is at once external and internal to the body. The painted coffins map out a symbolic process of procreation and revitalization.

The outermost coffin first puts the yin/yang interplay in stark contrast.⁸⁴ Painted, without figures, black on the outside and red inside, the coffin epitomizes the yin-to-yang process and heralds the spirits-enacted yin/yang drama on the inner painted coffins. The scheme of outer/black and inner/red indicates an imaginary movement from the outer layer to the inner core, a symbolic transition of overcoming the excessive yin and regaining the deficient yang.

Moving from outside in, the surface of the second coffin becomes animated with pictorial images. On all its five painted external panels (top, head, foot, and two long sides), fantastic figures move and float amid undulating vapor patterns set against a dark ground or void (fig. 10).

The vapors are not just decorative patterns; they signify the tomb occupant’s bodily condition. The medical manuscripts from Tomb 3 provide us with the best glossing of the pictorial scene here. The human organism is understood as an aggregate of tubular vessels (mai 脈) of yang and yin dispositions. The yang vessels are “the vapor of heaven.” The yin vessels are “the vapor of earth, and are the vessels of death. When ailments of the yin (vessels) create disorder, death occurs within ten days. The yin (vessels) putrefy the depots and rot the intestines, and they control killing.”⁸⁵

Here is a guideline to our painting. The panels picture the condition of the tomb occupant caught in binary oppositions: heaven/yang/life above and earth/yin/death below. As such, the spatial relationship is fraught with significance. The upper edge of the headboard, associated with heaven, signifies the realm of yang; the bottom, earth and yin. A female figure in profile—the marquise’s avatar—shows up at the bottom of the headboard (fig. 10), thereby signifying the tomb occupant’s earthbound condition. In other words, her bodily condition is close to the realm of yin and death.

All is not lost, however. In this universe in flux, death and life are contingent upon the ascent and descent of yin and yang vapors, which can revive life from being moribund. The very condition of yin/death, the nadir of an evolving cycle, is also a necessary phase for the breeding of life. The medical literature therefore speaks of going through the “obscure darkness” (minmin 冥冥) as a prerequisite of procreation: “Thus when human beings are engendered, having entered into obscure darkness and exited from obscure darkness, they first become humans (gu ren zhi chan ye, ru yu minmin, chu yu minmin, nai shi wei ren 故人之產 [也], 入於冥冥, 出於冥冥, 乃始為人).”⁸⁶ Sure enough, if death—a condition indicated by the occupant’s position at the bottom edge—is the starting point, what ensues is a transformative process that culminates in the beatitude at the top.

The appearance of the marquise’s avatar sets in motion the twirling vapor (qi 氣). The thrice-repeated image of a long-tailed bird riding the vapors in the composition is significant (fig. 10). Birds, creatures of the high, embody the yang force in the cosmos. The long-tailed bird therefore indicates the struggling yang condition in the marquise’s microcosm.

More significantly, the bird close to the marquise’s avatar cranes its neck upward, its beak emitting a bubble, thereby enacting “breathing and blowing, inhaling and exhaling,”⁸⁷ part of the breath cultivation practiced in early China. It is premised upon the macrobiotic view of the human body as responsive to the quality of vapors passing in and out of it. The practitioner is urged to “exhale the old and inhale the fresh.” The regimen involves acts mimicking animal poses, “imitating in gymnastics the steps of the bear, the fluttering and expanding of the wings of birds, the ablutions of the duck, the stooping of the gibbon, and the glare of the owl, the concentrated stare of the tiger.”⁸⁸ In conjunction, the antlered archer—a potent yang creature—on the footboard aims his bow to shoot those exhaled bubbles, the “old” and moribund vapors (fig. 11).

