Ancestors and anxiety

the long version

"This innovative work on Chinese concepts of the afterlife is the result of Stephen Bokenkamp's groundbreaking study of Chinese scripture and the incorporation of Indic concepts into the Chinese worldview. Here he explores how Chinese authors, including Daoists and non-Buddhists, received and deployed ideas about rebirth from the third to the sixth centuries C.E. In his final chapter, Bokenkamp closely examines a body of fifth-century Daoist scriptures that endorsed a version of the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth, along with ideas of punitive hells and the possibility of a ritual transfer of merit to rescue the dead from them. In tracing the antecedents of these scriptures, Bokenkamp uncovers a stunning array of non-Buddhist accounts that shed light on the realms of the dead, their denizens; and human interactions with them."--book jacket.