The Same Old Life in the Afterlife?--Chinese Concepts of Heaven

Recently, the God's Salvation Church called on its believers to fly from Taiwan to Texas to wait for God to receive them into his heavenly kingdom. If almighty God wants to come down to earth, he surely doesn't need a flying saucer. But it seems that both the "new religions," which are often accused of preying on the gullibility of a superstitious public, and the great, long-established faiths which have weathered innumerable challenges over their history, all inevitably attempt to attract believers with promises of "heaven."

In a painting on silk from the Western Han dynasty (206 BC-25 AD) found in the 1970s at Changsha in mainland China's Hunan Province, three realms--heaven, the human world and the underworld--are clearly visible. At the top, in heaven, dragons fly below the sun and moon which face each other across the sky, while immortals guard the gates. In the middle, in the human world, we see the home of an official. As for the spirit down below who holds up the earth with both hands, some people believe he is the spirit of the Daoist sacred mountain Mt. Tai, since writings of the time said that Mt. Tai was where the souls of the dead departed to. The painting provides important clues to ancient Chinese beliefs about heaven.

In the seventh lunar month the gates of the underworld open wide, and throughout the Chinese world families prepare food offerings for the "good brothers" who come out to take the air. But after Chinese people die they are not necessarily doomed to descend to the underworld as "ghosts": Although the Christian paradise has only recently become "available," since time immemorial the Chinese have been able to go to the Fairyland of the Queen Mother of the West, by-as is written in elegiac couplets and on tombstones-"riding to the Jade Pool," or "riding to the mountain of the Dao." Or, if taking the Buddhist option, they can be reborn in the Western Pure Land, the World of Ultimate Bliss, or one of the Three Realms of Heaven.

The World of Ultimate Bliss in this painting by Ding Guanpeng of the Qin g dynasty is depicted according to descriptions of the Pure Land in Buddhist scriptures. In the foreground is the Pool of the Seven Virtues, on which float lotus flowers as big as cartwheels. The streets and pavilions are decorated with gold, silver, glazed tiles and agate, and datura blossoms rain from the sky. The Pure Land, derived from ancient legends of paradise, is regarded by believers as a superior place for religious practice. (courtesy of the National Palace Museum)

Old Confucius was loath to talk of demons and spirits, but the religious beliefs of ordinary Chinese are seen as being characterized by the attitudes that "you can pray to anything, and you have to believe in everything to some degree." How does such a society perceive heaven? And what notions of life and death, reward and punishment, do Chinese people's conceptions of heaven reveal?

After those who are virtuous in their earthly lives become immortals, they are received into heaven by Golden Boys and Jade Girls sent by the Jade Emperor. At funerals today one can still see Golden Boys and Jade Girls made out of paper. （photo by Pu Hua-chih）

Guided by Chang E, her gown a-fluttering, and by the fierce-eyed God of Thunder and Goddess of Lightning, human souls enter Heaven by its South Gate. From there they first pass into Vaulting Mists Hall, where deities and celestial immortals gather to discuss the rights and wrongs of human actions with the great Jade Emperor, who presides over all. Then the new arrivals go through Pure Wind Gate, where another judge examines their deeds in the mortal world. To one side, demons sent by Yama, King of Hell, wait to seize the evildoers among them and carry them off to perdition. As for those who have done good, the Jade Emperor commands his Golden Boys and Jade Girls to receive them into Fairyland, where henceforth they may feast nightly in the company of deities and immortals, enjoying exquisite foods to the strains of music played by fairy girls. Thus the good finally receive their just rewards.An extension of the human world

The above depiction of heaven, at Taitien Temple in southern Taiwan's Matou Township, is modeled on one at Fengdu in mainland China's Sichuan Province. The Jade Emperor sits in the center, flanked by deities and immortals. The virtuous people who come here after their earthly death live free of worry or danger. But whether in Chinese tradition there really was a rewarding heaven of the kind conceived by people today is a matter of dispute, and in fact many believe that for the Chinese, the very notion of heaven is an "import."

