A near-death experience in Pu Songling's Strange stories from Liaozhai's studio.

Abstract

I present in this paper a tale from Pu Songling's "Strange Stories from Liaozhai's Studio." This story seems to contain the following key elements of a near-death experience: the life review, travel through a spiritual world, and a pilgrimage to obtain a healthy physical body "to return to life." I discuss the content of the life review in terms of emotionally tagged souvenirs. Other contents of the story are clearly culturally dependent and I discuss them within the framework of Oriental thought.