that can bring a corpse back to life: "if you wish to raise a body that has not been dead for fully three days, bathe the corpse with a solution of one spatula of the blue elixir, open its mouth, and insert another spatula full; it will revive immediately.". a tang daoist text prescribes taking an elixir in doses half the size of a millet grain, but adds, "if one is sincerely determined, and dares to take a whole spatula-full all at once, one will temporarily die for half a day or so, and then be restored to life like someone waking from sleep. this however is perilous in the extreme". ritual suicide michel strickmann, a scholar of daoist and buddhist studies, analyzed the well-documented shangqing school's alchemy in the maoshan revelations and in the life of tao hongjing, and concluded that scholars need to reexamine the western stereotype of "accidental elixir poisoning" that supposedly applied to "misguided alchemists and their unwitting imperial patrons". since six dynasties and tang period daoist literature thoroughly, "even rapturously", described the deadly toxic qualities of many elixirs, strickmann proposed that some of the recorded alchemical deaths were intentional ritual suicide. two reviewers disagreed about strickmann's conclusions. the first questions why he defends the logic of alchemical suicide rather than simply accepting the idea of accidental elixir poisoning, and says tao hongjing never experimented with alchemy seriously enough to achieve suicide himself—but fails to mention strickmann's prime example: tao's disciple zhou ziliang whom shangqing deities reportedly instructed to prepare a poisonous elixir and commit suicide in order to achieve immortality. the second describes strickmann's chapter as "one of the most thorough and useful" in the volume, and says he proves that it is "almost ludicrous to assume that a taoist (commoner or emperor) could have died from accidental elixir poisoning".