The Confucianists had little to say about demons and spirits, and most leading pre-Qin thinkers did not admit of a conscious existence after death. But they were not representative of society at large. Belief in a soul or spirit had been passed down from the most ancient times: In the Shang dynasty (17th to 11th centuries BC) it was believed that after death, humans became ghosts and spirits, and by the Warring States period (475-221 BC) the idea had emerged of two souls (the hun or spiritual soul, which is unattached to material things, and the po or lower spirit, attached to the physical body) which went to separate places after death. Pre-Han Chinese writings describe many different "dark realms," with locations which vary from below ground, to mountaintops, to the moon. But the people who go to these realms after death still experience joy and anger, pain and pleasure, still eat and drink, and even have to worry about paying taxes, just as in life. "In ancient China, the world after death appears to have been simply an extension of the mortal world," says Pu Mu-chou, a research fellow at Academia Sinica's Institute of History and Philology. He feels that these dark realms did not have the "distinguishing feature" of a heaven: that of being better than the mortal world.

The sacred Buddha sets an example few can aspire to follow. Most ordinary people simply hope to be born into a good family in their next reincarnation.

A steady stream of discoveries of Han-dynasty artifacts in mainland China over the last two decades has sparked off a wave of research into ancient concepts of heaven. On items such as burial articles, painted bricks and "money trees," there are numerous images of Xi Wang Mu, the Queen Mother of the West, accompanied by such motifs as immortal cranes, peaches of immortality and orioles. Today the Queen Mother-still greatly revered, and by now "betrothed" to the Royal Lord of the East-is in charge of all mortals, male or female, who enter heaven after death. In modern Taiwan, the Queen Mother of the West still ranks among the top 20 deities in terms of the number of temples primarily dedicated to her. An old priestess at Tsu-hui Tang Temple in Taipei's Sungshan District says that to be "carried back to the Jade Pool" (where the Queen Mother resides in Fairyland) after they die is the final wish of most believers.Flying up to heaven

From the Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) onwards, people placed great hopes in ascending to the Queen Mother's Fairyland when they died, but to answer the question of where her heavenly hall was located, we have to go back even further.

When humans in remote antiquity thought about their own origins, and then went on to ponder the origins of the vast universe, they explained it in terms of magical forces, and in the process created large numbers of heavenly and earthly spirits. The sense which humans have always had of being mere visitors in this dusty world, along with their harsh struggle for existence, caused them to believe in, and later to seek and to fashion, a better world. The Garden of Eden in the Bible, Mount Olympus in Greek mythology, the lands where elixirs of immortality were to be found in Huai Nan Zi (a book of Chinese legends), or even Zhuangzi's use of celestial immortals and the Imperial Land of the White Clouds as metaphors for a return to an idyllic simplicity, are all based on myths of paradise.

The idea in ancient Chinese legends of a land of bliss not only survived into later times, but also underwent various transformations. The Qin and Han dynasties were politically and economically powerful, "but they had no answer to the question of where life went to," says Pu Mu-chou. When alchemists, playing on people's fear of death, claimed that elixirs of immortality could be found on fairy islands in the sea, emperor after emperor sent people off in search of them. This set off a trend of seeking immortality throughout society, which helped Daoism develop into an organized religion by the end of the Eastern Han (25-220).

Burning houses and everyday utensils made of paper to give relatives a better life in the hereafter has been a custom since the Han dynasty. （photo by Pu Hua-chih）

Daoism retained the ancient belief in immortality, and developed various theories on how to create elixirs both external and internal. Daoists believed that through physical and mental exercises, or by ingesting elixirs hidden in sacred mountains, a person might transcend his corporeal form and become an immortal, to frolic in the heavenly paradise with the kings and emperors of yore and the gods of nature such as the wind, rain, thunder and lightning. They built on the legends of sacred lands and fairy realms to create their own heaven into which they could ascend on being transformed into immortals.Palaces in the North Star?

According to the Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), "The mountains of Kunlun lie in the northeast. They are the Emperor's capital below." In other words, the Kunlun Mountains were the Emperor of Heaven's capital on earth. In Kunlun there were not only elixirs of immortality and the tree of longevity, but also beautiful hanging gardens where both flowers and vegetables were grown, and which are seen as the earliest model of a Chinese garden. The Daoists "assigned" those who attained immortality to beautiful Kunlun, and with the admixture of some popular imagination the Queen Mother of the West, who in ancient times had been a tribal leader, was also transformed from a hideous monster with a panther's tail and tiger's teeth into a beautiful woman in her thirties, ruling over the Fairyland of Kunlun.

In the Han dynasty, the Queen Mother of the West was an emissary who guided humans into heaven. But in the legend of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, she becomes the younger sister of the Jade Emperor; when she throws down her jade hairpin it becomes a river across the sky (the Milky Way) keeping the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl apart.

