K. E. Brashier analyzes the symbolic discourse surrounding a prominent image in many Chinese ancestral stone memorials, namely an ornate tree beside a pavilion where a figure is receiving homage. He traces the arboreal image back to the ancient poem "Birchleaf Pear," which exhorts future generations to safeguard the tree because the Duke of Shao, had rested there. He then shows that, in Han literary texts justifying the building of ancestral memorials, the tree stands for long-lived physical things that survive into the present. Symbols can conflate allusions. The central figure within the pavilion is the tomb dedicatee as a Duke of Shao, and the shrine is to be preserved just as the Duke's tree was never to be felled. Past hero and present shrine dedicatee merge into a single icon.

Overseen by hungry gods on the one hand or structured by impersonal cyclic forces on the other, the Eastern Han cosmos eluded a single consistent model accepted by everyone. Yet these cosmological perspectives were not competing arguments held by different people; they were inconsistent genres of discourse found within the same people and sometimes even within the same texts. Late Eastern Han mountain inscriptions may ritually appease sacrifice-eating gods with their hymns of praise, but they simultaneously describe the cosmos as a single pervasive system ofqi-vapors,yinyang, and the five phases. How could these two models coexist?Dated to 183 C.E., the “Stele to the Spirit Lord of Baishi Mountain” (baishi shenjun bei白石神君碑) demonstrates how certain compromise positions existed between a universe overseen by external agencies and that consisting of resonating cycles. The inscription explains why this mountain deity merited sacrifice, describes the official process in which permission to sacrifice was secured, and identifies this hungry deity as one component within ritualized systems within spatial lineages and geographic bureaucracies and so he is not recognized as an entirely free agent. In addition, the inscription systematizes him by obligating him to participate in mechanical rituals of recompense and by reducing him to a ritualized Classicist stereotype, further diminishing his independence and individuality. The stele inscription s focus on ritual demonstrates how ritual lessens any perceived inconsistency between cosmic agencies and cosmic system.This article first surveys the Han history of mountain sacrifices and mountain stelae, thereby placing the Spirit Lord of Baishi Mountain into historical context. The translation of the inscription dedicated to him follows, which for the purpose of analysis I divide into eight sections that address themes such as rituals of recompense, the generation of rain, and the transformation of the god into a Classicist hero. The conclusion summarizes how human structures such as lineage and bureaucracy fill in the gaps between these inconsistent genres of discourse human structures that result in impersonal qi-vapors becoming more human and personalized mountain deities becoming more structured.

Modern scholarship has repeatedly maintained that the separation of thehunandposouls at death was a popular Han belief, but a re-examination of the received literature suggests thathunpodualism was at best only a scholastic model. Sources ranging from theZuo zhuanto Han medical texts depict thehunpoas an inherent part of the properly functioning body complex, and any deficiency in thehunpodid not necessarily result in death but in distress and disease. Grave stele texts, which also never distinguish between ahunand aposuggest a different dualism—that between thehunorpowith its corporeal associations on the one hand and the more rarefiedshenon the other. This dualism may have found a practical expression in ancestral worship because thehunpoand body were generally confined to the cemetery but the mobileshenenjoyed its sacrifices at the lineage shrine.

Unlike other forms of early Chinese poetry that create intense images in few words, the poetic exposition or futends to tell all, sometimes with compartmentalized encyclopeda. ic presentations and sometimes with torrents of alien words, composed in long lists that imply a sense of comprehensiveness. For example, the enumerative catalogues of trees, animals, flowers, gems, and other exotic objects in the works of Sima Xiangru (ca. 180-117 B.C.E.) reveal an incredible vocabulary that may be related to the poet's dictionary-making activities.1 In this light, Chenggong Sui's Tiandi fu or Poetic exposition on heaven and earth would appear to be a most capacious theme to be treated by a most epideictic medium. Yet this is not entirely the case. When Chenggong enumerates his constellations in heaven or his oddities on earth's periphery, he does not merely compile a list of objects that fit a category; he spatially or temporally links one object with the next, creating a mental roadmap within the mind of his reader. Discovering the list's unifying principle is the reader's burden and perhaps the reader's pleasure. Once the implicit unifying principles are discovered, this in turn enhances the explicit general theme of the unity between heaven and earth.

When debating the significance of jade objects unearthed in early Chinese burials, most scholars look beyond the object's shape to also probe the ritual meaning of its medium the jade itself. The classics have invested jade with many virtues such as 'smoothness like benevolence' and 'durability like intelligence',l and when archaeology yields jade suits, jade disks or jade tubes, scholars rightly take this physical material into account. Yet while there exist many theories as to the presence of mirrors in Han burials, to my knowledge none regards the significance of the mirror's metallic medium. Like jade, metal was a benchmark of longevity, the trait most desired in considerations of the afterlife. At least as early as the Ming Dynasty, scholars have regarded the number of mirrors recovered from early tombs as noteworthy. The scholar Xie Zhaozhe -SXjUlJ (fl. 1592-1607) in his Wu zazu :wAS considered their great number unusual: