The Three Corpses () or Three Worms () are a Daoist physiological belief that demonic creatures live inside the human body, and they seek to hasten the death of their host. These three supernatural parasites allegedly enter the person at birth, and reside in the three dantian "energy centers", respectively located within the head, chest, and abdomen. After their human host dies, they are freed from the body and become malevolent ghosts.
The pernicious Three Corpses/Worms work to harm their host's health and fate by initiating sicknesses, inviting other disease-causing agents into the body, and reporting their host's transgressions to the gods. The Three Corpses are supposed to keep records of their host's misdeeds, ascend to tian "heaven" bimonthly on the night of Chinese sexagenary while the host is sleeping, and file reports to the who deducts a certain number of days from the person's life for each misdeed. One way of avoiding this bureaucratic snitching is to stay awake for the entire gengshen day and night, thus preventing the Three Corpses from leaving one's body (a belief later assimilated into the Japanese tradition).
For a Daoist adept to achieve the longevity of a "transcendent", it was necessary to expel the Three Corpses from the body. Since these evil spirits feed upon decaying matter produced by grains being digested in the intestines, the practice of "abstinence from grains and cereals" is the first step towards expelling them. alone will not eliminate the Three Corpses, but weakens them to the point where they can be killed with alchemical drugs such as cinnabar, and ultimately eliminated through meditation techniques.
Terminology The Chinese terms and compound meaning "three, 3; several, many" with and .
The usual English translation of is "three corpses" or "Three Corpses". However, this Daoist term does not literally refer to "corpses; dead bodies" within the human body, but is linguistically causative meaning the eventual "death; mortality" produced by these demonic agents. Compare the English slang verb corpse meaning "to make a corpse of, to kill" (Oxford English Dictionary 2009). More accurate translations of sanshi are "Three Deathbringers", "three corpse-demons", or "three corpse ".
Synonyms for include , , , and in reference to the three corpses named Peng (see below), or . is an honorific alternate with "spirit; god; deity"
, which the (see below) used to mean "intestinal parasites", is normally translated as "three worms" or "Three Worms"; "Three Cadavers" is another version. Owing to the semantic polysemy of , the term is also translatable as "three pests" or "three bugs".
The expressions Three Corpses and Three Worms are used in traditional Chinese medicine. Zhang and Unschuld define two meanings for sanchong: "Etiological Agent of all microorganisms in the body that bring forth disease", citing Li Shizhen's (1578) Bencao Gangmu that, "Bugs/worms are small organisms. There are very many types. This is the meaning of 'three bugs/worms'"; and "Combined Designation of , , and , citing the (c. 610) , "The three worms include long worms, red worms, and pinworms". They give "three corpse " as an alternative name for "corpse bugs/worms", and define it as the "Etiological Agent of microorganisms that can bring forth all types of "corpse disease", citing the again that, "Inside the human body there are from the beginning all the three corpse . They come to life together with man, but they are most malicious. They are able to communicate with demons and the numinous, and they regularly invite evil from outside, thereby causing human suffering".
Demonic possession and demonic medicine are ancient Chinese beliefs. For example, the chapter (52) on medicines derived from the human body says "bregma; skull bone" is good for treating tuberculosis-like consumptive diseases that are supposedly caused by evil spirits, such as , which is translated as "cadaver vector disease", "consumptive and infectious disease", and "corpse transmission".
Since the Chinese notion of "Three Corpses" within the human body is unfamiliar to most Westerners, meaningful English descriptions are problematic. Scholars have termed them as gods: "transcendental beings"; "supernatural beings with physical and ephemeral spirit components"; "internal gods"; demons: "a sort of demon"; "maleficent demons"; "malevolent beings in the body"; "demonic supernatural creatures"; both: "semi-divine, semi-demonic agents". parasites: "biospiritual parasites"; "body parasites"; "parasites said to live inside the human body". other terms: "factors in the human body".
Daoist internal deities In Daoist physiology, the human body contains many indwellers besides the Three Corpses. and are Daoist terms for deities inhabiting various parts of the body, including , , and .
These "body residents" were either health threats or health protectors, and said to engage in constant struggles with one another. The upper, middle, and lower energy-centers contained both the Three Corpses/Worms and the counterpart guardian gods called the . When the Three Corpses approach spirits within the body, they can shapeshift, sometimes appearing as evil demons and sometimes taking human form.