Dusk and dawn are designated optimal moments for breath cultivation. Accordingly, two owls spaced apart vertically—one at the midpoint and the other close to the top—mark respectively the dusk and dawn (fig. 10), much like their counterparts on the painted banner. As yang creatures of night, owls signify the sun after dark. They therefore bracket here the nocturnal duration.⁸⁹ The night marks the total reign of the yin force, depletion of yang, and the nadir of life. The design visualizes this condition by showing the bird, the yang force, fumbling in the dark. The vaporexhaling birds suggest the appropriation of the breath cultivation from the living world into the afterlife cosmos as a symbolic means of revitalization. Likewise, the squatting figure in the middle of the west sideboard (fig. 12) may well enact the pose of “sitting and pulling the eight radical-chords” (zuoyin bawei 坐引八維): “I pull the eight radical-chords to guide myself, / harboring the drifting flow to attain longevity.”⁹⁰

The “drifting flow” here means the midnight air of the north.⁹¹ Returning to the headboard (fig. 10): as the owl at the top marks the dawn, a key moment of breath renewal, the human figure with unbound hair and long sleeves springs forward in the “Merlin” (zhan 鹯) pose of breath cultivation.⁹² The situation recalls the description in an early energy-guiding manual: “Spring days. After rinsing in the morning, . . . unfasten the hair, stroll to the lower end of the hall to meet the purest of dew and to receive the essence of heaven, . . . these are the means to increase accord.”⁹³ It is no coincidence that the vignette here is located at the juncture of dawn, as suggested by the upper owl, and at heaven at the top (fig. 10). The coffin occupant’s yang vapor is now gaining momentum.

Much of the rest of the painted coffin depicts what it takes to conjugate the yin and yang breaths and thereby regenerate life. Animals and fantastic creatures here are identifiable as agents of either yin or yang disposition. The serpent is a watery and earthly yin symbol. The bird, a solar symbol, is a yang emblem. The monsters clasping and strangling a bird apparently serve the yin force. In contrast, the bipeds with deer antlers are creatures of the yang force, for the deer antlers, with their phallic overtones, are a potent inseminating symbol of fertility in the Chu culture.⁹⁴

Since life and death are measured in proportion to the heavenly and earthly vapors, the restoration of life means regulation of these vapors. This principle gave rise to the macrobiotic hygiene practiced in ancient China. Associated with earth, the grain produces the yin vapor. So, the longevity-seeking individual is advised to eliminate the consumption of grain—the earthly product that leads to decay—by practicing the austere purifying dietetic known as “eliminating the grain” (bi gu 避穀). He is urged to “eat vapor” (shi qi 食氣), the product of heaven, by practicing breath cultivation.⁹⁵ The goal is to let out the stale yin vapor and supply the body with fresh and invigorating yang vapor.⁹⁶ “The essence of cultivating vapor is to exit from death and enter into life (zhi qi zhi jing, chu si ru sheng 治氣之精, 出死入生).”⁹⁷ The painted panels repeatedly show a bird either bending down or raising its neck, from which are issued a string of bubbles (fig. 11): a visualization of “circulating vapor” (xing qi 行氣), or breath cultivation.

The exercise has to observe careful timing, as dusk and dawn in particular are preferred moments for the regimen.⁹⁸ This accounts for the owls in the painting. In the ancient mytho-cosmic thinking, the dusk marks the sinking of the sun into the underground, where it moves from the western extremity to the eastern horizon.⁹⁹ The owl, in its archaic character, is a symbol of nocturnal solar essence, that is, the state of the sun after dusk and before dawn.¹⁰⁰ It is notable that the owl appears twice on both the headboard and the rightside board. In each case, the two owls are spaced apart in a below/above relationship (fig. 10), marking respectively the dusk (beginning of darkness, or death) and dawn (beginning of revived life).

The owls may also signal—or doubly signify as—a related physical exercise known as “guiding and pulling” (daoyin 導引) integral to the breath regimen. A silk manual containing forty-four postures of the breath-cultivation exercise unearthed from Mawangdui Tomb 3 (fig. 13) testifies to the relevance of this exercise in our context.