The deities of legend are all given specific representations in Daoism. The highest rulers of the Daoist celestial realm were Jade Purity (Yuqing), Higher Purity (Shangqing) and Great Purity (Taiqing); in folk religion, Jade Purity came to be revered as the prime manifestation of the Jade Emperor. In Daoism, countless deities and immortals were organized into a vast and complex system with many levels of seniority. To accommodate all these individuals of different status, in addition to Kunlun, which always remained a paradise of perfect plenty where immortals congregated, the North Star also became a heavenly palace in which deities and immortals were venerated and honored.

Confucianism stresses one's responsibilities in this life. Ancestor worship symbolizes "remembering the source when drinking the water." Chinese people put their hopes in making the best of this life--few sincerely believe in a better afterlife.

Early peoples believed the North Star was the center of heaven, around which all the other stars revolved. This belief was taken up and enlarged upon by religious Daoism to create the Purple Palace of the North Star, which was above-and connected with-the Fairyland of Kunlun. Riding on clouds or dragons, or on the backs of long-lived beasts such as cranes and turtles, those who became immortals were borne up into the Imperial Land of the White Clouds to roam among the moon and stars with the Emperor of Heaven. With this, the image of the celestial domain as a place of swirling clouds and mists was made complete.Ghosts squeezed out

However, popular belief transformed the Daoist Fairyland in which spirit and form were eternal, but which one could enter only by the transmutation of both body and soul, into the destination of all mortals after death. For the Chinese, phrases such as a "growing wings and ascending to heaven," "riding a phoenix to heaven," "gaining enlightenment and becoming an immortal," or "riding a crane to the West" became nothing more than euphemisms for death.

The activities of the immortality seekers of the Qin and Han greatly enriched the Chinese view of the world after death, and helped gradually construct the image of heaven still held by people today. Yet looking from the point of view of today's popular conception of heaven, although the palaces of the Jade Emperor, the Fairyland of the Queen Mother of the West or the unified Daoist system of "Heaven-Kunlun-Fairy Grottoes" do present the outward appearance of heaven, they still lack the element of reward, of being the place where the good go after death. The ancient Chinese conception of the universe was described by the late British scholar Joseph Needham as having a horizontal orientation (see "From Immortal Paradise to Popular Fairyland"). In his view, early Chinese culture did not include concepts of heaven or hell, nor of a god-creator or an afterlife, unlike the cultures of India or the Christian and Islamic peoples. But, said Needham, that changed once Buddhism arrived.

However, Professor Yu Ying-shih of the history department at Princeton University has a different view. He once used the Chinese story "When One Person Gains Enlightenment, Even His Chickens and Dogs Go to Heaven" to illustrate how "the Chinese notions of heaven and hell were established before the arrival of Buddhism." A stele inscription about "The Immortal Tang Gongfang" recounts how a certain Tang Gongfang gave his wife some pills of longevity, hoping that he and she would both ascend to heaven as immortals. But his wife was so attached to home that she would not agree to go. So Tang smeared elixir on the pillars of their house and on the furniture, and fed it to their cattle, horses and other animals too. Not long afterwards dark clouds gathered, and a great wind blew up and carried Tang Gongfang, his wife, the house and all the animals in it off to heaven, lock, stock and barrel.

When immortals began ascending to heaven in the flesh, and could not even bring themselves to leave behind their household clutter, the celestial realm no longer had the space to accommodate the ghosts of dead mortals. According to Yu Ying-shih, once the heavens became the exclusive domain of immortals and deities, mortal souls were detained in the Palace of the Earth and interrogated about their actions during life. Yu regards the Palace of the Earth, into which souls departed, as equivalent to a hell where punishment was inflicted.

Taitien Temple at Matou presents heaven to visitors in "real virtuality. " The God of Thunder and Goddess of Lightning wait outside heaven's southern gates to guide in human souls. The heaven of popular religion i s intended to encourage people to do good.

