from Donald S. Lopez, Jr , Religions of China in Practice,
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)
Acknowledging the wisdom of Chinese proverbs, most anthologies of Chinese
religion are organized by the logic of the three teachings (_sanjiao_) of
Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Historical precedent and popular
parlance attest to the importance of this threefold division for
understanding Chinese culture. One of the earliest references to the
trinitarian idea is attributed to Li Shiqian, a prominent scholar of the
sixth century, who wrote that ``Buddhism is the sun, Daoism the moon, and
Confucianism the five planets.''<1> Li likens the three traditions to
significant heavenly bodies, suggesting that although they remain separate,
they also coexist as equally indispensable phenomena of the natural world.
Other opinions stress the essential unity of the three religious systems.
One popular proverb opens by listing the symbols that distinguish the
religions from each other, but closes with the assertion that they are
fundamentally the same: ``The three teach ings--the gold and cinnabar of
Daoism, the relics of Buddhist figures, as well as the Confucian virtues of
humanity and righteousness--are basically one tradition.''<2> Stating the
point more bluntly, some phrases have been put to use by writers in the
long, complicated history of what Western authors have called
``syncretism.'' Such mottoes include ``the three teachings are one
teaching''; ``the three teachings return to the one''; ``the three teachings
share one body''; and ``the three teachings merge into one.''<3>
What sense does it make to subsume several thousand years of religious
experience under these three (or three-in-one) categories? And why is this
anthology organized differently? To answer these questions, we need first to
understand what the three teachings are and how they came into existence.
There is a certain risk in beginning this introduction with an
archaeology of the three teachings. The danger is that rather than fixing in
the reader's mind the most significant forms of Chinese religion--the
practices and ideas associated with ancestors, the measures taken to protect
against ghosts, or the veneration of gods, topics which are highlighted by
the selections in this anthology--emphasis will instead be placed on
precisely those terms the anthology seeks to avoid. Or, as one friendly
critic stated in a review of an earlier draft of this introduction, why must
``the tired old category of the three teachings be inflicted on yet another
generation of students?'' Indeed, why does this introduction begin on a
negative note, as it were, analyzing the problems with subsuming Chinese
religion under the three teachings, and insert a positive appraisal of what
constitutes Chinese religion only at the end? Why not begin with ``popular
religion,'' the gods of China, and kinship and bureaucracy and then, only
after those categories are established, proceed to discuss the explicit
categories by which Chinese people have ordered their religious world? The
answer has to do with the fact that Chinese religion does not come to us
purely, or without mediation. The three teachings are a powerful and
inescapable part of Chinese religion. Whether they are eventually accepted,
rejected, or reformulated, the terms of the past can only be understood by
examining how they came to assume their current status. Even the seemingly
pristine translations of texts deemed ``primary'' are products of their
time; the materials here have been selected by the translators and the
editor according to the concerns of the particular series in which this book
is published. This volume, in other words, is as much a product of Chinese
religion as it is a tool enabling access to that field. And because Chinese
religion has for so long been dominated by the idea of the three teachings,
it is essential to understand where those traditions come from, who
constructed them and how, as well as what forms of religious life are
omitted or denied by constructing such a picture in the first place.
Confucianism
The myth of origins told by proponents of Confucianism (and by plenty of
modern historians) begins with Confucius, whose Chinese name was Kong Qiu
and who lived from 551 to 479 B.C.E. Judging from the little direct evidence
that still survives, however, it appears that Kong Qiu did not view himself
as the founder of a school of thought, much less as the originator of
anything. What does emerge from the earliest layers of the written record is
that Kong Qiu sought a revival of the ideas and institutions of a past
golden age. Employed in a minor government position as a specialist in the
governmental and family rituals of his native state, Kong Qiu hoped to
disseminate knowledge of the rites and inspire their universal performance.
That kind of broad-scale transformation could take place, he thought, only
with the active encouragement of responsible rulers. The ideal ruler, as
exemplified by the legendary sage-kings Yao and Shun or the adviser to the
Zhou rulers, the Duke of Zhou, exercises ethical suasion, the ability to
influence others by the power of his moral example. To the virtues of the
ruler correspond values that each individual is supposed to cultivate:
benevolence toward others, a general sense of doing what is right, loyalty
and diligence in serving one's superiors. Universal moral ideals are
necessary but not sufficient conditions for the restoration of civilization.
Society also needs what Kong Qiu calls _li_, roughly translated as
``ritual.'' Although people are supposed to develop propriety or the ability
to act appropriately in any given social situation (another sense of the
same word, li), still the specific rituals people are supposed to perform
(also li) vary considerably, depending on age, social status, gender, and
context. In family ritual, for instance, rites of mourning depend on one's
kinship relation to the deceased. In international affairs, degrees of pomp,
as measured by ornateness of dress and opulence of gifts, depend on the rank
of the foreign emissary. Offerings to the gods are also highly regulated:
the sacrifices of each social class are restricted to specific classes of
deities, and a clear hierarchy prevails. The few explicit statements
attributed to Kong Qiu about the problem of history or tradition all portray
him as one who ``transmits but does not create.''<4> Such a claim can, of
course, serve the ends of innovation or revolution. But in this case it is
clear that Kong Qiu transmitted not only specific rituals and values but
also a hierarchical social structure and the weight of the past.
The portrayal of Kong Qiu as originary and the coalescence of a self-
conscious identity among people tracing their heritage back to him took
place long after his death. Two important scholar-teachers, both of whom
aspired to serve as close advisers to a ruler whom they could convince to
institute a Confucian style of government, were Meng Ke (or Mengzi, ca.
371-289 B.C.E.) and Xun Qing (or Xunzi, d. 215 B.C.E.). Mengzi viewed
himself as a follower of Kong Qiu's example. His doctrines offered a program
for perfecting the individual. Sageliness could be achieved through a gentle
process of cultivating the innate tendencies toward the good. Xunzi
professed the same goal but argued that the means to achieve it required
stronger measures. To be civilized, according to Xunzi, people need to
restrain their base instincts and have their behavior modified by a system
of ritual built into social institutions.
It was only with the founding of the Han dynasty (202 B.C.E.-220 C.E.),
however, that Confucianism became Confucianism, that the ideas associated
with Kong Qiu's name received state support and were disseminated generally
throughout upper-class society. The creation of Confucianism was neither
simple nor sudden, as three examples will make clear. In the year 136 B.C.E.
the classical writings touted by Confucian scholars were made the foundation
of the official system of education and scholarship, to the exclusion of
titles supported by other philosophers. The five classics (or five
scriptures, _wujing_) were the _Classic of Poetry_ (_Shijing_), _Classic of
History_ (_Shujing_), _Classic of Changes_ (_Yijing_), _Record of Rites_
(_Liji_), and _Chronicles of the Spring and Autumn Period_ (_Chunqiu_) with
the _Zuo Commentary_ (_Zuozhuan_), most of which had existed prior to the
time of Kong Qiu. (The word _jing_ denotes the warp threads in a piece of
cloth. Once adopted as a generic term for the authoritative texts of
Han-dynasty Confucianism, it was applied by other traditions to their sacred
books. It is translated variously as book, classic, scripture, and samutra.)
Although Kong Qiu was commonly believed to have written or edited some of
the five classics, his own statements (collected in the _Analects_
[_Lunyu_]) and the writings of his closest followers were not yet admitted
into the canon. Kong Qiu's name was implicated more directly in the second
example of the Confucian system, the state-sponsored cult that erected
temples in his honor throughout the empire and that provided monetary
support for turning his ancestral home into a national shrine. Members of
the literate elite visited such temples, paying formalized respect and
enacting rituals in front of spirit tablets of the master and his disciples.
The third example is the corpus of writing left by the scholar Dong Zhongshu
(ca. 179-104 B.C.E.), who was instrumental in promoting Confucian ideas and
books in official circles. Dong was recognized by the government as the
leading spokesman for the scholarly elite. His theories provided an
overarching cosmological framework for Kong Qiu's ideals, sometimes adding
ideas unknown in Kong Qiu's time, sometimes making more explicit or
providing a particular interpretation of what was already stated in Kong
Qiu's work. Dong drew heavily on concepts of earlier thinkers--few of whom
were self-avowed Confucians--to explain the workings of the cosmos. He used
the concepts of yin and yang to explain how change followed a knowable
pattern, and he elaborated on the role of the ruler as one who connected the
realms of Heaven, Earth, and humans. The social hierarchy implicit in Kong
Qiu's ideal world was coterminous, thought Dong, with a division of all
natural relationships into a superior and inferior member. Dong's theories
proved determinative for the political culture of Confucianism during the
Han and later dynasties.
What in all of this, we need to ask, was Confucian? Or, more precisely,
what kind of thing is the ``Confucianism'' in each of these examples? In the
first, that of the five classics, ``Confucianism'' amounts to a set of books
that were mostly written before Kong Qiu lived but that later tradition
associates with his name. It is a curriculum instituted by the emperor for
use in the most prestigious institutions of learning. In the second example,
``Confucianism'' is a complex ritual apparatus, an empire-wide network of
shrines patronized by government authorities. It depends upon the ability of
the government to maintain religious institutions throughout the empire and
upon the willingness of state officials to engage regularly in worship. In
the third example, the work of Dong Zhongshu, ``Confucianism'' is a
conceptual scheme, a fluid synthesis of some of Kong Qiu's ideals and the
various cosmologies popular well after Kong Qiu lived. Rather than being an
updating of something universally acknowledged as Kong Qiu's philosophy, it
is a conscious systematizing, under the symbol of Kong Qiu, of ideas current
in the Han dynasty.
If even during the Han dynasty the term ``Confucianism'' covers so many
different sorts of things--books, a ritual apparatus, a conceptual
scheme--one might well wonder why we persist in using one single word to
cover such a broad range of phenomena. Sorting out the pieces of that puzzle
is now one of the most pressing tasks in the study of Chinese history, which
is already beginning to replace the wooden division of the Chinese
intellectual world into the three teachings--each in turn marked by phases
called ``proto-,'' ``neo-,'' or ``revival of''--with a more critical and
nuanced understanding of how traditions are made and sustained. For our more
limited purposes here, it is instructive to observe how the word
``Confucianism'' came to be applied to all of these things and more.<5> As a
word, ``Confucianism'' is tied to the Latin name, ``Confucius,'' which
originated not with Chinese philosophers but with European missionaries in
the sixteenth century. Committed to winning over the top echelons of Chinese
society, Jesuits and other Catholic orders subscribed to the version of
Chinese religious history supplied to them by the educated elite. The story
they told was that their teaching began with Kong Qiu, who was referred to
as Kongfuzi, rendered into Latin as ``Confucius.'' It was elaborated by
Mengzi (rendered as ``Mencius'') and Xunzi and was given official
recognition-- as if it had existed as the same entity, unmodified for
several hundred years--under the Han dynasty. The teaching changed to the
status of an unachieved metaphysical principle during the centuries that
Buddhism was believed to have been dominant and was resuscitated-- still
basically unchanged--only with the teachings of Zhou Dunyi (1017- 1073),
Zhang Zai (1020), Cheng Hao (1032-1085), and Cheng Yi (1033- 1107), and the
commentaries authored by Zhu Xi (1130-1200). As a genealogy crucial to the
self-definition of modern Confucianism, that myth of origins is both
misleading and instructive. It lumps together heterogeneous ideas, books
that predate Kong Qiu, and a state- supported cult under the same heading.
