Fan Zhen

At a gathering in the garden of a Buddhist prince in southern China, some time in the 480s or early 490s, a poor scholar named Fan Zhen told his host that there was no Buddha. The prince, Xiao Ziliang, a devout believer, asked him a hard question: "If you do not believe in cause and effect, how can the world have riches and honour, poverty and low rank?"¹²

Fan answered with a picture. "A person's life is like the blossoms of one tree: they open on one branch from one calyx, and fall with the wind. Some brush past the curtains and land on cushions and mats; some catch on the hedge and wall and drop beside the privy. Those who fell on the cushions are Your Highness; the one by the privy is your servant. High and low take different roads; where in this is cause and effect?"¹³ The prince could not answer, but was "deeply puzzled." Fan went home and wrote out his reasoning as an essay, the Shen mie lun, On the Extinction of the Spirit.⁴⁵ This chapter follows the essay and the man, and asks why a Confucian scholar of the Southern Dynasties set out to prove that nothing of a person survives death.

Straw sandals

Almost nothing is known of his dates. He is usually placed around 450 to 510, but no source in the dynastic histories gives the year of his birth or his death.⁶ His family came from Wuyin in Nanxiang, in what is now Henan, and descended from a Jin dynasty general; his father died young, and the boy grew up poor and devoted to his mother.⁷⁸

Before he was twenty he heard that the teacher Liu Huan was lecturing in the capital, Jiankang, the modern Nanjing, and went to him. Liu was so impressed that he performed the boy's capping ceremony himself.⁹ Fan stayed for years. "Coming and going from home he always wore straw sandals and cloth clothes and went on foot along the road," the official history of the Liang dynasty says. "Liu's door had many carriages and noble idlers, and Fan, among them, felt no shame at all."¹⁰¹¹ He became learned in the classics, especially the three ritual books, and grew into a man who was "blunt, fond of dangerous and lofty talk, which made his fellow scholars uneasy."¹²¹³¹⁴ At twenty-nine, the Nan shi says, his hair was already white.¹⁵¹⁶

The prince's garden

He served the Qi dynasty as a minor official and went on embassies to the rival Northern Wei, where he and his companions "were all famous in the neighbouring country."¹⁷¹⁸ The prince Xiao Ziliang gathered the brightest men of the empire at his Western Residence; he was a devout Buddhist who held fasts and fed crowds of monks in his garden.¹⁹ Fan was among his guests, alongside the "Eight Friends," among them his cousin Fan Yun, Shen Yue, and Xiao Yan, who would one day be emperor.²⁰

It was there that he told the prince there was no Buddha, and there that the essay was born.¹⁴ "When the essay appeared," the history says, "court and country were in uproar." The prince called in monks to refute it, and they "could not make him bend."²¹

On the Extinction of the Spirit

The essay is a dialogue of questions and answers, about nineteen hundred characters long.²² Its thesis is simple: "The spirit is the body, and the body is the spirit. So when the body persists, the spirit persists; when the body perishes, the spirit is extinguished." The body is "the substance of the spirit; the spirit is the working of the body."²²²³²⁴

Then came the image that made it famous. "The relation of spirit to substance is like that of sharpness to the knife ... 'Sharpness' is not the name of the knife, and 'knife' is not the name of sharpness; yet without sharpness there is no knife, and without the knife no sharpness. Has anyone heard of the knife being gone and the sharpness remaining? How could the body be lost and the spirit stay?"²⁵²⁶ A dead body, he argued, is like dead wood: it has a form but no awareness, and "thinking about right and wrong is governed by the organ of the heart."²⁷²⁸²⁹

He had an answer, too, for the obvious objection. The Confucian classics told men to build ancestral temples and serve their dead "as ghosts." That, Fan said, was "the sages' teaching. It is meant to put filial sons' hearts at rest and to spur on the thin-hearted."³⁰³¹ The rites were useful, not proof.

Why he wrote it

The essay ends by asking what use it is to know that the spirit dies, and Fan's answer was not about metaphysics but about money and the poor. "The Buddhists harm government and the monks eat away at custom ... I grieve at the damage and long to save those drowning."³²³³ People, he wrote, "exhaust their wealth to go to the monks and break up their estates to run after the Buddha, and yet do not look after their kin or pity the poor ... because the feeling for themselves is deep and the wish to help others is shallow."³⁴ The result was that "soldiers are blunted in the ranks, offices are emptied of officials, grain is used up on idlers, and wealth is drained into clay and wood," the clay and wood of images and temples.³⁵ In its place he offered nature, in which things "transform themselves": common people would be content with their fields, gentlemen would keep "their plain calm," and there would be food and clothing that never ran out.³⁶³⁷

Sell the argument?

