Shijie (Taoism) (original) (raw)

Shijie, (simplified Chinese: 尸解; traditional Chinese: 屍解; pinyin: Shijie; Wade–Giles: shih-chieh; lit. 'corpse release') which has numerous translations such as liberation from the corpse and release by means of a corpse, is an esoteric Daoist technique for an adept to transform into a xian ("transcendent; immortal"), typically using some bureaucratic ruse to evade the netherworld administrative system of life and death registration. The many varieties of shijie range from deceitful cases, such as a person feigning death by substituting the corpse of their recently deceased grandfather as their own, to supernatural cases, such as (jianjie 劍解, "sword liberation") using a waidan alchemical sword to temporarily create a corpse-simulacrum, which enables one to escape and assume a new identity.