It denies the diversity of names by which members of a supposedly unitary
tradition chose to call themselves, including _ru_ (the early meaning of
which remains disputed, usually translated as ``scholars'' or
``Confucians''), _daoxue_ (study of the Way), _lixue_ (study of principle),
and _xinxue_ (study of the mind). It ignores the long history of contention
over interpreting Kong Qiu and overlooks the debt owed by later thinkers
like Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming (1472-1529) to Buddhist notions of the mind
and practices of meditation and to Daoist ideas of change. And it passes
over in silence the role played by non-Chinese regimes in making
Confucianism into an orthodoxy, as in the year 1315, when the Mongol
government required that the writings of Kong Qiu and his early followers,
redacted and interpreted through the commentaries of Zhu Xi, become the
basis for the national civil service examination. At the same time,
Confucianism's story about itself reveals much. It names the figures, books,
and slogans of the past that recent Confucians have found most inspiring. As
a string of ideals, it illuminates what its proponents wish it to be. As a
lineage, it imagines a line of descent kept pure from the traditions of
Daoism and Buddhism. The construction of the latter two teachings involves a
similar process. Their histories, as will be seen below, do not simply move
from the past to the present; they are also projected backward from specific
presents to significant pasts.
Daoism
Most Daoists have argued that the meaningful past is the period that
preceded, chronologically and metaphysically, the past in which the
legendary sages of Confucianism lived. In the Daoist golden age the empire
had not yet been reclaimed out of chaos. Society lacked distinctions based
on class, and human beings lived happily in what resembled primitive,
small-scale agricultural collectives. The lines between different
nation-states, between different occupations, even between humans and
animals were not clearly drawn. The world knew nothing of the Confucian
state, which depended on the carving up of an undifferentiated whole into
social ranks, the imposition of artificially ritualized modes of behavior,
and a campaign for conservative values like loyalty, obeying one's parents,
and moderation. Historically speaking, this Daoist vision was first
articulated shortly after the time of Kong Qiu, and we should probably
regard the Daoist nostalgia for a simpler, untrammeled time as roughly
contemporary with the development of a Confucian view of origins. In Daoist
mythology whenever a wise man encounters a representative of Confucianism,
be it Kong Qiu himself or an envoy seeking advice for an emperor, the hermit
escapes to a world untainted by civilization.
For Daoists the philosophical equivalent to the pre-imperial primordium
is a state of chaotic wholeness, sometimes called _hundun_, roughly
translated as ``chaos.'' In that state, imagined as an uncarved block or as
the beginning of life in the womb, nothing is lacking. Everything exists,
everything is possible: before a stone is carved there is no limit to the
designs that may be cut, and before the fetus develops the embryo can, in an
organic worldview, develop into male or female. There is not yet any
division into parts, any name to distinguish one thing from another. Prior
to birth there is no distinction, from the Daoist standpoint, between life
and death. Once birth happens--once the stone is cut--however, the world
descends into a state of imperfection. Rather than a mythological sin on the
part of the first human beings or an ontological separation of God from
humanity, the Daoist version of the Fall involves division into parts, the
assigning of names, and the leveling of judgments injurious to life. _The
Classic on the Way and Its Power_ (_Dao de jing_) describes how the original
whole, the _dao_ (here meaning the ``Way'' above all other ways), was broken
up: ``The Dao gave birth to the One, the One gave birth to the Two, the Two
gave birth to the Three, and the Three gave birth to the Ten Thousand
Things.''<6> That decline-through-differentiation also offers the model for
regaining wholeness. The spirit may be restored by reversing the process of
aging, by reverting from multiplicity to the One. By understanding the road
or path (the same word, dao, in another sense) that the great Dao followed
in its decline, one can return to the root and endure forever.
Practitioners and scholars alike have often succumbed to the beauty and
power of the language of Daoism and proclaimed another version of the Daoist
myth of origins. Many people seem to move from a description of the Daoist
faith-stance (the Dao embraces all things) to active Daoist proselytization
masquerading as historical description (Daoism embraces all forms of Chinese
religion). As with the term ``Confucianism,'' it is important to consider
not just what the term ``Daoism'' covers, but also where it comes from, who
uses it, and what words Daoists have used over the years to refer to
themselves.
The most prominent early writings associated with Daoism are two texts,
_The Classic on the Way and Its Power,_ attributed to a mythological figure
named Lao Dan or Laozi who is presumed to have lived during the sixth
century B.C.E., and the _Zhuangzi_, named for its putative author, Zhuang
Zhou or Zhuangzi (ca. 370-301 B.C.E.). The books are quite different in
language and style. _The Classic on the Way and Its Power_ is composed
largely of short bits of aphoristic verse, leaving its interpretation and
application radically indeterminate. Perhaps because of that openness of
meaning, the book has been translated into Western languages more often than
any other Chinese text. It has been read as a utopian tract advocating a
primitive society as well as a compendium of advice for a fierce, engaged
ruler. Its author has been described as a relativist, skeptic, or poet by
some, and by others as a committed rationalist who believes in the ability
of words to name a reality that exists independently of them. The _Zhuangzi_
is a much longer work composed of relatively discrete chapters written
largely in prose, each of which brings sustained attention to a particular
set of topics. Some portions have been compared to Wittgenstein's
_Philosophical Investigations_. Others develop a story at some length or
invoke mythological figures from the past. The _Zhuangzi_ refers to Laozi by
name and quotes some passages from the _Classic on the Way and Its Power_,
but the text as we know it includes contributions written over a long span
of time. Textual analysis reveals at least four layers, probably more, that
may be attributed to different authors and different times, with interests
as varied as logic, primitivism, syncretism, and egotism. The word
``Daoism'' in English (corresponding to Daojia, ``the School [or Philosophy]
of the Dao'') is often used to refer to these and other books or to a
free-floating outlook on life inspired by but in no way limited to them.
``Daoism'' is also invoked as the name for religious movements that began
to develop in the late second century C.E.; Chinese usage typically refers
to their texts as Daojiao, ``Teachings of the Dao'' or ``Religion of the
Dao.'' One of those movements, called the Way of the Celestial Masters
(Tianshi dao), possessed mythology and rituals and established a set of
social institutions that would be maintained by all later Daoist groups. The
Way of the Celestial Masters claims its origin in a revelation dispensed in
the year 142 by the Most High Lord Lao (Taishang Laojun), a deified form of
Laozi, to a man named Zhang Daoling. Laozi explained teachings to Zhang and
bestowed on him the title of ``Celestial Master'' (Tianshi), indicating his
exalted position in a system of ranking that placed those who had achieved
immortality at the top and humans who were working their way toward that
goal at the bottom. Zhang was active in the part of western China now
corresponding to the province of Sichuan, and his descendants con tinued to
build a local infrastructure. The movement divided itself into a number of
parishes, to which each member-household was required to pay an annual tax
of five pecks of rice--hence the other common name for the movement in its
early years, the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice (Wudoumi dao). The
administrative structure and some of the political functions of the
organization are thought to have been modeled in part on secular government
administration. After the Wei dynasty was founded in 220, the government
extended recognition to the Way of the Celestial Masters, giving official
approval to the form of local social administration it had developed and
claiming at the same time that the new emperor's right to rule was
guaranteed by the authority of the current Celestial Master.
Several continuing traits are apparent in the first few centuries of the
Way of the Celestial Masters. The movement represented itself as having
begun with divine-human contact: a god reveals a teaching and bestows a rank
on a person. Later Daoist groups received revelations from successively more
exalted deities. Even before receiving official recognition, the movement
was never divorced from politics. Later Daoist groups too followed that
general pattern, sometimes in the form of millenarian movements promising to
replace the secular government, sometimes in the form of an established
church providing services complementary to those of the state. The local
communities of the Way of the Celestial Masters were formed around priests
who possessed secret knowledge and held rank in the divine-human
bureaucracy. Knowledge and position were interdependent: knowledge of the
proper ritual forms and the authority to petition the gods and spirits were
guaranteed by the priest's position in the hierarchy, while his rank was
confirmed to his community by his expertise in a ritual repertoire. Nearly
all types of rituals performed by Daoist masters through the ages are
evident in the early years of the Way of the Celestial Masters. Surviving
sources describe the curing of illness, often through confession; the
exorcism of malevolent spirits; rites of passage in the life of the
individual; and the holding of regular communal feasts.
While earlier generations (both Chinese bibliographers and scholars of
Chinese religion) have emphasized the distinction between the allegedly
pristine philosophy of the ``School of the Dao'' and the corrupt religion of
the ``Teachings of the Dao,'' recent scholarship instead emphasizes the
complex continuities between them. Many selections in this anthology focus
on the beginnings of organized Daoism and the liturgical and social history
of Daoist movements through the fifth century. The history of Daoism can be
read, in part, as a succession of revelations, each of which includes but
remains superior to the earlier ones. In South China around the year 320 the
author Ge Hong wrote _He Who Embraces Simplicity_ (_Baopuzi_), which
outlines different methods for achieving elevation to that realm of the
immortals known as ``Great Purity'' (Taiqing). Most methods explain how,
after the observance of moral codes and rules of abstinence, one needs to
gather precious substances for use in complex chemical experiments. Followed
properly, the experiments succeed in producing a sacred substance, ``gold
elixir'' (_jindan_), the eating of which leads to immortality. In the second
half of the fourth century new scriptures were revealed to a man named Yang
Xi, who shared them with a family named Xu. Those texts give their
possessors access to an even higher realm of Heaven, that of ``Highest
Clarity'' (Shangqing). The scriptures contain legends about the level of
gods residing in the Heaven of Highest Clarity. Imbued with a messianic
spirit, the books foretell an apocalypse for which the wise should begin to
prepare now. By gaining initiation into the textual tradition of Highest
Clarity and following its program for cultivating immortality, adepts are
assured of a high rank in the divine bureaucracy and can survive into the
new age. The fifth century saw the canonization of a new set of texts,
titled ``Numinous Treasure'' (Lingbao). Most of them are presented as
sermons of a still higher level of deities, the Celestial Worthies
(Tianzun), who are the most immediate personified manifestations of the Dao.
The books instruct followers how to worship the gods supplicated in a wide
variety of rituals. Called ``retreats'' (_zhai_, a word connoting both
``fast'' and ``feast''), those rites are performed for the salvation of the
dead, the bestowal of boons on the living, and the repentance of sins.
As noted in the discussion of the beginnings of the Way of the Celestial
Masters, Daoist and imperial interests often intersected. The founder of the
Tang dynasty (618-907), Li Yuan (lived 566-635, reigned 618-626, known as
Gaozu), for instance, claimed to be a descendant of Laozi's. At various
points during the reign of the Li family during the Tang dynasty,
prospective candidates for government service were tested for their
knowledge of specific Daoist scriptures. Imperial authorities recognized and
sometimes paid for ecclesiastical centers where Daoist priests were trained
and ordained, and the surviving sources on Chinese history are filled with
examples of state sponsorship of specific Daoist ceremonies and the
activities of individual priests. Later governments continued to extend
official support to the Daoist church, and vice-versa. Many accounts portray
the twelfth century as a particularly innovative period: it saw the
development of sects named ``Supreme Unity'' (Taiyi), ``Perfect and Great
Dao'' (Zhenda dao), and ``Complete Perfection'' (Quanzhen). In the early
part of the fifteenth century, the forty-third Celestial Master took charge
of compiling and editing Daoist ritual texts, resulting in the promulgation
of a Daoist canon that contemporary Daoists still consider authoritative.