But at the same time as Daoism was becoming organized in the Eastern Han dynasty, Buddhism was already spreading East into China, so it is widely held that such Daoist notions of heaven and hell already incorporated Buddhist ideas. Daoism developed the idea of cheating death by becoming immortal, but the Buddhism imported from India directly welcomed death, telling believers that only after death could there be eternal life. The culmination of Buddhist practice is paramita-crossing to the other shore-to enter Nirvana, or in common terms, escaping from the cycle of birth-and-death. Buddhists regard the material world as defiled land (as opposed to the Pure Land of paradise). The present world is illusory, so one should cultivate oneself in order to gain enlightenment and break free from the cycle of birth, aging, sickness and death in which one is constrained by the power of karma. Only thus can one transcend the defiled land and be reborn in the World of Ultimate Bliss.Not heaven

But is the World of Ultimate Bliss heaven? Although one frequently hears the phrase "Western World of Ultimate Bliss" used in China today, more often than not it is said in jest, and many people use the term with no clear idea of what it means.

In recent years, thanks to the efforts of many prominent monks, Buddhism has been flourishing in Taiwan. Fewer Daoist priests than before are invited to funeral rites by bereaved families to guide the deceased into heaven; instead, Buddhist monks or Pure Land Sect followers chant at dying people's bedsides to help them be reborn in the Pure Land. This has become so common that after the recent China Airlines disaster at Tayuan in Taoyuan County, a student at a class on Buddhism asked the teacher whether the crash victims' sudden deaths, without such assistance, would have lessened their chances of entering the Pure Land.

The World of Ultimate Bliss actually refers to the Pure Land, and according to the teachings of different sutras and sects, the Pure Land can mean the Western World of Ultimate Bliss of the Buddha Amida, the Eastern World of Pure Emerald of the Buddha Bhaisajyaguruvaiduryaprabhasa, the Pure Land of the Amitayurdhyana Sutra, or many others. But after the doctrine of the Pure Land came to China, no other teachings became as popular as those of Amida's Western World of Ultimate Bliss. A possible reason for this-in the view of Fokuang University president Kung Peng-cheng-is that "it happened to coincide very closely with the tradition of the Fairyland of the Queen Mother of the West which already existed in China."

In the Qin and Han dynasties, most people believed in the fairy realm of the Queen Mother of the West, which represented transcendence of mortality. But the possibility of achieving immortality by overcoming physical death is easily brought into doubt. "From the Qin and Han onwards, as Buddhism spread into China, the Chinese began to speak much of the Western World of Ultimate Bliss, and the idea of the Western land of Kunlun was gradually eclipsed," says Kung Peng-cheng.

But many people may be disappointed to learn that the Western World of Ultimate Bliss is not equivalent to a heaven of reward for the good. According to Buddhist sutras, Amida made 48 great prayers, all of them for the salvation of all sentient beings, so that after death they might go to his Most Excellent Pure Land to cultivate themselves. By saying Amida's name, even evildoers could find safe haven in his sanctuary, and cultivate themselves despite their sins. The Pure Land attempted to change and remold people through their surroundings, by providing an environment more conducive to self-purification. Although people who reached this plane of existence would no longer have to return to the mortal world, if they did not make the effort to cultivate themselves, they would never be able to really leave behind suffering and attain bliss.Perhaps we've all been there?

What really brought the idea of judgment into the Chinese concept of heaven was the Buddhist doctrine of the six destinies of transmigration, comprising gods (devas), demigods (asuras), human beings, animals, hungry ghosts and hell-beings. By contrast with hell, the realm of the gods was widely interpreted in the popular mind as a kind of reward after death for those who did good during their lives. From this point on, veneration of ghosts among the Chinese not only declined in favor of the notion of immortals, but the torments of the hell of King Yama, adopted from India, in which people were flayed alive, thrown onto mountains of swords or cast into boiling oil, became deeply imprinted on the Chinese psyche. The status of ghosts sank ever lower, and they started down a different road from deities and buddhas, so that "ghosts and deities were separated for ever."

But were those fortunate enough to go to heaven assured an eternal place in the World of Ultimate Bliss? In fact, the Buddhist heaven has many levels. The "heavenly realm"-just one of the six destinies of transmigration, but often mistaken for heaven-is itself divided into three realms: desire, form and formlessness, which are in turn divided into 28 heavens. The closest realm to humans is the desire realm.

Just as Mahayana Buddhism does not make getting on the "fast track" to the Pure Land its final objective, the three heavenly realms are still not the ultimate "heaven" of Buddhism.

