Breaking the Blood Pond (po xuehu 破血湖) was a popular religious practice that took shape from the Song-Jin period onward and became widely prevalent in Jiangnan during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. The infernal hell conjured by the Blood Pond requires religious ritual to be broken open and transformed. This article argues that Breaking the Blood Pond can be traced back to Buddhist legend and to its unexpected convergence with Confucian notions of filial piety, while its more substantial discursive logic was established through Daoist apotropaic practices such as “breaking hell”. At the same time, it also had a lateral counterpart in the female inner alchemy of Red Dragon-Slaying (zhan chilong 斬赤龍), which circulated widely in Jiangnan from the Song, Jin, and Yuan periods onward. Menstrual blood and postpartum lochia are judged impure because they are understood as forms of stasis, retention, and obstruction. In Jiangnan local society, the unfolding of Breaking the Blood Pond depends both on the continued development of imaginaries of the netherworld and traditions of netherworld journey, and on concrete forms of local ritual organization. A woman’s state of existence in the afterlife is related not only to her experiences in life, but also to how her posthumous condition is imagined by the living. In this sense, Breaking the Blood Pond concerns not only the bodily experience of individual women, but also a communal ritual experience crossing the boundaries of class, generation, gender, and even good and evil.
Yulu Lv (Sat,) studied this question.