Possessing a history of some two thousand years and appealing to people
from all walks of life, Daoism appears to the modern student to be a complex
and hardly unitary tradition. That diversity is important to keep in mind,
especially in light of the claim made by different Daoist groups to maintain
a form of the teaching that in its essence has remained the same over the
millennia. The very notion of immortality is one way of grounding that
claim. The greatest immortals, after all, are still alive. Having conquered
death, they have achieved the original state of the uncarved block and are
believed to reside in the heavens. The highest gods are personified forms of
the Dao, the unchanging Way. They are concretized in the form of stars and
other heavenly bodies and can manifest themselves to advanced Daoist
practitioners following proper visualization exercises. The transcendents
(_xianren_, often translated as ``immortals'') began life as humans and
returned to the ideal embryonic condition through a variety of means. Some
followed a regimen of gymnastics and observed a form of macrobiotic diet
that simultaneously built up the pure elements and minimized the coarser
ones. Others practiced the art of alchemy, assembling secret ingredients and
using laboratory techniques to roll back time. Sometimes the elixir was
prepared in real crucibles; sometimes the refining process was carried out
eidetically by imagining the interior of the body to function like the test
tubes and burners of the lab. Personalized rites of curing and communal
feasts alike can be seen as small steps toward recovering the state of
health and wholeness that obtains at the beginning (also the infinite
ending) of time. Daoism has always stressed morality. Whether expressed
through specific injunctions against stealing, lying, and taking life,
through more abstract discussions of virtue, or through exemplary figures
who transgress moral codes, ethics was an important element of Daoist
practice. Nor should we forget the claim to continuity implied by the
institution of priestly investiture. By possessing revealed texts and the
secret registers listing the members of the divine hierarchy, the Daoist
priest took his place in a structure that appeared to be unchanging.
Another way that Daoists have represented their tradition is by asserting
that their activities are different from other religious practices. Daoism
is constructed, in part, by projecting a non-Daoist tradition, picking out
ideas and actions and assigning them a name that symbolizes ``the
other.''<7> The most common others in the history of Daoism have been the
rituals practiced by the less institutionalized, more poorly educated
religious specialists at the local level and any phenomenon connected with
China's other organized church, Buddhism. Whatever the very real congruences
in belief and practice among Daoism, Buddhism, and popular practice, it has
been essential to Daoists to assert a fundamental difference. In this
perspective the Daoist gods differ in kind from the profane spirits of the
popular tradition: the former partake of the pure and impersonal Dao, while
the latter demand the sacrifice of meat and threaten their benighted
worshippers with ill ness and other curses. With their hereditary office,
complex rituals, and use of the classical Chinese language, modern Daoist
masters view themselves as utterly distinct from exorcists and mediums, who
utilize only the language of everyday speech and whose possession by spirits
appears uncontrolled. Similarly, anti-Buddhist rhetoric (as well as anti-
Daoist rhetoric from the Buddhist side) has been severe over the centuries,
often resulting in the temporary suppression of books and statues and the
purging of the priesthood. All of those attempts to enforce difference,
however, must be viewed alongside the equally real overlap, sometimes
identity, between Daoism and other traditions. Records compiled by the state
detailing the official titles bestowed on gods prove that the gods of the
popular tradition and the gods of Daoism often supported each other and
coalesced or, at other times, competed in ways that the Daoist church could
not control. Eth nographies about modern village life show how all the
various religious personnel cooperate to allow for coexistence; in some
celebrations they forge an arrangement that allows Daoist priests to
officiate at the esoteric rituals performed in the interior of the temple,
while mediums enter into trance among the crowds in the outer courtyard. In
imperial times the highest echelons of the Daoist and Buddhist priesthoods
were capable of viewing their roles as complementary to each other and as
necessarily subservient to the state. The government mandated the
establishment in each province of temples belonging to both religions; it
exercised the right to accept or reject the definition of each religion's
canon of sacred books; and it sponsored ceremonial debates between leading
exponents of the two churches in which victory most often led to coexistence
with, rather than the destruction of, the losing party.
Buddhism
The very name given to Buddhism offers important clues about the way that
the tradition has come to be defined in China. Buddhism is often called
Fojiao, literally meaning ``the teaching (_jiao_) of the Buddha (Fo).''
Buddhism thus appears to be a member of the same class as Confucianism and
Daoism: the three teachings are Rujiao (``teaching of the scholars'' or
Confucianism), Daojiao (``teaching of the Dao'' or Daoism), and Fojiao
(``teaching of the Buddha'' or Buddhism). But there is an interesting
difference here, one that requires close attention to language. As semantic
units in Chinese, the words Ru and Dao work differently than does Fo. The
word Ru refers to a group of people and the word Dao refers to a concept,
but the word Fo does not make literal sense in Chinese. Instead it
represents a sound, a word with no semantic value that in the ancient
language was pronounced as ``bud,'' like the beginning of the Sanskrit word
``buddha.''<8> The meaning of the Chinese term derives from the fact that it
refers to a foreign sound. In Sanskrit the word ``buddha'' means ``one who
has achieved enlightenment,'' one who has ``awakened'' to the true nature of
human existence. Rather than using any of the Chinese words that mean
``enlightened one,'' Buddhists in China have chosen to use a foreign word to
name their teaching, much as native speakers of English refer to the
religion that began in India not as ``the religion of the enlightened one,''
but rather as ``Buddhism,'' often without knowing precisely what the word
``Buddha'' means. Referring to Buddhism in China as Fojiao involves the
recognition that this teaching, unlike the other two, originated in a
foreign land. Its strangeness, its non-native origin, its power are all
bound up in its name.
Considered from another angle, the word buddha () also accentuates the
ways in which Buddhism in its Chinese context defines a distinctive attitude
toward experience. Buddhas--enlightened ones--are unusual because they
differ from other, unenlightened individuals and because of the truths to
which they have awakened. Most people live in profound ignorance, which
causes immense suffering. Buddhas, by contrast, see the true nature of
reality. Such propositions, of course, were not advanced in a vacuum. They
were articulated originally in the context of traditional Indian cosmology
in the first several centuries B.C.E., and as Buddhism began to trickle
haphazardly into China in the first centuries of the common era, Buddhist
teachers were faced with a dilemma. To make their teachings about the Buddha
understood to a non-Indian audience, they often began by explaining the
understanding of human existence--the problem, as it were--to which Buddhism
provided the answer. Those basic elements of the early Indian worldview are
worth reviewing here. In that conception, all human beings are destined to
be reborn in other forms, human and nonhuman, over vast stretches of space
and time. While time in its most abstract sense does follow a pattern of
decline, then renovation, followed by a new decline, and so on, still the
process of reincarnation is without beginning or end. Life takes six forms:
at the top are gods, demigods, and human beings, while animals, hungry
ghosts, and hell beings occupy the lower rungs of the hierarchy. Like the
gods of ancient Greece, the gods of Buddhism reside in the heavens and lead
lives of immense worldly pleasure. Unlike their Greek counterparts, however,
they are without exception mortal, and at the end of a very long life they
are invariably reborn lower in the cosmic scale. Hungry ghosts wander in
search of food and water yet are unable to eat or drink, and the denizens of
the various hells suffer a battery of tortures, but they will all eventually
die and be reborn again. The logic that determines where one will be reborn
is the idea of _karma_. Strictly speaking the Sanskrit word karma means
``deed'' or ``action.'' In its relevant sense here it means that every deed
has a result: morally good acts lead to good consequences, and the
commission of evil has a bad result. Applied to the life of the individual,
the law of karma means that the circumstances an individual faces are the
result of prior actions. Karma is the regulating idea of a wide range of
good works and other Buddhist practices.
The wisdom to which buddhas awaken is to see that this cycle of existence
(_saymsmara_ in Sanskrit, comprising birth, death, and rebirth) is marked by
impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and lack of a permanent self. It is
impermanent because all things, whether physical objects, psychological
states, or philosophical ideas, undergo change; they are brought into
existence by preceding conditions at a particular point in time, and they
eventually will become extinct. It is unsat isfactory in the sense that not
only do sentient beings experience physical pain, they also face continual
disappointment when the people and things they wish to maintain invariably
change. The third characteristic of sentient existence, lack of a permanent
self, has a long and complicated history of exegesis in Buddhism. In China
the idea of ``no-self'' (Sanskrit: _anmatman_) was often placed in creative
tension with the concept of repeated rebirth. On the one hand, Buddhist
teachers tried to convince their audience that human existence did not end
simply with a funeral service or memorial to the ancestors, that humans were
reborn in another bodily form and could thus be related not only to other
human beings but to animals, ghosts, and other species among the six modes
of rebirth. To support that argument for rebirth, it was helpful to draw on
metaphors of continuity, like a flame passed from one candle to the next and
a spirit that moves from one lifetime to the next. On the other hand, the
truth of impermanence entailed the argument that no permanent ego could
possibly underlie the process of rebirth. What migrated from one lifetime to
the next were not eternal elements of personhood but rather temporary
aspects of psychophysical life that might endure for a few lifetimes--or a
few thousand--but would eventually cease to exist. The Buddha provided an
analysis of the ills of human existence and a prescription for curing them.
Those ills were caused by the tendency of sentient beings to grasp, to cling
to evanescent things in the vain hope that they remain permanent. In this
view, the very act of clinging contributes to the perpetuation of desires
from one incarnation to the next. Grasping, then, is both a cause and a
result of being committed to a permanent self.
The wisdom of buddhas is neither intellectual nor individualistic. It was
always believed to be a soteriological knowledge that was expressed in the
compassionate activity of teaching others how to achieve liberation from
suffering. Traditional formulations of Buddhist practice describe a path to
salvation that begins with the observance of morality. Lay followers pledged
to abstain from the taking of life, stealing, lying, drinking intoxicating
beverages, and engaging in sexual relations outside of marriage. Further
injunctions applied to householders who could observe a more demanding
life-style of purity, and the lives of monks and nuns were regulated in even
greater detail. With morality as a basis, the ideal path also included the
cultivation of pure states of mind through the practice of meditation and
the achieving of wisdom rivaling that of a buddha.
The discussion so far has concerned the importance of the foreign
component in the ideal of the buddha and the actual content to which buddhas
are believed to awaken. It is also important to consider what kind of a
religious figure a buddha is thought to be. We can distinguish two separate
but related understandings of what a buddha is. In the first understanding
the Buddha (represented in English with a capital B) was an unusual human
born into a royal family in ancient India in the sixth or fifth century
B.C.E. He renounced his birthright, followed established religious teachers,
and then achieved enlightenment after striking out on his own. He gathered
lay and monastic disciples around him and preached throughout the Indian
subcontinent for almost fifty years, and he achieved final ``extinction''
(the root meaning of the Sanskrit word _nirvana_) from the woes of
existence. This unique being was called Gautama (family name) Siddh;amartha
(personal name) during his lifetime, and later tradition refers to him with
a variety of names, including Sakyamuni (literally ``Sage of the Sakya
clan'') and Tathagata (``Thus-Come One''). Followers living after his death
lack direct access to him because, as the word ``extinction'' implies, his
release was permanent and complete. His influence can be felt, though,
through his traces--through gods who encountered him and are still alive,
through long-lived disciples, through the places he touched that can be
visited by pilgrims, and through his physical remains and the shrines
(_stupa_) erected over them. In the second understanding a buddha (with a
lowercase b) is a generic label for any enlightened being, of whom Sakyamuni
was simply one among many. Other buddhas preceded Sakyamuni's appearance in
the world, and others will follow him, notably Maitreya (Chinese: Mile), who
is thought to reside now in a heavenly realm close to the surface of the
Earth. Buddhas are also dispersed over space: they exist in all directions,
and one in particular, Amitayus (or Amitabha, Chinese: Amituo), presides
over a land of happiness in the West. Related to this second genre of buddha
is another kind of figure, a bodhisattva (literally ``one who is intent on
enlightenment,'' Chinese: ). Bodhisattvas are found in most forms of
Buddhism, but their role was particularly emphasized in the many traditions
claiming the polemical title of Mahayana (``Greater Vehicle,'' in opposition
to Hinayana, ``Smaller Vehicle'') that began to develop in the first century
B.C.E. Technically speaking, bodhisattvas are not as advanced as buddhas on
the path to enlightenment. Bodhisattvas particularly popular in China
include Avalokitesvara (Chinese: Guanyin, Guanshiyin, or Guanzizai),
Bhaisajyaguru (Chinese: Yaoshiwang), Ksitigarbha (Chinese: Dizang), Manjusri
(Wenshu), and Samantabhadra (Puxian). While buddhas appear to some followers
as remote and all-powerful, bodhisattvas often serve as mediating figures
whose compassionate involvement in the impurities of this world makes them
more approachable. Like buddhas in the second sense of any enlightened
being, they function both as models for followers to emulate and as saviors
who intervene actively in the lives of their devotees.
The Three Jewels
In addition to the word ``Buddhism'' (Fojiao), Chinese Buddhists have
represented the tradition by the formulation of the ``three jewels''
(Sanskrit: _triratna_, Chinese: _sanbao_). Coined in India, the three terms
carried both a traditional sense as well as a more worldly reference that is
clear in Chinese sources.<9> The first jewel is Buddha, the traditional
meaning of which has been discussed above. In China the term refers not only
to enlightened beings, but also to the materials through which buddhas are
made present, including statues, the buildings that house statues, relics
and their containers, and all the finances needed to build and sustain
devotion to buddha images.
The second jewel is the dharma (Chinese: ), meaning ``truth'' or ``law.''
The dharma includes the doctrines taught by the Buddha and passed down in
oral and written form, thought to be equivalent to the universal cosmic law.
Many of the teachings are expressed in numerical form, like the three marks
of existence (impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and no-self, discussed
above), the four noble truths (unsatisfactoriness, cause, cessation, path),
and so on. As a literary tradition the dharma also comprises many different
genres, the most important of which is called _sutra_ in Sanskrit. The
Sanskrit word refers to the warp thread of a piece of cloth, the regulating
or primary part of the doctrine (compare its Proto-Indo-European root,
*_syu_, which appears in the English words suture, sew, and seam). The
earliest Chinese translators of Buddhist Sanskrit texts chose a related
loaded term to render the idea in Chinese: _jing_, which denotes the warp
threads in the same manner as the Sanskrit, but which also has the virtue of
being the generic name given to the classics of the Confucian and Taoist
traditions. Sutras usually begin with the words ``Thus have I heard. Once,
when the Buddha dwelled at. . . .'' That phrase is attributed to the
Buddha's closest disciple, Ananda, who according to tradition was able to
recite all of the Buddha's sermons from memory at the first convocation of
monks held after the Buddha died. In its material sense the dharma referred
to all media for the Buddha's law in China, including sermons and the
platforms on which sermons were delivered, Buddhist rituals that included
preaching, and the thousands of books--first handwritten scrolls, then
booklets printed with wooden blocks--in which the truth was inscribed.
The third jewel is sangha (Chinese: or ), meaning ``assembly.'' Some
sources offer a broad interpretation of the term, which comprises the four
sub-orders of monks, nuns, lay men, and lay women. Other sources use the
term in a stricter sense to include only monks and nuns, that is, those who
have left home, renounced family life, accepted vows of celibacy, and
undertaken other austerities to devote themselves full-time to the practice
of religion. The differences and interdependencies between householders and
monastics were rarely absent in any Buddhist civilization. In China those
differences found expression in both the spiritual powers popularly
attributed to monks and nuns and the hostility sometimes voiced toward their
way of life, which seemed to threaten the core values of the Chinese family
system. The interdependent nature of the relationship between lay people and
the professionally religious is seen in such phenomena as the use of kinship
terminology--an attempt to re-create family--among monks and nuns and the
collaboration between lay donors and monastic officiants in a wide range of
rituals designed to bring comfort to the ancestors. ``Sangha'' in China also
referred to all of the phenomena considered to belong to the Buddhist
establishment. Everything and everyone needed to sustain monastic life, in a
very concrete sense, was included: the living quarters of monks; the lands
deeded to temples for occupancy and profit; the tenant families and slaves
who worked on the farm land and served the sangha; and even the animals
attached to the monastery farms.
Standard treatments of the history of Chinese Buddhism tend to emphasize
the place of Buddhism in Chinese dynastic history, the translation of
Buddhist texts, and the development of schools or sects within Buddhism.
While these research agenda are important for our understanding of Chinese
Buddhism, many of the contributors to this anthology have chosen to ask
rather different questions, and it is worthwhile explaining why.
Many overviews of Chinese Buddhist history are organized by the template
of Chinese dynasties. In this perspective, Buddhism began to enter China as
a religion of non-Chinese merchants in the later years of the Han dynasty.
It was during the following four centuries of disunion, including a division
between non-Chinese rulers in the north and native (``Han'') governments in
the south as well as warfare and social upheaval, that Buddhism allegedly
took root in China. Magic and meditation ostensibly appealed to the
``barbarian'' rulers in the north, while the dominant style of religion
pursued by the southerners was philosophical. During the period of disunion,
the general consensus suggests, Buddhist translators wrestled with the
problem of conveying Indian ideas in a language their Chinese audience could
understand; after many false starts Chinese philosophers were finally able
to comprehend common Buddhist terms as well as the complexities of the
doctrine of emptiness. During the Tang dynasty Buddhism was finally
``Sinicized'' or made fully Chinese. Most textbooks treat the Tang dynasty
as the apogee or mature period of Buddhism in China. The Tang saw
unprecedented numbers of ordinations into the ranks of the Buddhist order;
the flourishing of new, allegedly ``Chinese'' schools of thought; and lavish
support from the state. After the Tang, it is thought, Buddhism entered into
a thousand-year period of decline. Some monks were able to break free of
tradition and write innovative commentaries on older texts or reshape
received liturgies, some patrons managed to build significant temples or
sponsor the printing of the Buddhist canon on a large scale, and the
occasional highly placed monk found a way to purge debased monks and nuns
from the ranks of the sangha and revive moral vigor, but on the whole the
stretch of dynasties after the Tang is treated as a long slide into
intellectual, ethical, and material poverty. Stated in this caricatured a
fashion, the shortcomings of this approach are not hard to discern. This
approach accentuates those episodes in the history of Buddhism that
intersect with important moments in a political chronology, the validity of
which scholars in Chinese studies increasingly doubt. The problem is not so
much that the older, dynastic-driven history of China is wrong as that it is
limited and one-sided. While traditional history tends to have been written
from the top down, more recent attempts argue from the bottom up. Historians
in the past forty years have begun to discern otherwise unseen patterns in
the development of Chinese economy, society, and political institutions.
Their conclusions, which increasingly take Bud dhism into account, suggest
that cycles of rise and fall in population shifts, economy, family fortunes,
and the like often have little to do with dynastic history--the implication
being that the history of Buddhism and other Chinese traditions can no
longer be pegged simply to a particular dynasty. Similarly, closer scrutiny
of the documents and a greater appreciation of their biases and gaps have
shown how little we know of what really transpired in the process of the
control of Buddhism by the state. The Buddhist church was always, it seems,
dependent on the support of the landowning classes in medieval China. And it
appears that the condition of Buddhist institutions was tied closely to the
occasional, decentralized support of the lower classes, which is even harder
to document than support by the gentry. The very notion of rise and fall is
a teleological, often theological, one, and it has often been linked to an
obsession with one particular criterion--accurate translation of texts, or
correct understanding of doctrine--to the exclusion of all others.
The translation of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit and other Indic and
Central Asian languages into Chinese constitutes a large area of study.
Although written largely in classical Chinese in the context of a premodern
civilization in which relatively few people could read, Buddhist sutras were
known far and wide in China. The seemingly magical spell (Sanskrit:
_dharani_) from the _Heart Sutra_ was known by many; stories from the _Lotus
Sutra_ were painted on the walls of popular temples; religious preachers,
popular storytellers, and low-class dramatists alike drew on the rich trove
of mythology provided by Buddhist narrative. Scholars of Buddhism have
tended to focus on the chronology and accuracy of translation. Since so many
texts were translated (one eighth-century count of the extant number of
canonical works is 1,124),<10> and the languages of Sanskrit and literary
Chinese are so distant, the results of that study are foundational to the
field. To understand the history of Chinese Buddhism it is indispensable to
know what texts were available when, how they were translated and by whom,
how they were inscribed on paper and stone, approved or not approved,
disseminated, and argued about. On the other hand, within Buddhist studies
scholars have only recently begun to view the act of translation as a
conflict-ridden process of negotiation, the results of which were Chinese
texts whose meanings were never closed. Older studies, for instance,
sometimes distinguish between three different translation styles. One
emerged with the earliest known translators, a Parthian given the Chinese
name An Shigao (fl. 148-170) and an Indoscythian named Lokaksema (fl.
167-186), who themselves knew little classical Chinese but who worked with
teams of Chinese assistants who peppered the resulting translations with
words drawn from the spoken language. The second style was defined by the
Kuchean translator Kumarajiva (350-409), who retained some elements of the
vernacular in a basic framework of literary Chinese that was more polished,
consistent, and acceptable to contemporary Chinese tastes. It is that
style--which some have dubbed a ``church'' language of Buddhist Chinese, by
analogy with the cultural history of medieval Latin--that proved most
enduring and popular. The third style is exemplified in the work of Xuanzang
(ca. 596-664), the seventh-century Chinese monk, philosopher, pilgrim, and
translator. Xuanzang was one of the few translators who not only spoke
Chinese and knew Sanskrit, but also knew the Chinese literary language well,
and it is hardly accidental that Chinese Buddhists and modern scholars alike
regard his translations as the most accurate and technically precise. At the
same time, there is an irony in Xuanzang's situation that forces us to view
the process of translation in a wider context. Xuanzang's is probably the
most popular Buddhist image in Chinese folklore: he is the hero of the story
_Journey to the West_ (_Xiyou ji_), known to all classes as the most
prolific translator in Chinese history and as an indefatigable, sometimes
overly serious and literal, pilgrim who embarked on a sacred mission to
recover original texts from India. Though the mythological character is well
known, the surviving writings of the seventh-century translator are not.
They are, in fact, rarely read, because their grammar and style smack more
of Sanskrit than of literary Chinese. What mattered to Chinese audiences--
both the larger audience for the novels and dramas about the pilgrim and the
much smaller one capable of reading his translations--was that the Chinese
texts were based on a valid foreign original, made even more authentic by
Xuanzang's personal experiences in the Buddhist homeland.
The projection of categories derived from European, American, and modern
Japanese religious experience onto the quite different world of tradit ideas
shared by larger and less exclusive segments of the Chinese Buddhist
community and on schools less well represented in other anthologies.
The Problem of Popular Religion
The brief history of the three teachings offered above provides, it is
hoped, a general idea of what they are and how their proponents have come to
claim for them the status of a tradition. It is also important to consider
what is not named in the formulation of the three teachings. To define
Chinese religion primarily in terms of the three traditions is to exclude
from serious consideration the ideas and practices that do not fit easily
under any of the three labels. Such common rituals as offering incense to
the ancestors, conducting funerals, exorcising ghosts, and consulting
fortunetellers; belief in the patterned interaction between light and dark
forces or in the ruler's influence on the natural world; the tendency to
construe gods as government officials; the preference for balancing
tranquility and movement--all belong as much to none of the three traditions
as they do to one or three. These forms of religion, introduced in more
detail below, are the subject of numerous selections in this anthology.
The focus on the three teachings is another way of privileging precisely
the varieties of Chinese religious life that have been maintained largely
through the support of literate and often powerful representatives. The
debate over the unity of the three teachings, even when it is resolved in
favor of toleration or harmony--a move toward the one rather than the
three--drowns out voices that talk about Chinese religion as neither one nor
three. Another problem with the model of the three teachings is that it
equalizes what are in fact three radically incommensurable things.
Confucianism often functioned as a political ideology and a system of
values; Daoism has been compared, inconsistently, to both an outlook on life
and a system of gods and magic; and Buddhism offered, according to some
analysts, a proper soteriology, an array of techniques and deities enabling
one to achieve salvation in the other world. Calling all three traditions by
the same unproblematic term, ``teaching,'' perpetuates confusion about how
the realms of life that we tend to take for granted (like politics, ethics,
ritual, religion) were in fact configured differently in traditional China.
Another way of studying Chinese religion is to focus on those aspects of
religious life that are shared by most people, regardless of their
affiliation or lack of affiliation with the three teachings. Such forms of
popular religion as those named above (offering incense, conducting
funerals, and so on) are important to address, although the category of
``popular religion'' entails its own set of problems.
We can begin by distinguishing two senses of the term ``popular
religion.'' The first refers to the forms of religion practiced by almost
all Chinese people, regardless of social and economic standing, level of
literacy, region, or explicit religious identification. Popular religion in
this first sense is the religion shared by people in general, across all
social boundaries. Three examples, all of which can be dated as early as the
first century of the common era, help us gain some understanding of what
counts as popular religion in the first sense. The first example is a
typical Chinese funeral and memorial service. Following the death of a
family member and the unsuccessful attempt to reclaim his or her spirit, the
corpse is prepared for burial. Family members are invited for the first
stage of mourning, with higher- ranking families entitled to invite more
distant relatives. Rituals of wailing and the wearing of coarse, undyed
cloth are practiced in the home of the deceased. After some days the coffin
is carried in a procession to the grave. After burial the attention of the
living shifts toward caring for the spirit of the dead. In later segments of
the funerary rites the spirit is spatially fixed--installed--in a
rectangular wooden tablet, kept at first in the home and perhaps later in a
clan hall. The family continues to come together as a corporate group on
behalf of the deceased; they say prayers and send sustenance, in the form of
food, mock money, and documents addressed to the gods who oversee the realm
of the dead. The second example of popular or common religion is the New
Year's festival, which marks a passage not just in the life of the
individual and the family, but in the yearly cycle of the cosmos. As in most
civilizations, most festivals in China follow a lunar calendar, which is
divided into twelve numbered months of thirty days apiece, divided in half
at the full moon (fifteenth night) and new moon (thirtieth night); every
several years an additional (or intercalary) month is added to synchronize
the passage of time in lunar and solar cycles. Families typically begin to
celebrate the New Year's festival ten or so days before the end of the
twelfth month. On the twenty-third day, family members dispatch the God of
the Hearth (Zaojun), who watches over all that transpires in the home from
his throne in the kitchen, to report to the highest god of Heaven, the Jade
Emperor (Yuhuang dadi). For the last day or two before the end of the year,
the doors to the house are sealed and people worship in front of the images
of the various gods kept in the house and the ancestor tablets. After a
lavish meal rife with the symbolism of wholeness, longevity, and good
fortune, each junior member of the family prostrates himself and herself
before the head of the family and his wife. The next day, the first day of
the first month, the doors are opened and the family enjoys a vacation of
resting and visiting with friends. The New Year season concludes on the
fifteenth night (the full moon) of the first month, typically marked by a
lantern celebration.
The third example of popular religion is the ritual of consulting a
spirit medium in the home or in a small temple. Clients request the help of
mediums (sometimes called ``shamans'' in Western-language scholarship; in
Chinese they are known by many different terms) to solve problems like
sickness in the family, nightmares, possession by a ghost or errant spirit,
or some other misfortune. During the seance the medium usually enters a
trance and incarnates a tutelary deity. The divinity speaks through the
medium, sometimes in an altered but comprehensible voice, sometimes in
sounds, through movements, or by writing characters in sand that require
deciphering by the medium's manager or interpreter. The deity often
identifies the problem and prescribes one among a wide range of possible
cures. For an illness a particular herbal medicine or offering to a
particular spirit may be recommended, while for more serious cases the deity
himself, as dramatized in the person of the medium, does battle with the
demon causing the difficulty. The entire drama unfolds in front of an
audience composed of family members and nearby residents of the community.
Mediums themselves often come from marginal groups (unmarried older women,
youths prone to sickness), yet the deities who speak through them are
typically part of mainstream religion, and their message tends to affirm
rather than question traditional morality.
Some sense of what is at stake in defining ``popular religion'' in this
manner can be gained by considering when, where, and by whom these three
different examples are performed. Funerals and memorial services are carried
out by most families, even poor ones; they take place in homes, cemeteries,
and halls belonging to kinship corporations; and they follow two schedules,
one linked to the death date of particular members (every seven days after
death, 100 days after death, etc.) and one linked to the passage of
nonindividualized calendar time (once per year). From a sociological
perspective, the institutions active in the rite are the family, a complex
organization stretching back many generations to a common male ancestor, and
secondarily the community, which is to some extent protected from the
baleful influences of death. The family too is the primary group involved in
the New Year's celebration, although there is some validity in attributing a
trans-social dimension to the festival in that a cosmic passage is marked by
the occasion. Other social spheres are evident in the consultation of a
medium: although it is cured through a social drama, sickness is also
individuating; and some mediumistic rituals involve the members of a cult
dedicated to the particular deity, membership being determined by personal
choice.
These answers are significant for the contrast they suggest between
traditional Chinese popular religion and the forms of religion
characteristic of modern or secularized societies, in which religion is
identified largely with doctrine, belief about god, and a large, clearly
discernible church. None of the examples of Chinese popular religion is
defined primarily by beliefs that necessarily exclude others. People take
part in funerals without any necessary commitment to the existence of
particular spirits, and belief in the reality of any particular tutelary
deity does not preclude worship of other gods. Nor are these forms of
religion marked by rigidly drawn lines of affiliation; in brief; there are
families, temples, and shrines, but no church. Even the ``community''
supporting the temple dedicated to a local god is shifting, depending on
those who choose to offer incense or make other offerings there on a monthly
basis. There are specialists involved in these examples of Chinese popular
religion, but their sacerdotal jobs are usually not full- time and seldom
involve the theorizing about a higher calling typical of organized religion.
Rather, their forte is considered to be knowledge or abilities of a
technical sort. Local temples are administered by a standing committee, but
the chairmanship of the committee usually rotates among the heads of the
dominant families in the particular locale.
Like other categories, ``popular religion'' in the sense of shared
religion obscures as much as it clarifies. Chosen for its difference from
the unspoken reality of the academic interpreter (religion in modern Europe
and America), popular religion as a category functions more as a contrastive
notion than as a constitutive one; it tells us what much of Chinese religion
is not like, rather than spelling out a positive content. It is too broad a
category to be of much help to detailed under standing--which indeed is why
many scholars in the field avoid the term, preferring to deal with more
discrete and meaningful units like family religion, mortuary ritual,
seasonal festivals, divination, curing, and mythology. ``Popular religion''
in the sense of common religion also hides potentially significant
variation: witness the number of times words like ``typical,'' ``standard,''
``traditional,'' ``often,'' and ``usually'' recur in the preceding
paragraphs, without specifying particular people, times, and places, or
naming particular understandings of orthodoxy. In addition to being static
and timeless, the category prejudices the case against seeing popular
religion as a conflict-ridden attempt to impose one particular standard on
contending groups. Several of the contributions to this volume, for
instance, are works from non-Han cultures. Their inclusion suggests that we
view China not as a unitary Han culture peppered with ``minorities,'' but as
a complex region in which a diversity of cultures are interacting. To place
all of them under the heading of ``popular religion'' is to obscure a
fascinating conflict of cultures.
We may expect a similar mix of insight and erasure in the second sense of
``popular religion,'' which refers to the religion of the lower classes as
opposed to that of the elite. The bifurcation of society into two tiers is
hardly a new idea. It began with some of the earliest Chinese theorists of
religion. Xunzi, for instance, discusses the emotional, social, and cosmic
benefits of carrying out memorial rites. In his opinion, mortuary ritual
allows people to balance sadness and longing and to express grief, and it
restores the natural order to the world. Different social classes, writes
Xunzi, interpret sacrifices differently: ``Among gentlemen [_junzi_], they
are taken as the way of humans; among common people [_baixing_], they are
taken as matters involving ghosts.''<11> For Xunzi, ``gentlemen'' are those
who have achieved nobility because of their virtue, not their birth; they
consciously dedicate themselves to following and thinking about a course of
action explicitly identified as moral. The common people, by contrast, are
not so much amoral or immoral as they are unreflective. Without making a
conscious decision, they believe that in the rites addressed to gods or the
spirits of the dead, the objects of the sacrifice--the spirits
themselves--actually exist. The true member of the upper class, however,
adopts something like the attitude of the secular social theorist:
bracketing the existence of spirits, what is important about death ritual is
the effect it has on society. Both classes engage in the same activity, but
they have radically different interpretations of it.
Dividing what is clearly too broad a category (Chinese religion or
ritual) into two discrete classes (elite and folk) is not without
advantages. It is a helpful pedagogical tool for throwing into question some
of the egalitarian presuppositions frequently encountered in introductory
courses on religion: that, for instance, everyone's religious options are or
should be the same, or that other people's religious life can be understood
(or tried out) without reference to social status. Treating Chinese religion
as fundamentally affected by social position also helps scholars to focus on
differences in styles of religious practice and interpretation. One way to
formulate this view is to say that while all inhabitants of a certain
community might take part in a religious procession, their style--both their
pattern of practice and their understanding of their actions--will differ
according to social position. Well-educated elites tend to view gods in
abstract, impersonal terms and to demonstrate restrained respect, but the
uneducated tend to view gods as concrete, personal beings before whom fear
is appropriate.
In the social sciences and humanities in general there has been a clear
move in the past forty years away from studies of the elite, and scholarship
on Chinese religion is beginning to catch up with that trend. More and more
studies focus on the religion of the lower classes and on the problems
involved in studying the culture of the illiterati in a complex
civilization. Many of the contributors to this anthology reflect a concern
not only with the ``folk'' as opposed to the ``elite,'' but with how to
integrate our knowledge of those two strata and how our understanding of
Chinese religion, determined unreflectively for many years by accepting an
elite viewpoint, has begun to change. In all of this, questions of social
class (Who participates? Who believes?) and questions of audience (Who
writes or performs? For what kind of people?) are paramount.
At the same time, treating ``popular religion'' as the religion of the
folk can easily perpetuate confusion. Some modern Chinese intellectuals, for
instance, are committed to an agenda of modernizing and reviving Chinese
spiritual life in a way that both accords with Western secularism and does
not reject all of traditional Chinese religion. The prominent
twentieth-century Confucian and interpreter of Chinese culture Wing-tsit
Chan, for instance, distinguishes between ``the level of the masses'' and
``the level of the enlightened.'' The masses worship idols, objects of
nature, and nearly any deity, while the enlightened confine their wor ship
to Heaven, ancestors, moral exemplars, and historical persons. The former
believe in heavens and hells and indulge in astrology and dream
interpretation, but the latter ``are seldom contaminated by these
diseases.''<12> For authors like Chan, both those who lived during the
upheavals of the last century in China and those in Chinese diaspora
communities, Chinese intellectuals still bear the responsibility to lead
their civilization away from superstition and toward enlightenment. In that
worldview there is no doubt where the religion of the masses belongs. From
that position it can be a short step--one frequently taken by scholars of
Chinese religion--to treating Chinese popular religion in a dismissive
spirit. Modern anthologies of Chinese tradition can still be found that
describe Chinese popular religion as ``grosser forms of superstition,''
capable only of ``facile syncretism'' and resulting in ``a rather shapeless
tradition.''
Kinship and Bureaucracy
It is often said that Chinese civilization has been fundamentally shaped
by two enduring structures, the Chinese family system and the Chinese form
of bureaucracy. Given the embeddedness of religion in Chinese social life,
it would indeed be surprising if Chinese religion were devoid of such
regulating concepts. The discussion below is not confined to delineating
what might be considered the ``hard'' social structures of the family and
the state, the effects of which might be seen in the ``softer'' realms of
religion and values. The reach of kinship and bu reaucracy is too great,
their reproduction and representation far richer than could be conveyed by
treating them as simple, given realities. Instead we will explain them also
as metaphors and strategies.
Early Christian missionaries to China were fascinated with the religious
aspects of the Chinese kinship system, which they dubbed ``ancestor
worship.'' Recently anthropologists have changed the wording to ``the cult
of the dead'' because the concept of worship implies a supernatural or
transcendent object of veneration, which the ancestors clearly are not. The
newer term, however, is not much better, because ``the dead'' are hardly
lifeless. As one modern observer remarks, the ancestral cult ``is not
primarily a matter of belief. . . . The cult of ancestors is more nearly a
matter of plain everyday behavior. . . . No question of belief ever arises.
The ancestors . . . literally live among their descendants, not only
biologically, but also socially and psychologically.''<13> The significance
of the ancestors is partly explained by the structure of the traditional
Chinese family: in marriages women are sent to other surname groups
(exogamy); newly married couples tend to live with the husband's family
(virilocality); and descent--deciding to which family one ultimately
belongs--is traced back in time through the husband's male ancestors
(patrilineage). A family in the normative sense includes many generations,
past, present, and future, all of whom trace their ancestry through their
father (if male) or their husband's father (if female) to an originating
male ancestor. For young men the ideal is to grow up ``under the ancestors'
shadow'' (in Hsu's felicitous phrase), by bringing in a wife from another
family, begetting sons and growing prosperous, showering honor on the
ancestors through material success, cooperating with brothers in sharing
family property, and receiving respect during life and veneration after
death from succeeding generations. For young women the avowed goal is to
marry into a prosperous family with a kind mother-in-law, give birth to sons
who will perpetuate the family line, depend upon one's children for
immediate emotional support, and reap the benefits of old age as the wife of
the primary man of the household.
Early philosophers assigned a specific term to the value of upholding the
ideal family: they called it _xiao_, usually translated as ``filial piety''
or ``filiality.'' The written character is composed of the graph for
``elder'' placed above the graph for ``son,'' an apt visual reminder of the
interdependence of the generations and the subordination of sons. If the
system works well, then the younger generations support the senior ones, and
the ancestors bestow fortune, longevity, and the birth of sons upon the
living. As each son fulfills his duty, he progresses up the family scale,
eventually assuming his status as revered ancestor. The attitude toward the
dead (or rather the significant and, it is hoped, benevolent dead--one's
ancestors) is simply a continuation of one's attitude toward one's parents
while they were living. In all cases, the theory goes, one treats them with
respect and veneration by fulfilling their personal wishes and acting
according to the dictates of ritual tradition.
Like any significant social category, kinship in China is not without
tension and self-contradiction. One already alluded to is gender: personhood
as a function of the family system is different for men and women. Sons are
typically born into their lineage and hope to remain under the same roof
from childhood into old age and ancestorhood. By contrast, daughters are
brought up by a family that is not ultimately theirs; at marriage they move
into a new home; as young brides without children they are not yet
inalienable members of their husband's lineage; and even after they have
children they may still have serious conflicts with the de facto head of the
household, their husband's mother. Women may gain more security from their
living children than from the prospect of being a venerated ancestor. In the
afterlife, in fact, they are punished for having polluted the natural world
with the blood of parturition; the same virtue that the kinship system
requires of them as producers of sons it also defines as a sin. There is
also in the ideal of filiality a thinly veiled pretense to universality and
equal access that also serves to rationalize the _status inaequalis_. Lavish
funerals and the withdrawal from employment by the chief mourner for three
years following his parents' death are the ideal. In the Confucian tradition
such examples of conspicuous expenditure are interpreted as expressions of
the highest devotion, rather than as a waste of resources and blatant
unproductivity in which only the leisure class is free to indulge. And the
ideals of respect of younger generations for older ones and cooperation
among brothers often conflict with reality.
Many aspects of Chinese religion are informed by the metaphor of kinship.
The kinship system is significant not only for the path of security it
defines but also because of the religious discomfort attributed to all those
who fall short of the ideal. It can be argued that the vagaries of life in
any period of Chinese history provide as many counterexamples as
fulfillments of the process of becoming an ancestor. Babies and children die
young, before becoming accepted members of any family; men remain unmarried,
without sons to carry on their name or memory; women are not successfully
matched with a mate, thus lacking any mooring in the afterlife; individuals
die in unsettling ways or come back from the dead as ghosts carrying grudges
deemed fatal to the living. There are plenty of people, in other words, who
are not caught by the safety net of the Chinese kinship system. They may be
more prone than others to possession by spirits, or their anomalous position
may not be manifest until after they die. In either case they are
religiously significant because they abrogate an ideal of proper kinship
relations.
Patrilineage exercises its influence as a regulating concept even in
religious organizations where normal kinship--men and women marrying, having
children, and tracing their lineage through the husband's father--is
impossible. The Buddhist monkhood is a prime example;<14> sororities of
unmarried women, adoption of children, and the creation of other ``fictive''
kinship ties are others. One of the defining features of being a Buddhist
monk in China is called ``leaving the family'' (_chujia_, a translation of
the Sanskrit _pravrajya_). Being homeless means not only that the boy has
left the family in which he grew up and has taken up domicile in a
monastery, but also that he has vowed to abstain from any sexual relations.
Monks commit themselves to having no children. The defining feature of
monasticism in China is its denial, its interruption of the patrilineage. At
the same time, monks create for themselves a home--or a family--away from
home; the Buddhist order adopts some of the important characteristics of the
Chinese kinship system. One part of the ordination ceremony is the adoption
of a religious name, both a new family name and a new personal name, by
which one will henceforth be known. The family name for all Chinese monks,
at least since the beginning of the fifth century, is the same surname
attributed to the historical Buddha (Shi in Chinese, which is a shortened
transliteration of the first part of Sakyamuni). For personal names, monks
are usually assigned a two-character name by their teacher. Many teachers
follow a practice common in the bestowal of secular personal names: the
first character for all monks in a particular generation is the same, and
the second character is different, bestowing individuality. ``Brothers'' of
the same generation can be picked out because one element of their name is
the same; as far as their names are concerned, their relationship to each
other is the same as that between secular brothers. Not only do monks
construct names and sibling relations modeled on those of Chinese kinship,
they also construe themselves as Buddhist sons and descendants of Buddhist
fathers and ancestors. Monks of the past are not only called ``ancestors,''
they are also treated as secular ancestors are treated. The portraits and
statues of past members are installed, in order, in special ancestral halls
where they receive offerings and obeisance from current generations.
Another domain of Chinese religion that bears the imprint of Chinese
kinship is hagiography, written accounts of gods and saints. Biographies of
secular figures have long been part of the Chinese written tradition.
Scholarly opinion usually cites the biographies contained in the
first-century B.C.E. _Records of the Historian_ (_Shiji_) as the paradigm
for later biographical writing. Such accounts typically begin not with the
birth of the protagonist, but rather with his or her family background. They
narrate the individual's precocious abilities, posts held in government,
actions deemed particularly virtuous or vile, and posthumous fate, including
titles awarded by the government and the disposition of the corpse or grave.
They are written in polished classical prose, and, like the writing of
Chinese history, they are designed to cast their subjects as either models
for emulation or unfortunate examples to be avoided. Many of the same
features can be found in the hagiographies contained in this anthology. Gods
who are bureaucrats, goddesses, incarnations of bodhisattvas, even immortals
like Laozi and deities of the stars are all conceived through the lens of
the Chinese family.
The logic of Chinese kinship can also be seen in a wide range of rituals,
many of which take place outside the family and bear no overt relationship
to kinship. The basic premise of many such rites is a family banquet, a
feast to which members of the oldest generation of the family (the highest
ancestors) are invited as honored guests. Placement of individuals and the
sequence of action often follow seniority, with older generations coming
before younger ones. Such principles can be observed even in Buddhist rites
and the community celebrations enacted by groups defined by locale rather
than kinship.
What about the other organizing force in Chinese civilization, the
bureaucratic form of government used to rule the empire? It too has exerted
tremendous influence on Chinese religious life. Before discussing
bureaucracy proper, it is helpful to introduce some of the other defining
features of Chinese government.
Chinese political culture has, at least since the later years of the
Shang dynasty (ca. 1600-1028 B.C.E.), been conceived of as a dynastic
system. A dynasty is defined by a founder whose virtue makes clear to
all--both common people and other factions vying for control--that he and
his family are fit to take over from a previous, corrupt ruler. Shortly
after assuming the position of emperor, the new ruler chooses a name for the
dynasty: Shang, for instance, means to increase or prosper. Other cosmically
significant actions follow. The new emperor installs his family's ancestral
tablets in the imperial ancestral hall; he performs the sacrifices to Heaven
and Earth that are the emperor's duty; he announces new names of offices and
institutes a reorganization of government; and the office of history and
astronomy in the government keeps careful watch over any unusual phenomena
(the appearance of freakish animals, unusual flora, comets, eclipses, etc.)
that might indicate the pleasure or displeasure of Heaven at the change in
rule. All activities that take place leading up to and during the reign of
the first emperor in a new dynasty appear to be based on the idea that the
ruler is one whose power is justified because of his virtue and abilities.
When the new emperor dies and one of his sons succeeds to the throne,
however, another principle of sovereignty is invoked: the second emperor is
deemed fit to rule because he is the highest-ranking son in the ruling
family. First emperors legitimate their rule by virtue; second and later
emperors validate their rule by family connections. The latter rationale is
invoked until the end of the dynasty, when another family asserts that its
moral rectitude justifies a change. Thus, the dynastic system makes use of
two theories of legitimation, one based on virtue and one based on birth.
Another important principle of Chinese politics, at least since the early
years of the Zhou dynasty, is summarized by the slogan ``the mandate of
Heaven'' (Tianming). In this conception, the emperor and his family carry
out the commands of Heaven, the latter conceived as a divine, semi-natural,
semi-personal force. Heaven demonstrates its approval of an emperor by
vouchsafing plentiful harvests, social order, and portents of nature that
are interpreted positively. Heaven manifests its displeasure with an emperor
and hints at a change in dynasty by sending down famine, drought, widespread
sickness, political turmoil, or other portents. It is important to note that
the notion of the mandate of Heaven can serve to justify revolution as well
as continuity. Rebellions in Chinese history, both those that have failed
and those that have succeeded, usually claim that Heaven has proclaimed its
displeasure with the ruling house and is transferring its mandate to a new
group. The judgment of whether the mandate has indeed shifted is in
principle always open to debate. It furnishes a compelling rationale for all
current regimes at the same time that it holds open the possibility of
revolution on divine grounds.
