Gao Lian’s seven ways into the heart

Gao Lian’s seven ways into the heart is a moral scheme that maps the arrival of evil onto seven bodily routes, from the tongue and eyes to the hands and feet. For Gao Lian, the black stain in the heart is not an abstraction detached from conduct: it is connected to what a person says, takes in, permits, and does. The scheme’s pattern of two, two, and three gives this account a memorable order, while its final uncertainty turns it inward: at death, Gao Lian wonders what he will see in his own heart.

The black stain and the body

Gao Lian thinks about the blackness in people’s hearts and understands evil as something that manifests there as a stain. The image makes the heart both a place affected by wrongdoing and the point on which the condition of the whole person depends. In the surrounding reflection, he considers how a city that had seemed clean and beautiful can also be understood as resting above the remains of human cadavers, with death inside its buildings and its living inhabitants. The thought that a sick heart makes the whole body sick, until the person dies, gives the moral image a bodily consequence: corruption is not contained in one isolated act but reaches the whole.

The seven ways specify how that corruption may enter. They are not seven separate kinds of person or a ranking of sins, but a sequence of routes associated with different parts of the body. The scheme begins with forms of perception and reception, then includes bodily vulnerability and actions that carry a person into the world. Its movement makes the heart’s blackness seem connected to both what is done to a person and what a person does.

The seven entrances

The first way is the tongue: it lies and slanders. Speech can introduce falsehood directly into relations between people, and the scheme places it first, before the other routes. The second way is the eyes, which see what is forbidden. Here the danger lies not in speaking but in looking; the heart is exposed through what a person chooses to see.

The third way is through the ears, which listen to lies. It shifts the emphasis from producing falsehood to receiving it. The fourth is the stomach, which digests those lies. The paired routes extend the image beyond hearing: falsehood is not merely encountered but taken in and processed, as though it could become part of the person. Together, the tongue, eyes, ears, and stomach make the first four entrances a pattern of expression, sight, hearing, and inward reception.

The final three routes turn to bodily contact and action. The fifth is through the impure parts, which let themselves be touched; the sixth is through the hands, which plunder; the seventh is through the feet, which go to forbidden places. The list moves from permitted contact to taking and then to movement toward prohibited territory. These are distinct routes: bodily exposure, the act of seizure, and the decision to go somewhere forbidden. The sequence broadens the stain from what enters through the senses to conduct enacted with the body.

The pattern of two, two, and three

Gao Lian arranges the entrances as two, then two more, and finally three. He connects this grouping to the year 223, the year Wuhan, the city where he was born, was founded. The numerical association gives the moral inventory a personal and geographical point of reference: the scheme is not only an ordered account of the heart but also something Gao links to his birthplace. The passage offers the correspondence as a striking mnemonic rather than explaining it further.

The grouping also determines how the list unfolds. The first pair consists of the tongue and eyes; the next pair, the ears and stomach; the closing three, the impure parts, hands, and feet. This division holds unlike forms of wrongdoing within one compact structure. Speaking, looking, listening, digesting, allowing touch, plundering, and going to forbidden places remain specific actions, yet the repeated count gathers them into one account of how the heart becomes stained.

Death and the unresolved heart

The scheme ends not with a judgment about another person but with Gao Lian’s uncertainty about himself. It is said that, at the moment of death, a person sees everything in their heart. He wonders what he will see. The question gives the seven routes their personal force: they are not merely a catalogue through which to condemn others, because the final reckoning is imagined as an inward vision that may disclose what the person carries within.

Gao Lian’s possible answer is birds. The brief image does not explain whether the birds signify innocence, freedom, memory, or anything else, and the passage leaves that meaning open. Its placement nonetheless alters the tone of the black stain and the seven entrances: after an ordered inventory of lies, forbidden sights, plunder, and trespass, the thought of birds remains a possibility rather than a verdict. The rule therefore joins moral accounting to uncertainty. Gao Lian can name the routes by which evil reaches the heart, but he cannot yet say what his own heart will show.