Reference

Other shijie translations include "release by means of a corpse", "one's soul leaves the body and becomes an immortal after death", and "dissolve bodily into a spirit". Campany lists common elements in Shenxian Zhuan narratives involving shijie transcendence. [43]

Joseph Needham translates shijie as "release from the mortal part",[7] which is more appropriate than "release from the corpse" because the first step in achieving shijie transcendence is to abandon one's corporeal body.[8] Anna Seidel points out that shi in the term shijie denotes "all the corruptible aging factors of the physical body," rather than the corpse itself.[1] Fabrizio Pregadio cites a classic Daoist text that clearly uses the word shi to denote "not specifically a corpse, but in general the 'mortal body', either living or dead". Harper notes that xingjie "release from the form" is thought to be synonymous with shijie "release from the corpse", which for the Daoist believer, marked the moment of xian transformation when a new, immortal physique was perfected and the mortal body sloughed off, leaving behind a husk-like corpse (or an object such as a sword or staff) as evidence that the adept had achieved shijie (citing Maspero 1981: 445–48).

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 ...