The ancient Chinese believed in soul dualism between the hun and po souls: heavenly that leaves the body after death and the earthly that remains with the corpse of the deceased. In some Daoist traditions, the body was thought to contain three hun and seven po souls. The good hun-souls are clad in red and carry a red seal in their hands, the bad po-souls, "who long for the body to die and therefore perform mischief to try to hasten the adept's demise", are clad in black and carry black seals. Strickmann says the Three Corpses/Worms represent a specialized development of the po-souls' destructive propensities. But unlike the hun, whose nature (though flighty and inconstant) is entirely benign and whose tendencies are all heavenward, the seven p'o yearn for the earth. Their strongest wish is to rejoin the damp, dank underground springs whose moist, heavy nature they share, and so they seek to undermine and rid themselves of the constraining human body they inhabit. Thus at night, while their host is sleeping (and the airborne hun-souls are sporting and gambling with the hun of other sleepers, thereby causing dreams), the p'o beckon to passing phantoms and disease-demons and invite them in to take possession of the sleeper’s body and work toward his destruction. The very names of the seven p'o-souls suggest their harmful function, and one early list significantly begins with a corpse: corpse-dog, hidden dung, sparrow-sex, greedy-guts, flying venom, filth-for-removal, and rot-lung.
Daoists were fascinated with correlations between the human body and the cosmos. Maspero says, "Man and world, for the Chinese, are absolutely identical, not only as a whole but also in every detail." For examples, the human head is round like heaven, the feet are square like the earth; the Five Viscera correspond to the Five Phases, the 24 vertebra to the 24 solar terms, the 365 acupoints to the 365 days of the year; and the veins and arteries compare to rivers and streams.
Later texts like the Neijing Tu and Xiuzhen Tu depict the "inner landscape" of the human body as a microcosm of the universe, which helps neidan mediators visualize their personal internal spirits. While body gods travel in and out of the body, their prolonged exit may result in sickness or death. Hence, detailed visualizations of the corpse-worms within the meditator's body is a powerful means of keeping them in place and thus promoting health and longevity.
Classical descriptions The received canon of Chinese classics first mentioned the Three Corpses and Three Worms in the Han dynasty period (206 BCE – 220 CE). Beginning in the Jin dynasty (266–420), Daoist texts portrayed them in both zoomorphic and bureaucratic metaphors. According to Isabelle, the Three Worms or Corpses are well known by all of the Daoist schools; for instance, they are mentioned in early Shangqing School texts such as the and . The Three Corpses are among the most widely‑documented body parasites in early and medieval Chinese literature.
Liexian zhuan Liu Xiang's (c. late 1st century BCE) Daoist hagiography "Biographies of Exemplary Immortals" first records the Three Corpses in the biography of Zhu Huang (). His Daoist master Ruan Qiu () expelled the Three Corpses from Zhu Huang by means of a prescription combining seven drugs, administered nine times daily, over a period of a hundred days. It also quotes the Huangtingjing that for genghsen days, "Do not sleep either day or night, and you shall become immortal."
Lunheng Wang Chong's (c. 80 CE) compares the sanchong to (also written with insect radical generally used for characters naming insects, worms, spiders, and smaller reptiles). Wang censures critics who metaphorically describe corrupt officials as worms or parasites, . . To whom will these critics, so fond of similarities, compare the three worms?" In another Lunheng section, Wang Chong mentions ancient exorcisms of .
Baopuzi The "Inner Chapters" of the (c. 320 CE) , written by the Jin Dynasty Daoist scholar Ge Hong, is the earliest source of detailed information about the Three Corpses. This text describes the sanshi parasites causing illnesses during unlucky times in the Chinese calendar and reporting sins on days, as well as gives several methods for preparing poisonous alchemical elixirs to eliminate the Three Corpses.
The Baopuzi records how the Three Corpses and make regular reports to , who shortens the host's lifespan accordingly. Answering a question about the importance of , Ge Hong cites three apocryphal Han texts, the , , and , which is attributed to the Han Daoist Lezichang . Taboos are most urgent for avoiding harm and losses. Inner Commands of the Book of Changes, Ch'ih-sung tzu's Classic, and The Life-dealing Amulets of the Ho-t'u-chi are unanimous in saying that the gods of heaven and earth who are in charge of misdeeds make deductions from people's three-day reckonings according to the degree of their wrongdoing. As these reckonings decrease, a man becomes poorer and falls ill; frequently he suffers anxiety. When no more are left, he dies. Since there are hundreds of things that may give rise to deductions, I cannot give a complete account. It is also said that there are Three Corpses in our bodies, which, though not corporeal, actually are of a type with our inner, ethereal breaths, the powers, the ghosts, and the gods . They want us to die prematurely. (After death they become a man's ghost and move about at will to where sacrifices and libations are being offered.) Therefore, every fifty-seventh day of the sixty-day cycle they mount to heaven and personally report our misdeeds to the Director of Fates. Further, during the night of the last day of the month the hearth god also ascends to heaven and makes an oral report of a man's wrongs. For the more important misdeeds a whole period of three hundred days is deducted. For the minor ones they deduct one reckoning , a reckoning being three days. Personally, I have not yet been able to determine whether this is really so or not, but that is because the ways of heaven are obscure, and ghosts and gods are hard to understand. (6)