The different levels of heaven referred to in Buddhist teachings in fact denote different levels of achievement in self-cultivation. They accommodate people according to the different degrees of good karma they have accumulated and their different degrees of transcendence of birth-and-death. They are planes of existence manifested through a person's own spiritual powers, just as are the three "dark realms,"-the existences of animal, hungry ghost and hell-being. The three realms of heaven are "only mind": they are the expressions of the psychological phenomena of desire, anger and ignorance. Ultimate Nirvana, too, is only the elimination of these and all other defilements, leaving the mind in a state of complete purity.

Thus, according to Buddhist teachings, heaven and hell are in fact both within the scope of transmigration: anyone who has not escaped from the realm of birth-and-death may experience both heaven and hell. Those who practice the Superior Five Precepts (not killing, not stealing, not acting lewdly, not speaking falsely and not consuming alcohol) and the Ten Good Acts (not killing, not stealing, not committing adultery, not lying, not speaking harshly, divisively or idly, not being greedy or angry and not having wrong views) go up to heaven; those who commit any of the Ten Evils (killing, stealing, license, speaking harshly, divisively or idly, greed, anger and wrong views) or the Five Heinous Crimes (killing one's mother, one's father or a saint, wounding the body of the Buddha, or destroying the harmony of the community of monks) go down into hell. The beings in hell, once their punishments are completed, may be able to ascend to heaven; and those in heaven, having enjoyed all their rewards, may descend into hell. Although heaven is good, it is not the ultimate place of bliss, and although hell is a place of suffering, one may leave it in time.Hell is where the heart is

The highest existence among the three realms of heaven is that of "not thinking and not not thinking," which implies the capacity to observe the minute defilements of one's own thoughts. But to achieve ultimate Nirvana, one must transcend the three realms and "escape from heaven," working one's way up through the various levels of enlightenment like a bodhisattva floating up through the skies in a Dunhuang fresco.

Similarly, the tenets of Daoism, naturally more complex than those of folk religion, also underwent various changes. As Daoism and Buddhism influenced each other, the Daoist heaven was no longer just the Fairyland of the Queen Mother of the West, with its swirling colored clouds and auspicious humors. Daoism adopted the Buddhist heaven wholesale, but gave different names to the Buddhists' three realms and 28 heavens, and also added some more of its own: the four heavens of the Chosen Ones, the three heavens of the Pure Trinity, and the All-Encompassing Heaven (the highest Daoist heaven).

Professor Ting Huang of the history department at National Cheng Kung University feels that the concept of heaven in Daoism today has to be understood on several different levels. Daoism holds that at the birth of the universe, unity gave rise to duality and duality to multiplicity. But in Daoist religious practice it is the other way round-one has to progress step by step through the four heavens of the Chosen Ones, the three heavens of the Pure Trinity, and the All-Encompassing Heaven. In terms of specific content, Daoist practice stresses a complementary regimen of both spiritual and physical training, to accumulate virtue and improve one's mental and spiritual self-discipline while also fortifying the body in order to refine and transform one's corporeal form. If one is too attached to fame, wealth and the vulgar, material things of this world, so that one cares about dying, then one will find oneself in the living hell of the five desires and the six senses. "Buddhism and Daoism are similar in this respect: one must leave behind one's loving family, leave behind everything one has, and discard all notions of possession," says Ting Huang.Transcending the world of illusion

To people who lack religious experience, these many-layered heavens may seem dubious or even absurd, but for believers, "Heaven really does exist." Ethnomusicologist Lin Ku-fang, who also teaches courses in Buddhist studies, says that humans construct heaven on the basis of their own sensory awareness, projecting onto it the spatiality of the human world. For the faithful, this spatiality has two meanings. As well as heaven being a reward, Daoism gives heaven a specific, spatial embodiment as Fairyland and the Fairy Grottoes, which represent loci of superior energy, suitable for spiritual cultivation. For Buddhists who believe in transmigration and in reward or retribution for actions in past lives, the Pure Land is the reflection of the Buddha's heart. It is derived from the Buddha and is also intended as an aid to contemplation. But more importantly, "the heavens proposed by religions need to be examined in the context of a broader exploration of life and death."

Lin observes that the common condition of the living is the need to resolve the problem of their lack of control over their own life and death. The will to survive is instinctual, but humanity's greatest curse is the limited lifespan which none of us can overcome. Different religions approach death in different ways, but they have in common their search for ways to defeat mortality.

Looked at closely, the Daoist idea that corporeal immortality can be achieved through physical and spiritual discipline is a non-rational explanation developed to cope with the problem of a limited human lifespan. "The condition of life is such that humans inevitably seek explanations," says Lin Ku-fang, who takes the view that however developed rationality may become, it will never be able to explain life and death.

