Abstract:

According to Confucianism, the soul of a human being exists and the body and soul rest in the grave and the ancestral temple respectively when a person passes away. This provides the theoretical foundation for Confucian rites system to distinguish fortune rites from unfortune ones. In the late Western Jin Dynasty, due to the invasion of northern foreign tribes, many people in Central China moved to the south and even the court moved to Jiankang. For some official-scholars, when their families moved to the south, they lost their lives in the war in the north and their corpses could not be found. Hence, the evocation funeral was advocated. Differing from the traditional evocation custom, there was no corpse placed in the coffins in the grave but only souls in the evocation funeral in the Eastern Jin Dynasty. This funeral ceremony conflicted with the idea of body and spirit in traditional Confucianism and threatened the Five Rites System which was under construction at that time. Therefore, the evocation funeral was denounced fiercely by Confucian officials in the court and was forbidden in the end. However, it became prevalent in the late Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui and Tang Dynasties, which was related to the maturity of the Five Rites System.

Key words: Eastern Jin Dynasty, evocation funeral, the idea of body and spirit, Five Rites System