What are the four types of souls?

Definition1271 words

The question is usually asked by someone who has read three novels and noticed that each one had a different number of souls in it. The instinct is to assume there is a real taxonomy and the books are approximating it. There is a real taxonomy. It just does not have four categories, and the novels are not approximating anything.

What the tradition actually says

The oldest structure generally discussed is a pair, not a list.

魂, hun, is the part of a person that is light and can leave: it rises at death, or at least it is supposed to. 魄, po, is the part that is heavy and stays with the body, and it decays with the body unless somebody stops it. Mortal and immortal, sky and earth, breath and blood. English glosses for the two are ethereal soul and corporeal soul, and taken together they are the hun and po souls.

That pairing is the load-bearing idea, and every number you have heard is an elaboration of it. Three hun and seven po is the most common elaboration. One hun and seven po appears too. The seven-part po is the more stable of the two, which tells you something about the tradition's priorities: it was much more interested in cataloguing the animal parts of a person than in describing their better half.

The named lists

The Daoist ritual manuals are where the lists come from, and they are more specific than the novels that borrow them.

In the Yunji Qiqian, a Song-dynasty compilation, one chapter covers how a practitioner restrains the three hun and the next covers how he controls the seven po. The three are 胎光, 爽灵 and 幽精. The seven are 尸狗, 伏矢, 雀阴, 吞贼, 非毒, 除秽 and 臭肺.

The chapter is not poetry. It explains that the po are restless on the first, fifteenth and last nights of the month, that they wander, that they are drawn to filth, and that they are, in the text's own phrase, the turbid ghosts inside the body. The instruction that follows is a ritual: lie flat, close the eyes, hold the breath, visualise white vapour, and call them by name.

That is the thing most readers of xianxia never see, because the novels take the vocabulary and drop the practice. The names sound like fantasy furniture. In their own context they are the opposite: a list of things you were told to shout at in descending order so that they would stay put.

The four-soul schemes

Now the actual question. Where does four come from?

Three places, none of them the classical tradition.

The first is fiction. A novel with a nascent soul in it has already borrowed one soul concept, and adding a fourth hun is the next thing it reaches for. A novel that wants its protagonist to be abnormal gives him a fourth hun, and the extra one is usually the one that makes him dangerous. That is a plot device wearing a numeral.

The second is a mis-split. Some systems keep the pair but subdivide the po into four sorts rather than seven — animal, vegetable, mineral, whatever — and then the count of "types of souls" comes out at four because the hun is counted once and the po three times.

The third, and the most respectable, is Buddhist. Buddhist accounts of a person frequently divide what a Western reader would call the self into name, body and the mental and immaterial constituents, and translations of those lists produced a four-part model that circulated in popular Chinese literature. That model is not the hun-po model. It is a different question about what a person is made of.

Why the novels are so inconsistent

Because the terms were never technical.

A cultivation novel needs a soul for two jobs: something that can leave the body and fight, and something that survives death. The nascent soul fills the first. The second is filled by whatever the author feels like calling it — primordial spirit, true soul, spiritual body subject, a whole new noun invented mid-arc.

Once the soul is a plot object rather than a doctrine, the count stops mattering. The thing that leaves the body will be a primordial spirit in one arc and a sealed general in the next, and no character treats that as a contradiction. A book will say three hun and seven po in chapter two, then reveal in chapter four hundred that the hero's po are actually seven sealed generals, and nobody in either the text or the fandom treats that as a contradiction, because it was never a claim about the world.

The useful distinction to keep

If you want one thing to carry between books, carry this: in the Chinese material, the soul is not one thing that survives or does not. It is a bundle with a light part and a heavy part, the body and the thing that is supposed to leave it, and most of the genre's best funeral scenes are about the two being separated at the wrong moment.

A corpse that keeps its po and loses its hun is not dead in the way a Western reader expects, and every ghost story in the tradition runs on that gap. It is the wrong kind of alive. That is where the corpse that will not stay down comes from — the jiangshi and the hungry ghost both rest on a body that has kept too much of itself — and it is a much more interesting engine than a number.

The short answer

Two kinds, usually. Three and seven when someone is being precise. Four only when a novel needs its protagonist to be special, and then it is best read as a plot device and not as a doctrine.

Which one is in the book you are holding depends on which book you are holding, and the text will usually tell you within a page if you know what to look for: a number with a name attached is doctrine; a number with a feeling attached is fiction.

The better tell is what the soul is asked to do. If it leaves the body and fights, the book is using it as a soul projection. If it stays behind and has to be fed, the book is using it as a po.

The questions people ask

How many souls does a person have in Chinese belief?

Two kinds, usually. Hun is the part that rises and can leave; po is the part that stays with the body and decays with it. The pair is the constant, and the numbers attached to each vary by text: three hun and seven po is the common Daoist elaboration, but seven po and one hun also appears.

What are the three hun called?

In the Daoist ritual manuals, 胎光, 爽灵 and 幽精. The Yunji Qiqian, a Song-dynasty compilation, has a chapter on restraining the three hun and a matching one on controlling the seven po, and both name their subjects. 胎光 is usually described as the life-bearing one, 爽灵 as the seat of intelligence and reaction, and 幽精 as the one that governs appetite and attachment.

Where does the idea of four souls come from?

This is where the confusion starts.

Nowhere consistent. Some novels give a character a fourth hun as a mark of abnormality, some split the po into a fourth category, and some borrow the four-part division of a person found in Buddhist accounts of name, body and the mental and immaterial aggregates. None of these is the standard tradition, and the novels rarely say which one they are using.