POPULAR RELIGIONS
Popular religions offered another means of solace in unstable times, although written sources for such expressions are limited. However, glimpses may be garnered through inference. Some texts cite belief in spirits and in deities associated with nature, but details about specific rituals are scarce. A work of poetry, known as the Chu ci (Songs of the South or Songs of Chu), mentions shamanism, which was an easily accessible religion because it did not depend on written sources. With the help of musical instruments and a whirling dance, a shaman would fall into a trance and allegedly reach the sky and speak in the names of the spirits. Judging from modern shamanism in Japan and Korea, shamans also provided rudimentary medical care. To be sure, shamanism developed different forms and practices in northeast Asia, including Manchuria and Mongolia. In any event, the Chu ci includes a poem called “Li Sao” (Departing in Sorrow), which had profound reverberations on Chinese history and yielded set themes about a badly treated official who commits suicide in response and, in that manner, clears his name. Qu Yuan (343–278 BCE), the writer of the poem, himself had been dismissed from government service for warning about taking precautions against the state of Qin. His warnings fell on deaf ears and the Qin conquered his region. In despair, Qu committed suicide. The annual Dragon Boat Festival, on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, commemorates this heroic figure.
Popular religions may have had as great an influence on the ordinary person as Daoism and other clearly defined philosophies. They had few specific texts and no clergy except for practitioners. The lack of a canon made these views accessible to the largest segment of the population, most of whom could not read or write. Worshippers did not limit themselves to set beliefs and instead borrowed, combined, and adapted them from local traditions and other religions and cults. They believed in such supernatural beings as gods, ancestors, and ghosts and prayed to them to provide rain, to avert natural catastrophes, and to prevent illnesses. They incorporated veneration of the ancestors and a belief in an afterlife. Gods and ancestors became central, but worshippers showed the same reverence to ghosts because they feared them. A cult of the dead developed, with ancestral tablets playing important roles in prayer.
The gods might respond to prayers if provided with temples and shrines, which were situated according to the principles of geomancy. Statues honoring them, festivals, and offerings of food, drink, and incense would also prompt responses. Practitioners would perform divinations and would interpret the gods’ and ancestors’ responses. The Jade Emperor, a towering figure, was in many cases the leading deity, but he remained aloof and somewhat inapproachable. Indeed, before the twelfth century CE, many gods were remote and were associated with mountains, the earth, natural phenomena, and heroes of a distant age. Local deities, such as a city god who was responsible for public safety and justice and a kitchen god whose image adorned many households, were more approachable, but even the kitchen god offered an annual report on household members to the Jade Emperor, an indication of the greater power of the more remote deities. Naturally, there were many regional and local variations in such worship and performance.
CONFUCIANISM
Confucianism has cast such a large shadow over Chinese history that Chinese society cannot be understood without knowledge of Confucius’s life and ideas. His theories of human nature, proper conduct, and interpersonal relations dominated much of Chinese history from the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) on. Since then, Confucius has been so inextricably linked with Chinese civilization that the term “Confucian China” seems commonplace. Students, recognizing the significance of Confucianism, often ask whether it is a philosophy or a religion. They implicitly assume that Confucianism was so vital to the legitimacy and functioning of Chinese society that it needed to be more than a philosophy. However, Confucianism’s emphasis on this life differentiates it from most religions.
Confucius (551–479 BCE) or Kong Fuzi (Master Kong) or Kong Qiu lived and died believing that he had failed in his objectives. Born in the state of Lu (in the modern province of Shandong), he was descended from a noble family that had suffered setbacks as a result of the turbulence in the Warring States period. Confucius was determined to influence the politics of his times and believed that an appeal to rulers provided the optimal opportunity to do so. He attempted to persuade the nobles in various states to adopt his teachings in order to restore stability in China, which for most of these rulers meant unification and centralization of the country. Although he succeeded in gathering around him a group of students and disciples, he failed in his efforts to secure an official position in the states through which he traveled. Nor did the rulers subscribe to or implement his philosophy. His disciples also traveled throughout China to spread his teachings but they too were often rebuffed. Facing such disappointments and encountering such resistance, Confucius returned to Lu in his sixties and died there in 479 BCE. Despite the tenacity of his students and disciples, he came to the end of his life without having had much of an impact on Chinese society.
Because Confucius directed his efforts at gaining support from rulers, his philosophy tended to be conservative, focusing on a return to a golden age of the past. In general, he did not call for dramatic social change because he did not wish to be perceived as challenging or undermining the authority of his potential patrons. An image as a disrupter of the social system would not serve his interests. Yet his teachings would actually subvert the power of the hereditary aristocracy and would enable a less entrenched, mobile class, if not a meritocracy, to supplant it as the ruling authority. To a limited extent, his philosophy generated social change.
Confucius sought social stability. Believing that social order resulted from proper moral conduct, he identified five basic relationships in society: ruler–ruled, father–son, elder brother–younger brother, friend–friend, and husband–wife. Women played an explicit role in only one of these relationships – an indication of their lesser position in Confucian society. In any event, Confucius believed that if the ethical principles he espoused characterized these five relationships, a good society would emerge. There is no doubt that Confucius’s principal objective was the establishment of a harmonious and ethical society. Although he referred to spirits, sacrifices, and Heaven, he simply mentioned them in passing and devoted barely any attention to metaphysical and cosmological speculation. He probably accepted the major beliefs embodied in the ancient Shang and Zhou religions (though certainly not the practice of human sacrifice), but these views scarcely intruded on his teachings because they dealt with the realm beyond mankind’s control. Thus, other than a concern for harmony in the cosmos, Confucius did not generally address theological questions. One exception was his rejection of the concepts of destiny and fate. Instead he affirmed his belief that a man’s abilities, efforts, and ethical code determined his own fate and his own potential to become a junzi or gentleman – for Confucius, the person most suited to govern and the embodiment of the highest ideals. According to Confucius, a man succeeded because of his self-cultivation, merit, and virtue, not because of heredity or fate. Yet this view appeared to clash with his repeated attempts to appeal to the ruling classes and his emphasis on acceptance of a social hierarchy.
It is difficult to reconcile these contradictory elements in Confucius’s thought because of the nature of the sources available to us. The Analects (Lunyu), which is attributed to Confucius and contains the most lucid explanation of his teachings, was compiled at least a century after