Daoism was influenced by the Chinese conception of the universe and the beliefs of primitive religion. Observing natural phenomena such as the pupating of cicadas and the sloughing of snakes led people to believe that ways exist to transcend corporeal form. Daoism used mystical religious concepts to explain the difficult problem of death, and developed the idea that the flesh need not die, but could pass directly from this world into the next. This contrasts with how other religions, in seeking eternal life for the soul, actually regard the death of the physical body as a release. Li Feng-mao, a research fellow at Academia Sinica's Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, feels that this early Chinese idea of immortality represents a unique view of the body and of the universe. Like growing watermelons

If heaven is merely an explanation which grew out of reflections on life and death, then whether or not there is a heaven appears unimportant, and indeed some people do not refer to heaven at all when explaining the world after death.

In its contacts with death, Buddhism produced many doctrines, but the Chan (Zen) sect of Mahayana Buddhism does not speak of heaven. It goes straight to the point and asks where life comes from when we are born, and where it goes when we die. Is life extinguished, or does it continue? "Only by recognizing our powerlessness over our own life and death can we face the transition from one to the other with composure and equanimity," says Lin Ku-fang. But, he adds, Buddhism acknowledges that there are worlds into which human consciousness does not reach, and perhaps heaven is a space in which states of existence are possible which humans cannot perceive.

Adepts prefer to regard heaven as a state of mind rather than a spatially specific location. In fact even the Pure Land-which many mistakenly regard as a through train to Nirvana which can be boarded simply by chanting the Buddha's name-requires all kinds of conditions to be met. It's just like growing watermelons: as well as good seeds, other factors such as ample water, sunshine, air and fertilizer are all needed. For one to be reborn in the Pure Land, says Buddhist studies teacher Tang Yu-ling, one's own faith in and willingness to pray to the Buddha are not enough: such things as the protection of others chanting around one as one dies, and the degree of Buddhist devotion among one's family members, are also important, and these beneficial external factors need to be cultivated long-term. Do people who accumulate evil karma over long periods assume that before they die they will have the opportunity to repent their sins and smilingly enter paradise?

In temples the Queen Mother of the West's Fairyland is portrayed in great detail, in images such as the Queen Mother riding a phoenix chariot, flanked by female immortals. But for mortals to be reborn beside the Jade Pool "is easier said than done" says the old priestess of Tsu-hui Tang Temple, stressing that in life one must do good and be diligent in religious practice.

For the mass of ordinary people, who are impatient and full of worldly desires, the idea of heaven as an essentially illusory mental state achieved by self-cultivation is abstruse and complex, and the continuous, unrelenting effort required to enter such a state is both hard to understand and hard to achieve. Thus it is understandable that a "heaven" in which religious concepts are simplified and popularized is preferred by proselytizers.A reward for the faithful?

For ordinary folk who have no prospect of escaping from the sea of suffering which is birth-and-death, "Heaven is a reward which organized religions promise their adherents in return for doing good." So says Associate Professor Hsiao Teng-fu of National Taichung Institute of Commerce, who researches Buddhist and Daoist concepts of heaven and hell.

In folk religion in particular, specific representations are preferred for their persuasive effect. Taitien Temple in Matou presents heaven and hell in concrete images for all to see-clearly in the hope of persuading people to repent their sins and return to the path of righteousness.

In the popular religious image "Buddha Expounds on the Ten Dharma Realms," in addition to the six unenlightened realms of hungry ghosts, hell-beings, animals, human beings, demigods and gods, there are also the four enlightened realms: the buddha realm, the bodhisattva realm, the pratyekabuddha realm and the s'ravaka realm. Today, there is certainly a place in Chinese heaven for holy buddhas as the ultimate in perfection, but most people's purpose in doing good works and amassing blessings is simply to come back in the next life as a rich person and not a hungry ghost. They would never presume to aspire to "practicing the five precepts and ten good acts, cultivating compassion and virtue, protecting the country and people, and faithfully following the way of heaven," so as to become immortals and deities like Guan Gong or Matsu.

