Procursus:

Tales of reanimated corpses are a common genre in Chinese folklore, and in English it is usual to refer to them as zombies, since, like reanimated corpses in Western lore, they are usually quite frightening, retain little of the personalities they had in life, and often seem animated by a good deal of malice. The following “zombie” story, however, shines a somewhat different light on the tradition, since we see a positive side of the zombie as well as a negative one..

The story comes from the brush of YUÁN Méi 袁枚, an XVIIIth-century man of letters with a deep interest in the supernatural. First he tells us the story as he collected it. Then he tries to explain how the zombie’s duality can be explained..

His explanation will hang upon the notion that a living person has at least two souls, a rather ethereal one, called a hún 魂 sometimes associated with the positive, yáng 阳 forces of the universe and a more material one called a pò 魄 associated with the negative, yīn 阴 forces. The ethereal one (often under the name Línghún 灵魂 or “efficacious spirit”) goes on to reincarnation or sometimes hovers for a time among the living as a ghost (guǐ 鬼), while the pò may appear near the grave, especially if the body is not properly buried. It is the pò that is usually responsible for animating zombies, Yuán reasons.

For this on-line version, the English has been slightly edited and romanizations modernized. Traditional characters have been scanned and proofed from printed text. The romanized and simplified versions were computer-generated and not proofed.

See also “A Brief Note on Chinese ‘Zombies’”(link).

DKJ