1. The extraordinary stories that followed Japan's 3.11 tsunami
The magnitude nine earthquake off the coast of Japan on 11 March 2011, and the tsunami it set off, took eighteen thousand lives, and in the aftermath a great many hard-to-believe stories came out of the affected areas.
One taxi driver, for instance, carried a passenger to the address he had been given, only to find a patch of empty ground with no house on it; when he turned around, the passenger had gone. A Japanese writer, Shuji Okuno, decided to look into these accounts. After three and a half years of interviews he set down the sixteen fullest cases in a book, If Grief Could Be Soothed: Miraculous Encounters After 3.11, and a Chinese translation is due out shortly. The people in these stories describe dreaming of, or meeting, relatives and friends who had died, or complete strangers. The author cannot prove that what they say is factually true, but for the people themselves there is no doubt at all that it happened. What these encounters suggest is that although the body disappears at death, the soul remains, and will go looking for family and friends, so that they sense the presence of the person they lost.
2. My own encounter with a soul
I have had a comparable experience myself. Twenty years ago a professor named Zhan in the Department of Electrical Engineering at National Taiwan University died of nasopharyngeal cancer. His laboratory was on the fourth floor of the electrical engineering building, next door to mine. The seventh day after his death fell on a weekend, and I happened to have scheduled a finger-reading experiment in the ground-floor meeting room of that same building. Miss T, who has the ability, was working through one slip of paper after another. Partway through, she suddenly turned her head to look at the back of the room and said to me: "There is a spirit sitting on a chair near the back door." Ordinary people like me see nothing, of course; I looked up and saw only empty rows of chairs, and for a moment the hair stood up on the back of my neck.
I knew that finger-reading experiments sometimes draw spirits in to watch, and occasionally to make mischief. So once we had finished I asked Miss T to communicate with this one and find out what was going on, and what it had come for. The spirit said: "I have not eaten for a very long time. I would like some food." I asked a student who was present and knew the Daoist feeding incantation to take him to the student cafeteria for the sensation of eating.
It dawned on me afterwards that this was Professor Zhan's soul. Because of the cancer, he had been unable to eat during the last three months of his life and had been fed through a nasogastric tube, so the sensation of food was still much on his mind. On the seventh day he had returned to a familiar place, found someone he could communicate with, and satisfied the human awareness that had not yet faded.
For this reason I believe the sixteen stories in the book are real, and not merely hallucinations produced by longing for a lost relative. What we can see in them is that contact with the soul of a family member who has died leaves people believing: "one day I will see the person I lost again." That not only soothes their grief, but gives them the courage to go on living.
Meeting the soul of a family member who has died is a rare thing in a life, powerful and full of insight, and it suggests to me that the human soul does not die. In the early period after death the soul leaves the body, but human awareness has not yet dissolved, and it still misses family and the affairs of this world. They no longer need food, and yet they still want to eat. This says something about why the traditional seven-day rites still matter: they are how you tell the departed that they have died, and that it is time to go where they should go. The pity is that most people have no knowledge of the world after death, and can only leave it to fate.
