The black stain and seven ways into the heart

The black stain and seven ways into the heart is Gao Lian’s image of evil as an inward corruption that enters through ordinary human faculties and actions. Its seven routes make moral damage bodily and cumulative: speech, sight, hearing, digestion, sexual vulnerability, grasping hands, and forbidden movement all become possible entrances. The model is at once an account of how wrongdoing takes hold and a source of personal dread, because Gao imagines that at death a person sees everything held in the heart. Drawing quiets that fear for a time, but does not erase the image that has produced it.

The stain and its bodily logic

Gao thinks about the blackness in people’s hearts and understands evil as a black stain that manifests there. The heart is not merely a symbol of private feeling in this account. It is the vulnerable center of a living whole: if the heart becomes sick, the body becomes sick and dies. That connection gives the metaphor a physical severity. Evil is not presented as an abstract label applied after an action; it is something that enters, takes hold, and threatens the person from within.

The model also links interior corruption to a world already marked by death. The city had seemed clean and beautiful, but Gao now knows that beneath its ground and water lie human remains accumulated over millennia, and that death is also present inside buildings and living people. Against that recognition, the black stain offers a concentrated image of hidden damage: a surface may appear clean while what lies underneath is not. The heart becomes another concealed place whose condition cannot be judged by outward appearance alone.

The seven entrances

The routes are counted in three groups: two, then two more, then three. Gao connects the resulting pattern, two-two-three, with the year 223, when the city where he was born, Wuhan, was founded. The association ties his account of the heart to the place of his birth through a number, giving the sequence a personal and historical marker as well as a ritual-like structure. The routes are not presented as an unordered catalogue; their grouping and numerical pattern are part of how Gao holds them in mind.

The first entrance is the tongue, which lies and slanders. Corruption begins here through language used to distort or injure. The second is the eyes, which see what is forbidden: looking itself becomes a route inward, so that wrongdoing is connected not only to what a person says but also to what a person permits themselves to behold.

The third entrance is the ears, which listen to lies. Where the tongue produces falsehood, the ears admit it; the account therefore marks both speaking and receiving as morally consequential. The fourth is the stomach, which digests those lies. This image carries falsehood further inward than hearing alone: what has been taken in is processed within the body. The sequence moves from the circulation of words to their imagined incorporation.

The fifth route is through the impure parts, which let themselves be touched. The sixth is through the hands, which plunder. One concerns bodily contact and vulnerability; the other, the taking of what belongs to someone else. The seventh is through the feet, which go to forbidden places. At the end of the list, movement itself becomes an entrance: a person’s path through the world can participate in the stain. Together, the seven routes extend responsibility across speech, perception, reception, appetite, sexuality, action, and place.

Death, fear, and imagined vision

The account becomes most personal when Gao considers the claim that, at the moment of death, a person sees everything in their heart. The seven entrances then point toward a final reckoning: what has entered and accumulated within may become visible at the end. Gao wonders what he himself will see. That question turns a general moral scheme into a private apprehension, without establishing what the vision will contain or whether the claim is literally true.

His possible images are strikingly different in kind. He thinks of birds, then of a hand offering comfort. These are not additional routes or explanations of the stain; they are possibilities for what might appear in the heart’s final vision. The movement from a broad, fleeting image to a gesture of consolation leaves the prospect unresolved. Gao’s fear remains, but the imagined contents of his heart are not reduced to wrongdoing alone.

Drawing as temporary relief

Gao draws and writes, piling paper on top of paper. The accumulating pages provide a concrete counterpoint to the invisible accumulation described by the stain: on one side, a heart receives what the seven routes admit; on the other, Gao makes marks and builds a visible body of work. The passage does not say that drawing cures or removes the blackness. Its stated effect is narrower and more immediate: the work makes him calm, and he forgets his fear of the stain.

That temporary relief shapes the concept’s narrative force. Gao’s sequence is precise enough to be recited and remembered, yet the fear it produces is not dispelled by naming each entrance. He turns instead to repeated acts of drawing and writing, allowing the work to quiet him without settling what death might reveal. The black stain thus remains both a moral map and a personal anxiety: an account of how harm enters, and an image from which Gao can briefly look away.