The Acquisition of Virtue-Power (de) and the Marginality of Hell

The idea of hell entails a type of extramundane retribution, and such extramundane retribution is useful as a deterrent to antisocial behaviour. This functionalist view of extramundane retribution was, in fact, explicitly countenanced during pre-imperial China. Also, like many roughly contemporaneous pre-Christian cultures in western Eurasia, pre-imperial China had a notion of an “underworld”. For early China, then, the more relevant “problem of hell” might be this one: why does hell appear to be so marginal? This paper surveys the idea of hell in the pre-Qin and Han periods, and concludes that an answer may be found in the Ruist appropriation of Zhou ideas about acquisition of virtue-power (de) and the afterlife, which were promulgated as state orthodoxy during the Han. With the fall of the Han, however, this state orthodoxy crumbled, and the culturally-adaptive memetic power of hell reasserted itself in the interdynastic and Tang periods. During these periods, a mélange of Buddhist and Daoist ideas of hell more strongly informed popular belief, and the idea of hell was arguably thereafter marginal in appearance only.