The prince's circle tried mockery and bribery. A writer named Wang Yan jeered: "Alas, Master Fan! He does not even know where his own ancestors' spirits are." Fan shot back: "Alas, Master Wang! You know where your ancestors' spirits are, and yet you cannot bring yourself to die and follow them."³⁸³⁹⁴⁰ Then the prince sent his counsellor Wang Rong with an offer: the theory was unreasonable and would damage the teaching of duty; "with your fine gifts, why worry about not reaching Gentleman of the Secretariat? ... Burn it."⁴¹⁴² Fan laughed. "If Fan Zhen were willing to sell his argument for an office, he would have reached Director or Vice-director long ago, not merely Gentleman of the Secretariat."⁴¹⁴³

Later, as prefect of Yidu, according to the Nan shi, he forbade sacrifices at three local shrines, "not believing in spirits."⁴⁴

The emperor

In 501 the Qi dynasty fell to Xiao Yan, the young officer of the prince's garden, who became Emperor Wu of Liang. He was delighted to see his old acquaintance, and made him prefect of Jin'an, where he served four years, "clean and frugal, living on his official salary."⁴⁵⁴⁶ The new emperor was a devout Buddhist; his own historian says he "devoutly trusted the True Law" and wrote commentaries on the sutras in hundreds of chapters.⁴⁷

Fan's exile, when it came, had nothing to do with Buddhism. In 505, at a banquet in the palace, the emperor asked his officials to speak frankly, and Fan did: he said the emperor's favourite minister "has only a hollow name" while a dismissed friend of his, Wang Liang, "has a good deal of real administrative merit," and "this is what your foolish servant cannot understand."⁴⁸⁴⁹⁵⁰ The emperor changed colour. The censor impeached Fan for "insolent" words, and he was banished to Guangzhou "for Wang Liang."⁵¹⁵²⁵³ Neither history connects the exile to the essay.⁵²

Sixty-two answers

Some years later, after he had been recalled and made a Gentleman of the Secretariat, the essay reached the throne, and the emperor answered it himself.⁵⁴⁵⁵ His edict did not name Fan. It quoted the classics, "Only a filial son can feast his parents," and "After three days of fasting, he must see the one he sacrifices to," and concluded: "If you say the feasting has no one to feast and the seeing no one to see, you go against the classics and betray your parents ... The theory of extinction of the spirit is something I do not understand."⁵⁶⁵⁷ The abbot Fa Yun sent the edict round the court, and sixty-two officials wrote back, nearly all of them simply praising the emperor's words.⁵⁸⁵⁹ One, Wang Tai, admitted that he could not out-argue "Secretary Fan."⁶⁰ Shen Yue, an old friend from the prince's garden, wrote that "the talk of extinction truly alarms me."⁶¹⁶²

Three men argued properly. Xiao Chen, Fan's friend and relative, turned the knife against him: "If you use the sharpness up, you break the edge and the blade turns dull. Then the sharpness is gone and the knife remains, which is the spirit gone and the body remaining."⁶³⁶⁴ Shen Yue pointed out that a dead body remains when the knowing spirit has gone, "so the spirit is not the body and the body not the spirit."⁶⁵ And the official Cao Siwen sent the emperor two memorials, asking, if body and spirit both perish, "who is it that is matched with Heaven" at the great sacrifice?⁶⁶⁶⁷ Fan answered Cao, and his answer survives. Dreams, he said, "are empty illusion; they come from nowhere"; and Cao's best argument was really "the best evidence for extinguishing the spirit ... You meant to challenge me to battle; have you decided to be my reinforcement?"⁶⁶⁶⁸⁶⁹ Cao reported to the emperor that Fan "still clings to his former error."⁷⁰⁷¹

The end

No source records that Fan recanted. He became Gentleman of the Secretariat and an academician of the state college, and "died in office," some time around 510.⁵⁴⁷² His collected works, in ten or fifteen chapters, are lost.⁵⁴⁷³ The historians disagreed about the man: one judged that his hopes of high office had been disappointed, "and it was fitting"; another that "his frankness and uprightness showed from first to last."⁷⁴⁷⁵ In 1084 the historian Sima Guang printed the knife sentence and the falling flowers in his history, the Zizhi tongjian.⁷⁶

What he left

Fan Zhen's unbelief was a Confucian scholar's, rooted in the classics and in the state. A poor boy among rich students, he saw a court pouring its wealth into monasteries and a doctrine of karma that explained rank as reward, and he answered both with a fallen flower and a knife. He did not deny the rites; he said the sages had made them for the living. Pressed by a prince, a bribe, an emperor and sixty-two courtiers, he was never punished for his argument and never gave it up. Four centuries before him another Chinese scholar, Wang Chong, had argued in the Han dynasty that the dead do not become ghosts; he has his own chapter in this book.