Some of the bodily postures imitate animal gestures and poses, which are accordingly named “crane,” “dragon ascending,” “monkey bawling to pull internal hotness,” “gibbon shouting,” “bear ramble,” “hen,” and so in.¹⁰¹ On the basis of other early sources, the regimen also includes the “gawking like owls,”¹⁰² or “the glare of the owl” (chishi 鴟視):

As to such motions as breathing and blowing, inhaling and exhaling, spitting out the old, drawing in the new breath, imitating in gymnastic the steps of the bear, the fluttering and expanding of the wings of birds, the ablutions of the duck, the stooping of the gibbon, and the glare of the owl, the concentrated stare of the tiger,—these motions are the means used by man to cultivate the bodily form. (ruo chuixu huxi, tugu naxin, xiongjing niaoshen, fuyu yuanjue, chishi hugu, shi yangxing zhi ren ye 若吹呴呼吸, 吐故內新, 熊經鳥伸, 鳧浴蝯躩, 鴟視虎顧, 是養形之人也)¹⁰³ By the same token, other postures of breath cultivation—such as “sitting and pulling the eight radical-chords” or “pulling lower body pain” (fig. 13)¹⁰⁴ — may account for the squatting figure on the west-side panel (fig. 12). The speaker of a Han southern song gives a subtext of such breathing postures: “I pull the eight radical-chords to guide myself, / harboring the drifting flow to attain longevity (yin bawei yi zidao xi, han hangxie yi changsheng 引八維以自道[導]兮, 含沆瀣以長生).”¹⁰⁵

Other therapeutic means include the treatment of ailments in ways likewise premised on the yin/yang theory. The body is believed to contain eleven tubular vessels of either yin or yang disposition.¹⁰⁶ These vessels facilitate the passage of the pervasive vapors, thereby linking the cosmic and somatic spaces. Excess or deficiency of either vapor in vessels of a certain part of the body may cause an ailment. Therapies involve cauterizing (jiu 灸) or lancing (bian 砭) the vessels.¹⁰⁷

Therapeutic impulses of this kind motivate the pictorial program, as death in the Mawangdui tomb is understood as no more than the nadir of an evolving life cycle, and the revival of life hinges on the continued effort to improve the pathogenic condition. The therapeutic lancing may well inform the scenes of fantastic creatures attacking their enemy with lances, as these creatures embody excessive yin and yang forces (fig. 14).

The yin/yang interplay culminates on the coffin lid, which is symbolically close to the yang realm above. Repeated serpent-fighting scenes— including the goat-headed bipeds (yang) devouring snakes (yin)—signal the prolonged engagement of the upper yang with the lower yin force. A notable departure from these is a bird (yang) clutching a fish (yin)—instead of the repeated serpent—in its beak (fig. 15). Not merely a figural variation of the same yang/yin theme, the scene marks the “reawakening” or revival of life, which takes both yin and yang to regenerate. Classical texts describe the serpent-to-fish transformation as a symbolic correlate of “awakening.”¹⁰⁸ Here we begin to have a glimpse of hope that the coffin occupant will revive.

The image of a jade disc—a “jade closure”—dominates the footboard (fig. 16) of the third coffin from outside in (fig. 2).

The appearance of the jade disc, that is, jade closure, signifies the accumulation and concentration of “essence” and vapor. This is accompanied by a marked change of color tone. The painted coffin features a uniformly red ground, signaling the dominance of yang. This concentration of essence in turn signals the arrival of “spiritual illumination,” that is, something akin to consciousness and awakening. Once the essence enters the human body, “it is deposited to form a wellspring source . . . a deep pool of vapor. When the pool does not go dry, the four limbs are solid; when the wellspring is not exhausted, the nine apertures penetrate.”¹⁰⁹

The decor on the red-lacquer coffin evokes the wellspring source. The east-side panel shows fantastic animals and creatures riding dragons across the “weak water” surrounding the proverbial Mount Kunlun (fig. 18).¹¹⁰

The headboard presents a pair of deer (yang creatures) ascending the mountain (fig. 17).

As Kunlun is located in the west, it is significant that the west panel shows angular lozenge patterns (fig. 19), signifying the pristine, transcendent mountain—abstraction and geometrical streamlining is an effective formal strategy to picture the never-never land made of patterned precious objects (jade, etc.).

