The Great Returning: Death and Transformation in the Zhuangzi

Abstract

According to David Keightley, “One striking feature of the early Chinese written record is its view of death as unproblematic. Death was simply not the issue it was for the ancient Mesopotamians or the ancient Greeks.”1 Indeed, in early China we do not have the kind of complex eschatology and soteriology of the religions of the ancient Near East nor the kind of existential attention to death that we see in epics like Gilgamesh and The Odyssey. Having said that, to the extent that the early Chinese considered life as good and death as something that extinguishes not only the continuation of life but also the enjoyment of goods that life brings, we can say that death for the early Chinese, while not the existential aporia that it was for the cultures of the ancient Near East, was nevertheless a question that engendered competing visions of the afterlife, appropriate rituals and emotional responses for its observation, and sophisticated theories about the nature and metaphysics of death.KeywordsPersonal IdentityPsychological ContinuityRitual ProprietyWarring State PeriodAncestor WorshipThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.