China may be found the further inconsistency that the spirit of a departed relative may receive the tribute of offerings and salutations called ancestor worship, while at the same time Buddhist services are being performed for his deliverance from hell.  But of the wide distribution, antiquity and strength of the cult there can be no doubt.  It is anterior not only to Brahmanism but to the doctrines of transmigration and karma, and the main occupation of Buddhist priests in China and Japan is the performance of ceremonies supposed to benefit the dead.  Even within Buddhism these practices cannot be dismissed as a late or foreign corruption.  In the Khuddaka-patha which, if not belonging to the most ancient part of the Buddhist canon, is at least pre-Christian and purely Indian, the dead are represented as waiting for offerings and as blessing those who give them.  It is also curious that a recent work called Raymond by Sir O. Lodge (1916) gives a view of the state after death which is substantially that of the Chinese.  For its teaching is that the dead retain their personality, concern themselves with the things of this world, know what is going to happen here and can to some extent render assistance to the living[106].  Also (and this point is specially remarkable) burning and mutilation of the body seem to inconvenience the dead.

Early Chinese works prescribe that during the performance of ancestral rites, the ghosts are to be represented by people known as the personators of the dead who receive the offerings and are supposed to be temporarily possessed by spirits and to be their mouthpieces.  Possession by ghosts or other spirits is, in popular esteem, of frequent occurrence in India, China, Japan and Indo-China.  It is one of the many factors which have contributed to the ideas of incarnation and deification, that is, that gods can become men and men gods.  In Europe the spheres of the human and divine are strictly separated:  to pass from one to the other is exceptional:  a single incarnation is regarded as an epoch-making event of universal importance.  But in Asia the frontiers are not thus rigidly delimitated, nor are God and man thus opposed.  The ordinary dead become powers in the spirit world and can bless or injure here:  the great dead become deities:  in another order of ideas, the dead immediately become reincarnate and reappear on earth:  the gods take the shape of men, sometimes for the space of a human life, sometimes for a shorter apparition.  Many teachers in India have been revered as partial incarnations of Vishnu and most of the higher clergy in Tibet claim to be Buddhas or Bodhisattvas manifest in the flesh.  There is no proof that the doctrine of metempsychosis existed in Eastern Asia independently of Indian influence but the ready acceptance accorded to it was largely due to the prevalent feeling that the worlds of men and spirits are divided by no great gulf.  It is quite natural to step into the spirit world and back again into this.