Imagining the World Beyond: Representations of Heaven and the Netherworld in Early Chinese Religion

What does Heaven look like? Where do we go after we draw our last breath? Is there an afterlife? Such questions regarding the world that lies beyond daily human existence occupy a central place in almost all religious traditions. Picturing these distant realms, however, is not an easy matter. The more remote and otherworldly these places are, the harder it is to imagine them and give them shape. The two books under review make important contributions to the study of early Chinese religion by demonstrating the various ways in which the extrahuman realm was perceived, envisioned, and articulated during the Han Dynasty [206 BCE–220 CE]. Drawing on a variety of visual and textual sources, some of them only recently recovered in archaeological excavations, both books reveal the role of the creativity and human experience in constructing images of the world beyond. Lillian Tseng’s Picturing Heaven in Early China is a detailed study of visual representations of Heaven in Han Dynasty art and architecture. Drawing on a wide variety of visual media, mostly from recently excavated archaeological sites, Tseng attempts to trace the relationship between textual and visual depictions of Heaven and determine how did the various meanings attached to the concept of Heaven, as the sky, a supreme deity or cosmic force, and as the imagined land of the immortals, impact the ways in which it was visually represented. Tseng’s main interest lies in interpreting the hermeneutics of the artistic process as a form of social communication between the artisan and his audience. Picturing Heaven, she argues, required a “significative rather than an imitative view of representation” (6); it was “an act of signification determined by convention” (7). Han artisans drew from a shared body of tacit knowledge derived from a wide variety of cosmological assumptions, astronomical observations, and mythological and literary accounts, and transformed this knowledge into unique works of art that conveyed certain coded meanings for their audience to decipher. In Chapter 1, “Constructing the Cosmic View,” Tseng examines the architectural layout of a specific religious structure, the Bright Hall, in the context of early imperial religious and political ideology, most notably the notion that earthly rule is a prerogative given by Heaven to its son, the emperor. Drawing on evidence provided by recent archaeological excavations in the former imperial capitals of Chang’an (modern-day Xi’an) and Luoyang, Tseng demonstrates that the fundamental design of the Bright Hall involved a combination of circles and squares, two motifs that are commonly associated with Heaven and Earth. In building the Bright Hall, she argues, Han artisans were simply translating these well-known cosmological tropes into architectural language to an audience who shared the common tacit knowledge of the circle-square symbolism (50). This allowed them to depict the Bright Hall not only as a ritualistic place where the emperor worshiped Heaven and declared the reception of its mandate but as a sacred space, an image of the cosmos (37). In Chapter 2, “Engraving Auspicious Omens,” Tseng discusses another important notion connected to communicability of Heaven’s mandate, auspicious omens, through a detailed analysis of a specific site—the cliff carvings in the Western Passage, modern-day Gansu Province, which commemorate the administrative accomplishments of a local governor. These carvings contain textual inscriptions alongside visual representations of five auspicious omens—the yellow dragon, white deer, sweet dew, auspicious grain, and the interconnecting trees. The appearance of such omens, which were perceived as an indication of Heaven’s support