This edited volume aims to “sketch the remarkable range and richness of Chinese responses to mortality” (p. 2) in eleven essays. Poo Mu-chou's sweeping survey of changes in burial practice and ideas of the afterlife in ancient times attempts to “reconstruct” from a handful of classical passages a “system” of burial and accompanying ideas. Poo posits that “it is reasonable to assume that this system represents a general consensus” (p. 14), yet admits on the same page that “this … system probably never existed as a universal institution at any given point in history.” Poo's dubious generalizations contrast sharply with the next two essays. Eugene Y. Wang offers a brilliantly constructed interpretation of the famous funerary banner found in Mawangdui Tomb 1 in its sepulchral context. He argues that the purpose of the visual representations on the occupant's coffins and banner was “to revive the dead” (p. 74) and that the depictions of cosmic scenes are at the same time scans of Lady Dai's inner condition. However, Wang's argument does not consider the premortem preparation or postmortem treatment of Lady Dai's body itself, a surprising omission given the direction of his interpretation of the visual evidence. Guo Jue's essay, also on the Han period, takes a welcome methodological approach: “Instead of posing a single ‘standard’ reading of the concept of death and the afterlife in Han China, this study uses tomb objects and texts to … argue that a plural set of beliefs underlie the practices reflected” in the tombs (p. 87, emphasis in original). Guo organizes her essay around two questions: where do the dead dwell, and what is the nature of these places? She stresses the multivalence of the archeological evidence and the co-presence of multiple notions of the afterlife in Han times. Along the way, Guo also gives an excellent review of recent scholarship and introduces the genre of archeologically recovered mortuary documents known as “informing-the-earth” (gaodi) texts.

The next three essays are less successful. Roger T. Ames attempts to prove that the intensity of warfare was the chief motive and cause for the development of correlative thinking. However, his analysis generalizes about things as broad as ancient Chinese “common sense” on the basis of evidence as demographically and generically limited as oracle bone inscriptions. Philip J. Ivanhoe, in a 2003 essay reprinted here, surveys attitudes toward death and dying in the Analects. Ivanhoe writes (despite the qualification buried in his note 4) as if it were a straightforward matter to derive Kongzi's personal views on death from the statements attributed to him in various discursive contexts throughout the Analects—as if these passages may simply be assumed to record everything the master ever uttered (much less thought) on the subject. Amy Olberding's chapter is a constructive bit of philosophizing on death and parenthood in the Analects that bears only a tangential relation to the actual text.

Mark Csikszentmihalyi's chapter again takes the Analects as a main proof text. He briefly documents two contrasting views of allotted life span in ancient China: one, seen in the Analects and elsewhere, that held it to be inexorable, and the other that taught it could be altered by one's actions. Next comes an essay by Mark Berkson that clearly sets forth and then attempts to reconcile various statements and attitudes toward death in the Zhuangzi. Michael Puett contributes an essay on how sages are portrayed as dealing with death in the Huainanzi. Unlike Berkson's essay, Puett's sets its target text in a larger intellectual context, thus clarifying the significance of the Huainanzi's teachings by indicating others to which it offered alternatives. A chapter by Tao Jiang compares Lin Ji's and William James's statements on mortality, and a chapter by Guoxiang Peng applies the Tillichian theological concept of ultimate concern to neo-Confucian teachings on death and dying—specifically those of Wang Yangming and his followers.

Taken as a whole, the book is characterized by an extreme disproportion in coverage. The volume purports to “sketch the remarkable range and richness of Chinese responses to mortality” (p. 2, emphasis mine), yet nine of the eleven chapters treat topics predating the end of the Eastern Han era (220 CE). Despite Confucius's famous reticence on the subject of the dead, two essays focus on the Analects, while nothing is mentioned of the entirety of the religious tradition of Daoism and almost all of the Buddhist tradition in China, with their two millennia of sustained attention to death, afterlife, purgatory, the heavens, salvation, rebirth, and various rites for helping the dead. Also unmentioned are any of the thousands of narratives produced in China over those same two millennia on numerous facets of death and dying, stories of ghosts who return to visit the living and living people who return from the realm of the dead; techniques for prolonging life and avoiding death; commemorative practices such as inscribed stelae and offering texts in honor of the dead (and, for that matter, the entire body of Confucian reflection on and prescriptions for sacrificing to the dead); ritual specialists who managed the relationship between the living and the dead; how and why deceased emperors and their families as well as departed holy persons of various persuasions were treated differently from the more ordinary dead; and so forth.

The editors justify these omissions by saying, first, that the pre-Han and Han periods “[set] up many of the issues that inform the later tradition” and, second, that the two essays on later topics “provide examples of how this influence appears in representative works from the post-Han” (p. 10). But this is a very weak case for the volume's limitations, given the editors' ambitions to showcase the “great variety” (p. 1) and “remarkable range” (p. 2) of Chinese views and practices concerning death. Likewise, their statement that this book provides “only the initial words on this compelling aspect of Chinese tradition” (p. 9) ignores the vast amount of work that has already been done on this rich theme. Fortunately for the state of the field, this book offers neither the first nor the last words on mortality in premodern China.