The symbolic import of Mt. Kunlun is crucial to this yin-to-yang physiological process of revitalization. The mythical geography has spawned the conviction that the painting here indeed represents the deceased’s spiritual ascent of the proverbial mount out there in the west, thereby exacerbating the presumed problem of whether the burial implicitly encourages the deceased to stay or depart. The problem is moot if we follow the ancient Chinese propensity to translate, or transpose, physiological states into mythico-geographic terms. Consider the following instruction on bodily cultivation in the medical manuscripts from Mawangdui Tomb 3:

Thus he who is skilled at cultivating vapor and concentrating essence accumulates the signless. Essence and spirit overflow like a wellspring. Suck in the sweet dew and have it accumulate. Drink the blue-gem wellspring and numinous winepot and make it circulate. Eliminate the foul and love the habitual, and spirit then flows into the form. The way to suck in vapor: it must be made to reach to the extremities, so that essence is generated and not deficient.¹¹¹

The “blue-gem wellspring and numinous winepot” evoke Mount Kunlun. The mythical geography is said to have a “blue-gem pool” (yaochi 瑤池) where the Queen Mother of the West exchanged a toast with the legendary King Mu who visited there.¹¹² Mount Kunlun is at times simply a spatial metaphor for saliva.¹¹³ The geographic reference is all but a metaphoric analogy to the physiological state of concentration of “essence.” The spatial trope fits the situation of breath cultivation “made to reach to the extremities.” In other words, the “extremities” are reached by physiological acts—breath cultivation, for instance—which can be correlated with the far-flung mountain. From Mount Kunlun ensues a heaven-bound sublimation and exaltation. The top panel of the red-ground coffin shows a pair of dragons ascending (fig. 20), visually echoing the top celestial section of the T-shaped silk painting (fig. 6).

This space/state transference produces an effect palpably captured by the decorative scheme of the innermost coffin (fig. 2).¹¹⁴ The surface decor of the coffin is made of bird feathers, signifying a transcendent ethereal state of inhaling the essence of heavenly vapor. The experience of this state is thus effectively conveyed through the analogy of bird flight. The analogy harks back to the image of the bird clutching a fish on the black-ground coffin (fig. 15)—the stage of yin-and-yang interaction. Now in the innermost layer, the yang force finally gains the upper hand. The body that previously struggled in the dark phase of the black-painted coffin has now acquired the yang essence emblematized by the soaring bird. As “the spirit then flows into the form,” the bodily form is spiritualized and etherealized. “The person . . . becomes a spirit, . . . capable of achieving release from the form.”¹¹⁵ In other words, the body has dissolved into the freedom of a bird.

The visual program governing the paintings in Mawangdui Tomb 1 thus fulfills a symbolic function—its goal is to revive the dead. Acting on the premise that death is a matter of loss of yin/yang supply and balance, the means of revival is through “conjoining yin and yang” vapors. The metaphoric language used as guidance in the macrobiotic hygiene function of conjoining yin and yang through breath and sexual cultivation constitutes the basic grammar of motives or the visual vocabulary for the pictorial program.

The body/space ambiguity inherent in the symbolic act of conjoin-ing yin and yang is thus integral to the Mawangdui paintings. Premised on the early notion of the body as a product or vessel of cosmic yin and yang forces, the boundary between the cosmic space out there and the bodily interior is thus highly porous. The paintings chart an imaginary journey—so it seems—of the deceased’s soul toward Mount Kunlun and from there further up to heaven. Given the goal of revival of the dead, it becomes clear that the geography thus traversed is all but a figurative mapping of the physiological processes of procreation, replenishment, insemination, and invigoration. Part of the progression is achieved through cosmic yin/yang copulation and excitation on the assumption that the bodily transformation stems from cosmic interplay. This conceptual oscillation between cosmos and body results in an ambiguous pictorial space teeming with visual double entendres. A jade disc, commonly understood as a symbolic conduit to heaven, may thus be a veiled reference to the physiological act of carefully measured and controlled insemination. It is still a conduit to heaven—only the “heaven” in question is itself a metaphor for sexual bliss. Mount Kunlun, with its associated “blue-gem wellspring and winepot,” could be no more than a metaphoric mapping of the sensation experienced in breath and sexual cultivation. Not that the paintings in the tomb prompt the deceased toward an imaginary sexual activity; rather, veiled references to intercourse are part and parcel of the language of macrobiotic hygiene that is believed to produce longevity in life and, in this case, the afterlife. Pressing these token acts of copulation into service in the pictorial program is a symbolic way of achieving what these symbolic acts aspire toward—specifically, to take the loaded language of Mawangdui medical texts literally, “to exit from death and enter into life.”