In modern Taiwan, small temples or "phoenix halls" are still very widespread. The print run to date of A Journey Through Heaven, published by one such temple, the Shenghsien Tang Temple in Taichung, is over one million, an astonishing figure. Leafing through the book, we see that it constantly urges readers to turn towards the good in order to together ascend into heavenly bliss. In particular, the writer laments how in the great wide world today there is so much evil that "even if hell were enlarged it wouldn't be big enough to hold all the sinners, while the gleaming halls of heaven stand empty." With morality in a state of decline and people only out for their own gain, appeals to virtue with the promise of heaven are not likely to disappear. This is true of Buddhism, Daoism and folk religion, and also applies to Christianity, which arrived late in China-it urges people to have faith in God and gain eternal life, and thus avoid a hell "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched."

The religious concept of heaven and hell serves to give people the outlook that judgment will one day be passed on everything we do, and that every person must take responsibility for his or her actions. As Christianity developed, people surmised that between heaven and hell there was also a purgatory where lesser sinners might expiate their sins and be saved. Purgatory seems to resemble the Buddhist Pure Land, for both try to give people a chance to repent and mend their ways.

In religion many things are exaggerated for fear of people not believing strongly enough. Although religions do talk about heaven, "it is better to think of heaven as something symbolic," says Associate Professor Chan Tak Kwong of Fu Jen Catholic University's Department of Religion.Nothing escapes heaven's gaze

When speaking seriously of their view of what comes after death, Chinese people seem still to be deeply influenced by mainstream Confucianist thinking. In the Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BC), Confucianists pushed religion in the direction of morality, preaching that one should respect heaven and honor one's ancestors by carefully conducting one's parents' funeral rites and venerating one's most distant forefathers with due ceremony. People should find the meaning of life by seeking out its origins, and find its direction by respecting heaven and honoring their ancestors. This metaphysical source of life is what is called heaven or nature. In oracle bone inscriptions from the Shang dynasty there are already records of ceremonies in praise of heaven, and it was believed that those who had done worthy deeds could become spirits and return to the world of the Emperor of Heaven. In the "Zhou Hymns" section of the Book of Songs, worthy mortal kings who are equal in virtue to the Emperor of Heaven can ascend to heaven after death. But the heaven revered during the Shang and Zhou dynasties was merely a formalistic abstraction.

Confucianism emphasized the responsibilities of the current generation, and stressed that "when drinking water, one should remember the source," i.e. one should worship one's ancestors. But one needed only to ask oneself whether one's character and conduct conformed to heavenly principles, for the spirit world existed only in form, and humans did not interact closely with it. For the Confucianists, the natural view of morality was that "families which accumulate virtuous actions are storing up good fortune, while families which accumulate evil actions are storing up ill fortune." An individual's actions might shield his descendants from harm, or pass on misfortune to them. But although Confucianism lacks such practices as the recitative prayer or confession seen in other religions, the idea that heaven sees fair play and that evil attracts retribution is in fact "functionally equivalent" to heaven and hell.

Kung Peng-cheng takes the view that although Confucianism has no heaven and no creator, it has a powerful religious consciousness and emotional content, so it is not too far removed from the system of deities and buddhas with which Daoism and Buddhism attempt to explain and regulate life. In the Song dynasty, Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism converged, and the Lixue or Neo-Confucianist school of philosophy arose as a synthesis of the three. Neo-Confucianism held that "heavenly reason" and conscience were one and the same thing. Intuitive knowledge and conscience were inseparable, and both were products of mental and spiritual self-cultivation.

In the ancestor worship of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, people did not ponder or emphasize whether the ancestors had gone up into the heavens or down into the earth. Says Kung Peng-cheng: "The later you go in history, the more people tried to create specific images out of abstract concepts in order to explain the idea that people became spirits or ghosts after death. Only then was heaven constructed."

Given China's vast area and long history, it is natural that in different eras its people developed different views about life. Daoism also influenced Chinese notions of reward and punishment, but although it developed a complex heaven, it equally stressed reward in this life. Religious Daoism followed philosophical Daoism in maintaining that all things in nature arise out of the coming together and dissipation of qi (vital energy). Hence they did not speak of transmigration, but believed instead that humans live only one life, and placed great emphasis on this life. The Daoist concept of divine judgment developed out of star myths. The North Star maintained the register of death, while the "Southern Pole Star" (Canopus) maintained the register of life, and this is where the story of the Old Immortal of the South Pole (the God of Longevity) comes from. Celestial officials recorded people's good and bad actions; after the final reckoning, rewards were given in this life, usually in the form of happiness, rank and longevity.

Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?

In fact, most Chinese lack any "faith" in an afterlife, and despite the popularity of worship, prayer and divination in Daoist and Buddhist temples, they do not really believe that after death their relatives go to a heaven or paradise. Pu Mu-chou says: "All one can do is to imagine life after death with a fairly positive attitude. Funeral and burial services are a concrete way of expressing this hope." The bronze ritual burial objects used in the Shang and Zhou dynasties and the Warring States period, which were indicative of social status, were gradually replaced in the Qin and Han by everyday utensils, and in the Han items such as chariots, horses and houses, which represented a comfortable life, became the main burial objects. Evidently people wished to provide their dead relatives with an environment similar to the one they enjoyed in life. And are not the many items made of paper, such as credit cards, Mercedes-Benz cars, luxury villas, chauffeurs and servants, which modern funeral directors offer for sale to bereaved families, a continuation of the same kind of thinking?

As for the question whether people go to heaven or hell after they die, Pu believes that it is very hard to determine just where people believe their relatives' souls are. Most people are unlikely to have a systematic concept of life after death, and different clues and opinions may all be accepted. All the more so since wherever the dead go, they do not come back-no-one can be sure whether their ancestors have gone to the Pure Land to cultivate themselves. Otherwise, if the ancestors have already given up desire, selfishness and attachment, why would one need to keep bothering them with ancestor worship ceremonies?

Since no-one has ever seen heaven or hell, people can give free rein to their imaginations, and make any farfetched claims they like about heaven and fairyland.

A religious pot-pourri

The Chinese conception of heaven is an amalgam of elements from ancient and modern culture in which ancient ideas, myths and attitudes about celestial beings and immortality are fused together and then blended with Buddhism to develop a conception of the heavenly realm in which "fairy mountains project into the Buddha's paradise and the human world communes with heaven."

Religious thinking shows that human thought is not linear, but multidimensional, diverse and imaginative. The concrete representation of heaven at Taitien Temple is full of twisting paths and mountain peaks, and as one leaves the misty fairyland of the Jade Emperor, at the other end of the clouds one sees believers sitting with heads bowed, listening attentively to the Buddha Sakyamuni as he explains dharma and expounds on the sutras!

The Daoist Fairyland is next door to the Buddhist Pure Land, and the Jade Emperor and the Buddha Sakyamuni run heaven together. In the 16th-century novel Journey to the West, when the Monkey King, not content to be a mere celestial stable boy, creates havoc in heaven, the Jade Emperor, at his wits' end, can only call on the Buddha and the bodhisattva Guanyin (Avalokitesvara) to bring him under control. With Western influence, in the early-Qing-dynasty book Dong Ming Ji, the Greek gods also make their appearance in Chinese heaven. And in A Journey through Heaven, published by Shenghsien Tang Temple, the monk Ji Dian leads the author through heaven and tells him of a heavenly summit meeting between Mohammed, Jehovah, the Buddha and the Jade Emperor. In the future, as all faiths blend together there, Chinese heaven will become even more diverse. Just as religious creeds are adapted to meet the needs of each age, Chinese heaven has also changed with the changing attitudes of each era, like an old house being repeatedly altered and renovated.

Heaven on earth?

Up in heaven, those good folk who during their mortal lives helped people in need, succored the weak or perhaps just donated blood, on achieving immortality are invited to drink tea in the cold of winter with all the celestial immortals; those who charitably helped build roads and bridges, on being reborn in the Pure Land, contentedly play chess in the autumn countryside or merrily pluck zithers under the trees in perfect peace, leisure and dignity. This is as different from hell as is chalk from cheese. . . .

Leaving behind the "real virtuality" of Taitien Temple's heaven, the lush and verdant mortal world around us is vibrant with the sound of cicadas, and a light breeze caresses our skins. The ticket seller dozes peacefully after eating his packed lunch. Is he roaming through heaven in his dreams? The tourists return to the town to dine in fine restaurants or snack at simple eateries, where in both cases the fare is no less splendid than in the fairyland they have just witnessed. So we should hardly be surprised at the notice in the temple which carelessly reveals what the immortals are up to: "The good enjoying worldly pleasures with the immortals." Yet still some people did not believe that heaven and the human world are one and the same, and flew to Texas to wait for God's call. Heaven? The mortal world? Could it be that the more like heaven this world becomes, the further it distances itself from heaven?