The dynastic system and the mandate of Heaven were joined to a third
basic idea, that of bureaucracy. A bureaucratic form of government is not,
of course, unique to China. What is important for our purposes is the
particular shape and function of the bureaucracy and its reach into nearly
all spheres of Chinese life, including religion.
Max Weber's listing of the characteristics of bureaucracy offers a
helpful starting point for discussing the Chinese case. According to Weber,
bureaucracy includes: (1) the principle of official jurisdictional areas, so
that the duties and powers of each office are clearly stipulated; (2) the
principle of hierarchy, which makes clear who ranks above and who ranks
below, with all subordinates following their superiors; (3) the keeping of
written records or files and a class of scribes whose duty is to make
copies; (4) training of officials for their specific tasks; (5) full-time
employment of the highest officials; and (6) the following of general
rules.<15> Virtually all of these principles can be found in one form or
another in the Chinese bureaucracy, the roots of which some scholars trace
to the religion of the second millennium B.C.E. The only consistent
qualification that needs to be made (as Weber himself points out<16>)
concerns the fourth point. Aspirants to government service were admitted to
the job, in theory at least, only after passing a series of examinations,
but the examination system rewarded a general course of learning in arts and
letters rather than the technical skills demanded in some posts like
engineering, forensic medicine, and so on.
The central government was also local; the chief government official
responsible for a county was a magistrate, selected from a central pool on
the basis of his performance in the examinations and assigned to a specific
county where he had no prior family connections. He was responsible for
employing lower-level functionaries in the county like scribes, clerks,
sheriffs, and jailers; for collecting taxes; for keeping the peace; and,
looking upward in the hierarchy, for reporting to his superiors and
following their instructions. He performed a number of overtly religious
functions. He made offerings at a variety of officially recognized temples,
like those dedicated to the God of Walls and Moats (the so-called ``City
God,'' Chenghuang shen) and to local deified heroes; he gave lectures to the
local residents about morality; and he kept close watch over all religious
activities, especially those involving voluntary organizations of people
outside of family and locality groups, whose actions might threaten the
sovereignty and religious prerogative of the state. He was promoted on the
basis of seniority and past performance, hoping to be named to higher posts
with larger areas of jurisdiction or to a position in the central
administration resident in the capital city. In his official capacity his
interactions with others were highly formalized and impersonal.
One of the most obvious areas influenced by the bureaucratic metaphor is
the Chinese pantheon. For many years it has been a truism that the Chinese
conception of gods is based on the Chinese bureaucracy, that the social
organization of the human government is the essential model that Chinese
people use when imagining the gods. At the apex of the divine bureaucracy
stands the Jade Emperor (Yuhuang dadi) in Heaven, corresponding to the human
Son of Heaven (Tianzi, another name for emperor) who rules over Earth. The
Jade Emperor is in charge of an administration divided into bureaus. Each
bureaucrat-god takes responsibility for a clearly defined domain or discrete
function. The local officials of the celestial administration are the Gods
of Walls and Moats, and below them are the Gods of the Hearth, one per
family, who generate a never-ending flow of reports on the people under
their jurisdiction. They are assisted in turn by gods believed to dwell
inside each person's body, who accompany people through life and into death,
carrying with them the records of good and evil deeds committed by their
charges. The very lowest officers are those who administer punishment to
deceased spirits passing through the purgatorial chambers of the underworld.
They too have reports to fill out, citizens to keep track of, and jails to
manage. Recent scholarship has begun to criticize the generalization that
most Chinese gods are bureaucratic, raising questions about the way in which
the relation between the human realm and the divine realm should be
conceptualized. Should the two realms be viewed as two essentially different
orders, with one taking priority over the other? Should the two
bureaucracies be seen as an expression in two spheres of a more unitary
conceptualization of power? Is the attempt to separate a presumably concrete
social system from an allegedly idealized projection wrong in the first
place? Other studies (and the discussion in the next section) suggest that
some of the more significant deities of Chinese religion are not approached
in bureaucratic terms at all.
An important characteristic of any developed bureaucratic system, earthly
or celestial, is that it is wrapped in an aura of permanence and freedom
from blame. Office-holders are distinct from the office they fill.
Individual magistrates and gods come and go, but the functions they serve
and the system that assigns them their duties do not change. Government
officials always seem capable of corruption, and specific individuals may be
blameworthy, but in a sprawling and principled bureaucracy, the blame
attaches only to the individuals currently occupying the office, and
wholesale questioning of the structure as a whole is easily deferred. Graft
may be everywhere--local magistrates and the jailers of the other world are
equally susceptible to bribes--but the injustice of the bureaucracy in
general is seldom broached. When revolutionary groups have succeeded or
threatened to succeed in overthrowing the government, their alternative
visions are, as often as not, couched not in utopian or apolitical terms,
but as a new version of the old kingdom, the bureaucracy of which is staffed
only by the pure.
Bureaucratic logic is also a striking part of Chinese iconography, temple
architecture, and ritual structure. For peasants who could not read in
traditional times, the bureaucratic nature of the gods was an apodictic
matter of appearance: gods were dressed as government officials. Their
temples are laid out like imperial palaces, which include audience halls
where one approaches the god with the proper deportment. Many rituals
involving the gods follow bureaucratic procedures. Just as one communicates
with a government official through his staff, utilizing proper written
forms, so too common people depend on literate scribes to write out their
prayers, in the correct literary form, which are often communicated to the
other world by fire.
The Spirits of Chinese Religion
Up to this point the discussion has touched frequently on the subject of
gods without explaining what gods are and how they are believed to be
related to other kinds of beings. To understand Chinese theology (literally
``discourse about gods''), we need to explore theories about human
existence, and before that we need to review some of the basic concepts of
Chinese cosmology.
What is the Chinese conception of the cosmos? Any simple answer to that
question, of course, merely confirms the biases assumed but not articulated
by the question--that there is only one such authentically Chinese view, and
that the cosmos as such, present unproblematically to all people, was a
coherent topic of discussion in traditional China. Nevertheless, the answer
to that question offered by one scholar of China, Joseph Needham, provides a
helpful starting point for the analysis. In Needham's opinion, the dominant
strand of ancient Chinese thought is remarkable for the way it contrasts
with European ideas. While the latter approach the world religiously as
created by a transcendent deity or as a battleground between spirit and
matter, or scientifically as a mechanism consisting of objects and their
attributes, ancient Chinese thinkers viewed the world as a complete and
complex ``organism.'' ``Things behaved in particular ways,'' writes Needham,
``not necessarily because of prior actions or impulsions of other things,
but because their position in the ever-moving cyclical universe was such
that they were endowed with intrinsic natures which made that behaviour
inevitable for them.''<17> Rather than being created out of nothing, the
world evolved into its current condition of complexity out of a prior state
of simplicity and undifferentiation. The cosmos continues to change, but
there is a consistent pattern to that change discernible to human beings.
Observation of the seasons and celestial realms, and methods like
plastromancy and scapulimancy (divination using tortoise shells and shoulder
blades), dream divination, and manipulating the hexagrams of the _Classic of
Changes_ allow people to understand the pattern of the universe as a whole
by focusing on the changes taking place in one of its meaningful parts.
The basic stuff out of which all things are made is called _qi_.
Everything that ever existed, at all times, is made of qi, including
inanimate matter, humans and animals, the sky, ideas and emotions, demons
and ghosts, the undifferentiated state of wholeness, and the world when it
is teeming with different beings. As an axiomatic concept with a wide range
of meaning, the word qi has over the years been translated in numerous ways.
Even in this anthology, different translators render it into English in
three different ways. Because it involves phenomena we would consider both
psychological--connected to human thoughts and feelings--and physical, it
can be translated as ``psychophysical stuff.'' The translation ``pneuma''
draws on one early etymology of the word as vapor, steam, or breath. ``Vital
energy'' accentuates the potential for life inherent to the more ethereal
forms of qi. These meanings of qi hold for most schools of thought in early
Chinese religion; it is only with the renaissance of Confucian traditions
undertaken by Zhu Xi and others that qi is interpreted not as a single
thing, part-matter and part-energy, pervading everything, but as one of two
basic metaphysical building blocks. According to Zhu Xi, all things partake
of both qi and _li_ (homophonous to but different from the _li_ meaning
``ritual'' or ``propriety''), the latter understood as the reason a thing is
what it is and its underlying ``principle'' or ``reason.''
While traditional cosmology remained monistic, in the sense that qi as
the most basic constituent of the universe was a single thing rather than a
duality or plurality of things, still qi was thought to move or to operate
according to a pattern that did conform to two basic modes. The Chinese
words for those two modalities are _yin_ and _yang_; I shall attempt to
explain them here but shall leave them untranslated. Yin and yang are best
understood in terms of symbolism. When the sun shines on a mountain at some
time other than midday, the mountain has one shady side and one sunny side.
Yin is the emblem for the shady side and its characteristics; yang is the
emblem for the sunny side and its qualities. Since the sun has not yet
warmed the yin side, it is dark, cool, and moist; plants are contracted and
dormant; and water in the form of dew moves downward. The yang side of the
mountain is the opposite. It is bright, warm, and dry; plants open up and
extend their stalks to catch the sun; and water in the form of fog moves
upward as it evaporates. This basic symbolism was extended to include a host
of other oppositions. Yin is female, yang is male. Yin occupies the lower
position, yang the higher. Any situation in the human or natural world can
be analyzed within this framework; yin and yang can be used to understand
the modulations of qi on a mountainside as well as the relationships within
the family. The social hierarchies of gender and age, for instance--the duty
of the wife to honor her husband, and of younger generations to obey older
ones--were interpreted as the natural subordination of yin to yang. The same
reasoning can be applied to any two members of a pair. Yin-yang symbolism
simultaneously places them on an equal footing and ranks them
hierarchically. On the one hand, all processes are marked by change, making
it inevitable that yin and yang alternate and imperative that humans seek a
harmonious balance between the two. On the other hand, the system as a whole
attaches greater value to the ascendant member of the pair, the yang. Such
are the philosophical possibilities of the conceptual scheme. Some
interpreters of yin and yang choose to emphasize the nondualistic,
harmonious nature of the relationship, while others emphasize the imbalance,
hierarchy, and conflict built into the idea.
How is human life analyzed in terms of the yin and yang modes of
``material energy'' (yet another rendering of qi)? Health for the individual
consists in the harmonious balancing of yin and yang. When the two modes
depart from their natural course, sickness and death result. Sleep, which is
dark and therefore yin, needs to be balanced by wakefulness, which is yang.
