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4 - Stories That Reveal the Dark Corner

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2022

Mu-Chou Poo
Affiliation:
The University of Hong Kong
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Summary

This chapter discusses ghosts in early Medieval China (Six Dynasties period) as mainly represented in the zhiguai 志怪, or Anomaly Tales. In these stories, ghosts were either human beings before death or, more often than not, nonhuman spirits, goblins, or demons that behaved or looked like human beings. We have already encountered a variety of ghosts from the pre-imperial period to the Han dynasty. However, as we have hinted in the previous chapter, there was a qualitative change in the role ghosts played in the literary creations of the Six Dynasties Period. That is to say, ghosts evolved from playing a supporting role with little elaboration on their characters to becoming the main protagonists of the stories with fully developed personalities. The Six Dynasties period, moreover, was an era in which the Buddhist and Daoist religions were beginning to gain widespread influence among the populace and were, each in its own fashion, integrating preexisting beliefs into their systems.2 The idea of ghosts was inevitably one of the central religious themes that both religions needed to address with care. The result of this encounter was to have profound significance for the formation of a religious mentality in Chinese society. For the understanding of the development of religious life in China, I would argue, the idea of ghosts in the Six Dynasties period occupies a crucial position. Previous studies on the theme of ghosts in the medieval period mainly concentrate on literary expressions and the typology of the Anomaly Tales, with less emphasis on its religious significance.3 It was to the credit of R. Campany that a new appreciation of the religious significance of Anomaly Tales was aroused. Campany sees the Anomaly Tales stories involving ghosts as explorations of new types of concerns and questions regarding the relationship between the living and the dead,4 as many authors portrayed for their readers a wide variety of situations in which the “living and the dead individuals who began as strangers ended up … bound to one another with moral and, often, emotional cords despite the chasm that still separated them.”5 Here we shall try to further explore the religious aspects of the Anomaly Tales by discussing the images of the ghosts and the significance that these literary representations embodied.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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