The Rise of Postmortem Retribution in China and the West

Abstract

Building on a distinction between three conceptions of death and the relationship between the living and the dead (porous, neutral and moral death), the authors examine trends that shaped the development of religion and the law in China and the West. Both cultures experienced a critical transformation involving the rise of moral death, in which the living imagine postmortem judgement and retribution, with the dead being segregated into one class that is rewarded and another that is punished. Among the chief qualifications to this generalisation is that in China the dead are judged by legal and in the West by moral standards. Further differences include a more profound connection of religion to family and less autonomy or purity in the concept of neutral death in China than in the West. Still, family ties affect Western religion in the Roman cult of the manes and in the suffrages descendants devote to their deceased parents. Although the advent of beliefs in postmortem retribution appears to have occurred earlier in the West than in China, in both cultures it was clearly present by the time the Han and Roman imperial states had consolidated their rule.