In light of this, the question posed at the outset of this essay appears to be an inadequate formulation. Does the painted banner guide the soul to heaven or summon it to the tomb? Placed on the innermost coffin and close to the deceased’s body, the painting is about the transformative process undergone by the deceased. As to the question where or in what space this process unfolds, there is no easy answer. Yet the underlying premise that it takes both heaven and earth to cause bodily change is certain; the body enacts in cosmic terms. The occurrence outside is therefore what goes on inside the body. The macrocosm is the microcosm. Space—or rather spatial designation—is therefore less an issue than we think. What matters most is the body’s transformative process, for which space is all but a mapping device and frame of reference. The deceased does not really go anywhere, as her body is deeply ensconced in the layered coffins. What the living cares for is to see, or imagine, that she undergoes that transformation whereby she “comes to life,” or attains afterlife immortality—however oxymoronic that may sound to our modern ears. For that transformation to take place, a cosmic arena encompassing both heaven and earth is required. Once the cosmos enters the picture, we—or she—appear to step out. No matter how cosmic the setting or the scale may appear to be, the dramatic action remains inside the bodily theater. Ultimately, the cosmic picture is a scan of her inner condition.

The case therefore impels us to rethink the relationship between art and ritual. The inadequate formulation of the initial question (i.e., guidance to heaven or tomb?) stems from our subscription to an unspoken assumption that paintings in the burial are isomorphic to the soul-summoning ritual. This study shows that the ritual provides no guideline for the pictorial program in Mawangdui Tomb 1. The paintings in fact enact a ritual process of conjoining yin and yang on the strength of the logic governing the macrobiotic hygiene regimen laid out in the Mawangdui manuscripts. Aiming at the revival of life, the ritual is performed by pictorial images of spirits, demons, fantastic animals, and the deceased’s own likenesses. The enactment qualifies as a ritual by virtue of its performance aspect, a programmatic regimen, and deep investment in the symbolic value of the transformative process.

The conjoining–yin/yang ritual, pictorially constituted, has a complicated and tortuous relationship with the soul-summoning ritual performed in real life. The soul-summoning, as extrapolated from the Songs of the South and other sources, may have had its currency in the Warring States period. Whether it was performed in the same way in the middle of the second century B.C.E. is not entirely clear. Assuming its continued practice, the pictured ritual appears to pick up where the performed soul-summoning leaves off, with different underlying assumptions. Premised upon a body/spirit split, the soul-summoning seeks to reunite the spirit and body. The pictured virtual ritual of conjoining yin and yang, to the contrary, assumes no definite identifiable spirit; instead, it treats spirit as a volatile force—present in both the cosmos and the body—that constantly redefines and reshapes the body, hence the conditions of life and death.

The rapport between the two kinds of rituals is just as notable. Having warned of the perils of the Four Quarters and heaven and earth, the soul-summoning beckons the wandering soul home with the comforts of the household and, above all, with food, drinks, and sexual bliss. If we consider these as freighted with symbolic import, we see the conjoining of yin and yang act upon the promise held in the soul-summoning.

While the question of whether the painted banner guides the soul to heaven or summons it to the tomb is flawed, it nevertheless alerts us to the aftermath of the fashioning of the visual model. Granted, the painted banner from Mawangdui Tomb 1 is better interpreted in the vein of the conjoining-yin/yang macrobiotic language, and “heaven,” in this symbolic scheme of things, ought to be seen simply as a metaphor, a figurative representation of a heightened physiological state rather than a physical space. It is nonetheless conceivable that once this visual and figurative model came into being, it may have elicited a perceptive response that takes the visual metaphors here literally. Therein the composition—and its implied way of visual thinking—may have laid the ground for the imaginary afterlife scenario of the soul’s ascent to heaven. For this new belief system to work, the notion of “soul” needed to be solidified into an identifiable entity. The cues had already been in existence before the Han period, and it was a matter of time before this scenario took hold of the Chinese imagination. Around the middle of the second century B.C.E., however, the belief in a soul had not quite taken shape. The Mawangdui paintings both testify against this belief and provide the model for its coming into being.