Salty tastes (yin) should be matched by bitter ones (yang); inactivity
should alternate with movement; and so on. Normally the material energy that
constitutes a person, though constantly shifting, is unitary enough to
sustain a healthy life. When the material energy is blocked, follows
improper patterns, or is invaded by pathogens, then the imbalance between
yin and yang threatens to pull the person apart, the coarser forms of
material energy (which are yin) remaining attached to the body or near the
corpse, the more ethereal forms of material energy (which are yang) tending
to float up and away. Dream-states and minor sicknesses are simply gentler
forms of the personal dissociation--the radical conflict between yin and
yang-- that comes with spirit-possession, serious illness, and death. At
death the material force composing the person dissipates, and even that
dissipation follows a pattern analyzable in terms of yin and yang. The yin
parts of the person--collectively called ``earthly souls'' (_po_)--move
downward, constituting the flesh of the corpse, perhaps also returning as a
ghost to haunt the living. Since they are more like energy than matter, the
yang parts of the person--collectively called ``heavenly souls''
(_hun_)--float upward. They--notice that there is more than one of each kind
of ``soul,'' making a unique soul or even a dualism of the spirit impossible
in principle--are thought to be reborn in Heaven or as another being, to be
resident in the ancestral tablets, to be associated more amorphously with
the ancestors stretching back seven generations, or to be in all three
places at once.
Above I claimed that a knowledge of Chinese cosmology and anthropology
was essential to understanding what place gods occupy in the Chinese
conceptual world. That is because the complicated term ``god,'' in the sense
either of a being believed to be perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness or a
superhuman figure worthy of worship, does not correspond straightforwardly
to a single Chinese term with a similar range of meanings. Instead, there
are general areas of overlap, as well as concepts that have no
correspondence, between the things we would consider ``gods'' and specific
Chinese terms. Rather than pursuing this question from the side of modern
English usage, however, we will begin with the important Chinese terms and
explain their range of meanings.
One of the terms crucial to understanding Chinese religion is _shen_,
which in this introduction I translate with different versions of the
English word ``spirit.'' Below these three words are analyzed separately as
consisting of three distinct spheres of meaning, but one should keep in mind
that the three senses are all rooted in a single Chinese word. They differ
only in degree or realm of application, not in kind.
The first meaning of shen is confined to the domain of the individual
human being: it may be translated as ``spirit'' in the sense of ``human
spirit'' or ``psyche.'' It is the basic power or agency within humans that
accounts for life. To extend life to full potential the spirit must be
cultivated, resulting in ever clearer, more luminous states of being. In
physiological terms ``spirit'' is a general term for the ``heavenly souls,''
in contrast to the yin elements of the person.
The second meaning of shen may be rendered in English as ``spirits'' or
``gods,'' the latter written in lowercase because Chinese spirits and gods
need not be seen as all-powerful, transcendent, or creators of the world.
They are intimately involved in the affairs of the world, generally lacking
a perch or time frame completely beyond the human realm. An early Chinese
dictionary explains: ``Shen are the spirits of Heaven. They draw out the ten
thousand things.''<18> As the spirits associated with objects like stars,
mountains, and streams, they exercise a direct influence on things in this
world, making phenomena appear and causing things to extend themselves. In
this sense of ``spirits,'' shen are yang and opposed to the yin class of
things known in Chinese as _gui_, ``ghosts'' or ``demons.'' The two words
put together, as in the combined form _guishen_ (``ghosts and spirits''),
cover all manner of spiritual beings in the largest sense, those benevolent
and malevolent, lucky and unlucky. In this view, spirits are manifestations
of the yang material force, and ghosts are manifestations of the yin
material force. The nineteenth-century Dutch scholar Jan J. M. de Groot
emphasized this aspect of the Chinese worldview, claiming that ``animism''
was an apt characterization of Chinese religion because all parts of the
universe--rocks, trees, planets, animals, humans--could be animated by
spirits, good or bad. As support for that thesis he quotes a disciple of Zhu
Xi's: ``Between Heaven and Earth there is no thing that does not consist of
yin and yang, and there is no place where yin and yang are not found.
Therefore there is no place where gods and spirits do not exist.''<19>
Shen in its third meaning can be translated as ``spiritual.'' An entity
is ``spiritual'' in the sense of inspiring awe or wonder because it combines
categories usually kept separate, or it cannot be comprehended through
normal concepts. The _Classic of Changes_ states, `` `Spiritual' means not
measured by yin and yang.''<20> Things that are numinous cross categories.
They cannot be fathomed as either yin or yang, and they possess the power to
disrupt the entire system of yin and yang. A related synonym, one that
emphasizes the power of such spiritual things, is _ling_, meaning
``numinous'' or possessing unusual spiritual characteristics. Examples that
are considered shen in the sense of ``spiritual'' include albino members of
a species; beings that are part- animal, part-human; women who die before
marriage and turn into ghosts receiving no care; people who die in unusual
ways like suicide or on battlefields far from home; and people whose bodies
fail to decompose or emit strange signs after death.
The fact that these three fields of meaning (``spirit,'' ``spirits,'' and
``spiritual'') can be traced to a single word has important implications for
analyzing Chinese religion. Perhaps most importantly, it indicates that
there is no unbridgeable gap separating humans from gods or, for that
matter, separating good spirits from demons. All are composed of the same
basic stuff, qi, and there is no ontological distinction between them.
Humans are born with the capacity to transform their spirit into one of the
gods of the Chinese pantheon. The hagiographies included in this anthology
offer details about how some people succeed in becoming gods and how godlike
exemplars and saints inspire people to follow their example.
The broad range of meaning for the word shen is related to the
coexistence, sometimes harmonious, sometimes not, of a number of different
idioms for talking about Chinese gods. An earlier section quoted Xunzi's
comment that distinguishes between a naive fear of gods on the part of the
uneducated and a pragmatic, agnostic attitude on the part of the literati.
Although they share common practices and might use the same words to talk
about them, those words mean different things. Similarly, in one of the
translations in this volume (``Zhu Xi on Spirit Beings''), Zhu Xi uses
homonyms and etymology to abstract--to disembody--the usual meaning of
spirits and ghosts. Spirits (_shen_), he says, are nothing but the
``extension'' (_shen_, pronounced the same but in fact a different word) of
material energy, and ghosts (_gui_) amount to the ``returning'' (_gui_, also
homophonous but a different word) of material energy.
Chinese gods have been understood--experienced, spoken to, dreamed about,
written down, carved, painted--according to a number of different models.
The bureaucratic model (viewing gods as office- holders, not individuals,
with all the duties and rights appropriate to the specific rank) is probably
the most common but by no means the only one. Spirits are also addressed as
stern fathers or compassionate mothers. Some are thought to be more pure
than others, because they are manifestations of astral bodies or because
they willingly dirty themselves with birth and death in order to bring
people salvation. Others are held up as paragons of the common values
thought to define social life, like obedience to parents, loyalty to
superiors, sincerity, or trustworthiness. Still others possess power, and
sometimes entertainment value, because they flaunt standard mores and
conventional distinctions.
Books on Chinese religion can still be found that attempt to portray the
spirit--understood in the singular, in the theoretical sense of essential
principle--of Chinese tradition. That kind of book treats the subject of
gods, if it raises the question at all, as an interesting but ultimately
illogical concern of the superstitious. The primary texts translated in this
anthology represent an attempt to move from a monolithic and abstract
conception of the Chinese spirit to a picture, or an occasionally
contentious series of pictures, of the many spirits of Chinese religion.
Notes
I am grateful to several kind spirits who offered helpful comments on
early drafts of this essay. They include the anonymous readers of the book
manuscript, Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Yang Lu, Susan Naquin, Daniel L. Overmyer,
and Robert H. Sharf.
1. Li's formulation is quoted in _Beishi_, Li Yanshou (seventh century),
Bona ed. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), p. 1234. Unless otherwise noted,
all translations from Chinese are mine.
2. The proverb, originally appearing in the sixteenth-century novel
_Investiture of the Gods_ (_Fengshen yanyi_), is quoted in Clifford H.
Plopper, _Chinese Religion Seen through the Proverb_ (Shanghai: The China
Press, 1926), p. 16.
3. The first three are quoted in Plopper, _Chinese Religion_, p. 15. The
last is quoted in Judith Berling, _The Syncretic Religion of Lin Chao-en_
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 8. See also Timothy Brook,
``Rethinking Syncretism: The Unity of the Three Teachings and Their Joint
Worship in Late-Imperial China,'' _Journal of Chinese Religions_ 21 (Fall
1993):13-44.
4. The phrase is _shu er bu zuo_, quoted from the _Analects_, _Lunyu
zhengyi_, annot. Liu Baonan (1791-1855), in _Zhuzi jicheng_ (Shanghai:
Shijie shuju, 1936), 2:134.
5. For further details, see Lionel M. Jensen, ``The Invention of
`Confucius' and His Chinese Other, `Kong Fuzi,' '' _Positions: East Asia
Cultures Critique_ 1.2 (Fall 1993): 414-59; and Thomas A. Wilson,
_Geneaology of the Way: The Construction and Uses of the Confucian Tradition
in Late Imperial China_ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
6. _Laozi dao de jing_, ch. 42, _Zhuzi jicheng_ (Shanghai: Shijie shuju,
1936), 3:26.
7. For three views on the subject, see Kristofer Schipper, ``Purity and
Strangers: Shifting Boundaries in Medieval Taoism,'' _T'oung Pao_ 80 (1994):
61-81; Rolf A. Stein, ``Religious Taoism and Popular Religion from the
Second to Seventh Centuries,'' in _Facets of Taoism_, ed. Holmes Welch and
Anna Seidel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 53- 81; and Michel
Strickmann, ``History, Anthropology, and Chinese Religion,'' _Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies_ 40.1 (June 1980): 201-48.
8. In fact the linguistic situation is more complex. Some scholars
suggest that Fo is a transliteration not from Sanskrit but from Tocharian;
see, for instance, Ji Xianlin, ``Futu yu Fo,'' _Guoli zhongyang yanjiuyuan
Lishi yuyan yanjisuo jikan_ 20.1 (1948): 93-105.
9. On the extended meaning of the three jewels in Chinese sources, see
Jacques Gernet, _Buddhism in Chinese Society: An Economic History from the
Fifth to the Tenth Centuries_, trans. Franciscus Verellen (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 67.
10. _Kaiyuan shijiao lu_, Zhisheng (669-740), T 2154, 55:572b.
11. _Xunzi jijie_, ed. Wang Xianqian, in _Zhuzi jicheng_ (Shanghai:
Shijie shuju, 1935), 2:250.
12. Wing-tsit Chan, _Religious Trends in Modern China_ (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1953), pp. 141, 142.
13. Francis L. K. Hsu, _Under the Ancestors' Shadow: Kinship,
Personality, and Social Mobility in China_, 2d ed. (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1971), p. 246.
14. See John Jorgensen, ``The `Imperial' Lineage of Ch'an Buddhism: The
Role of Confucian Ritual and Ancestor Worship in Ch'an's Search for
Legitimation in the Mid-T'ang Dynasty,'' _Papers on Far Eastern History_ 35
(March 1987): 89-134.
15. Max Weber, _Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive
Sociology_, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff et
al., 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 956- 58.
16. Ibid., p. 1049.
17. Joseph Needham, with the research assistance of Wang Ling, _Science
and Civilisation in China_, vol. 2: _History of Scientific Thought_
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), p. 281.
18. _Shuowen jiezi_, Xu Shen (d. 120), in _Shuowen jiezi gulin zhengbu
hebian_, ed. Duan Yucai (1735-1815) and Ding Fubao, 12 vols. (Taibei:
Dingwen shuju, 1977), 2:86a.
19. Jan J. M. de Groot, _The Religious System of China: Its Ancient
Forms, Evolution, History and Present Aspect, Manners, Customs and Social
Institutions Connected Therewith_, 6 vols. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1892- 1910),
4:51. My translation differs slightly from de Groot's.
20. _Zhouyi yinde_, Harvard-Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series,
Supplement no. 10 (reprint ed., Taibei: Ch'eng-wen Publishing Co., 1966), p.
41a.
