296 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. 



There is, secondly, a purely religious group of mortuary jade objects 

 composed of the six cosmic deities and implements of primitive forms 

 originally connected with solar worship. This group belongs to the 

 culture of the Chou era. In the Han period, we meet with jade carv- 

 ings of animals acting as protectors of the grave. 



A third group of burial objects is formed by jade amulets worn by 

 the corpse, as the belief prevailed that jade possessed the property of 

 preserving the flesh of the body and keeping it from decay. These 

 amulets will form the subject of this chapter. 



In the following chapter, we shall deal with a fourth group of grave 

 objects used in dressing the corpse for burial. 



In the days of the Chou dynasty, jade was taken internally as food. 

 "When the emperor purifies himself by abstinence, the chief in charge 

 of the jade works {yii fu) prepares for him the jade which he is obliged 

 to eat," says the Chou li (Biot, Vol. I, p. 125). Jade, add the commen- 

 taries to this passage, is the essence of the purity of the male principle, 

 the emperor partakes of it to correct or counteract the water which he 

 drinks (as water belongs to the female principle) ; the emperor fasts and 

 purifies himself, before communicating with the spirits; he must take 

 the pure extract of jade; it is dissolved that he may eat it. And in 

 another passage of the Chou li (Biot, Vol. I, p. 492), we read that jade 

 is pounded to be mixed with rice to be administered as food to the corpse 

 of an emperor before burial (tseng yii). 



In later Taoism, we meet the belief highly developed that jade is 

 the food of spirits and tends to secure immortality (De Groot, The 

 Religious System of China, Vol. I, pp. 271-273; Vol. II, p. 395). We 

 remember from a consideration of the symbolism underlying the girdle- 

 ornaments of the Han period that a belief was then dominant in a 

 revival of the corpse, and the hill-censers and hill -jars of Han pottery 

 interred with the dead have taught us how deep the longing for immor- 

 tality was among the people of that age. Two ideas are, therefore, 

 prominent in the burial of certain jade ornaments with the corpse 

 during the Chou and Han peiiods, — the preservation of the body by 

 the effect of the qualities inherent to jade, and the hope of a resurrec- 

 tion prompted by this measure. 



The idea of jade being apt to prolong life seems to have originated at 

 the same time in connection with the notions and practices of alchemy 

 then coming into existence. A marvellous kind of jade is called yii 

 ying "the perfection of jade." It is represented among "the wonderful 

 objects of good omen" (Ju jui) — there are twenty-two altogether — 

 on the bas-reliefs of Wu-liang of the Han period in Shan-tung where it 

 is pictured as a plain rectangular slab accompanied by the inscription, 



