The black stain

The black stain is Gao Lian’s image for evil within the human heart, and the seven ways leading to it turn an abstract idea of corruption into a sequence of bodily acts. The image joins moral judgment to physical vulnerability: what enters through speech, sight, hearing, appetite, touch, grasping hands, and movement through forbidden places leaves its mark inside. Yet the thought of death does not settle into a single verdict. Gao wonders what he will see in his own heart, and the passage leaves room for birds and a hand offering comfort alongside darkness.

Definition and Structure

Gao Lian, thinking about the blackness in people’s hearts, understands evil as appearing there as a black stain. The stain is not presented as a mark imposed by one isolated deed. It is the accumulated destination of seven routes, each connected to a part of the body and a way of encountering or acting in the world. The image makes inward corruption legible through a figure that can be imagined as both a visible mark and the consequence of repeated conduct.

The routes are arranged in groups of two, two, and three. Gao links that count to the year 223, which he identifies as the year Wuhan, the city where he was born, was founded. This numerical pattern gives the list a memorable internal order, while connecting a theory of the heart to a specific historical association in his thoughts. The sequence is not merely a catalogue: its count is itself part of the way Gao organizes and remembers the idea.

The Seven Ways into the Heart

The first two routes concern perception and speech. The tongue is the first way because it lies and slanders; the eyes are the second because they see what is forbidden. In this account, wrongdoing begins both in what a person puts into language and in what a person looks upon. The pairing places spoken harm beside transgressive looking, treating outward expression and inward reception as related entrances rather than separate moral domains.

The next pair extends the movement from hearing to digestion. The ears provide the third way when they listen to lies; the stomach is the fourth when it digests those lies. The image carries falsehood beyond the moment of hearing: what is taken in can be swallowed and incorporated. By making the stomach one of the routes, Gao’s scheme presents corruption as something that may become part of a person, not merely something encountered at a distance.

The final three routes are the impure parts, the hands, and the feet. The fifth way opens when the impure parts let themselves be touched; the sixth is through hands that plunder; the seventh is through feet that go to forbidden places. The list thus moves from exposure to contact and from contact to action and destination. Its final entries make bodily participation explicit: a person’s relation to the stain is shaped not only by what is seen or heard, but by what the body permits, takes, and approaches.

Death and the Uncertain Contents of the Heart

The scheme gains its sharpest consequence in Gao’s thought about death. It is said that at the moment of death a person sees everything in their heart, and Gao wonders what he himself will see. The seven routes therefore lead toward a reckoning: the inward mark, ordinarily difficult to inspect, becomes visible at life’s end. But the passage frames this as a question about what will be revealed, not as a certainty that Gao already knows his own final image.

The images that follow complicate the prospect of a heart defined only by evil. Gao considers birds, then a hand offering comfort. These brief possibilities interrupt the severity of the ordered list without cancelling it. The hand is especially resonant beside the earlier account of hands as a way to plunder: the body part associated with taking can also appear as an offer of consolation. The text leaves that contrast open, allowing the imagined contents of the heart to include something other than the black stain.

The Stain as a Recurring Image

A later passage gives the heart a related image through the metaphor of fire. A woman listens to an inner roaring and to blood burning in her veins; eventually, she thinks, the fire will die down and her heart will be charred, ending as a large black stain. The wording returns to blackness and damage inside the heart, but approaches them through an anticipated bodily exhaustion rather than Gao’s ordered moral routes. The passages share an image without establishing that the woman is Gao or that her thought is part of his system.

The scene’s physical sequence makes that recurrence concrete. She pours more wine, rinses her face, drinks and retches, forces herself to finish the glass, wipes herself with a towel, and puts on make-up. When she looks at herself, she judges that she looks good enough for her purpose. Against these deliberate acts of appearance, the predicted black stain remains inward and unseen. Across the two passages, the image connects moral darkness with a vulnerable inner life, while the contrast between outward presentation and inward damage prevents the heart from becoming a simple, publicly readable emblem.