Thus, the King did not know that he himself had been deceived by the traveler, but censured the students for their tardiness. Enraged thereby, the King chastised the students. Before the men sent to learn completed their study, the traveler died. Once a traveler taught the King of Yan the way to immortality. He recounts an episode from the lifetime of King Huiwen:
But his writings also contain rumination about what he called the “drug of deathlessness,” or elixir of immortality. Such beliefs were obviously attractive to kings, and later an emperor, who wished to prolong their reigns.Īs an adviser and through his writings, Han Fei is known to have had a huge influence on the thought of Qin Shihuang in the political sphere. Indeed from around 400 bc, a couple of generations before Huiwen, it was believed that some men had managed to liberate themselves from death and had achieved perpetual life. This obsession was something of a family tradition, for traces of it appear in all the chronicles and histories from the time of King Huiwen onward. His vision of a lasting dynasty was founded on personal immortality, so death was unthinkable as a scholar of Chinese religious practices expressed it, writing of the emperor’s Han successors, “Holiness essentially meant the art of not dying.” In fact we know from the biography by Sima Qian that Qin Shihuang hated even hearing conversations about death, to the point that his officials were afraid of mentioning the very word. After years of military conquests and bloody massacres he had good reason to fear revenge from victims whose spirits would also continue to live after death and might lie in wait for him. Qin Shihuang, First Emperor of China, survived assassination attempts, constantly feared conspiracies, and insisted on secrecy in his movements to the extent of building walls and corridors to disguise them from public view-and to render them invisible to malign spirits.
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