From Song to Ming: Establishing a New Tradition II

Chapter 10 From Song to Ming: Establishing a New Tradition II

1 State and Scholars Support the Expansion of Culture and Establish the Uniformity of Ethics in Everyday Life in the Song Dynasty

In the middle of the eleventh century during the reign of Emperor Renzong (Zhao Zhen 趙禎, 1010–1063, r. 1022–1063), with the support of Xia Song (985– 1051), the government used its administrative power to order more than 1,980 shaman (shiwu 師巫) households to “change professions, return to agricul- ture, and to practice acupuncture and medicine.” All of their paraphernalia, including spirit images (shenxiang 神像), talismans ( fulu 符箓), spirit robes (shenshan 神衫), magic staffs (shenzhang 神杖), soul headbands (hunjin 魂巾) and soul caps (hunmao 魂帽), were also ordered destroyed or confiscated.1 Of course the government had issued such prohibition orders more than once. General prohibitions of shamans, witches, and unorthodox and unacceptable cults in order to improve the ethics of everyday life and moral order through the exercise of political power had always received the support of emperors and the central government. Ancient governments’ resistance to “unacceptable cults” and “shamanistic customs” usually took the form of establishing schools to raise the educational standards. In the same manner during Renzong’s reign, Fan Zhongyan (989–1052) rec- ommended the establishment of new schools. Many of the newly established schools not only transmitted knowledge but also even more widely dissemi- nated “civilization” (wenming) as the content of education.2 From the records of various extant Song dynasty gazetteers, we can see that after the jingyou reign period (1034–1038) schools really began to be universalized. The state revised its previous policy of engaging celebrated Confucian scholars to teach in these schools and began to appoint government officials as teachers. This strategy of having “officials serve as teachers” (yi li wei shi 以吏為師) further brought the top-down activity to promote civilization into government admin- istration and also greatly accelerated its progress.

1 Xia Song, “Hongzhou qing duan xianwu,” Song wenjian, j. 43, 652. 2 “Zhoujun shuyuan,” Hong Mai, Rongzhai sanbi, j. 5, in Rongzhai suibi, 1993, 477.

This collaborative effort by officialdom and the gentry to promote the broadening of civilization through the twin methods of strict prohibition and educational persuasion continued for several centuries from the Northern through the Southern Song dynasties. The government continuously issued imperial orders and enacted laws forbidding temples for worshiping unorthodox gods (yinci 淫祠), improper cults (sacrifices not acceptable to ritual norms, yinci 淫祀), and “congregations of men and women from dusk to dawn (yeju xiaosan 夜聚曉散).” They also forbade the old custom of drowning new- born babies known as haozi (薅子, weeding out), the use of ceremonial ban- ners and weapons (yizhang 儀仗) in sacrifices to spirits, and self-punishing religious practices such as burning the head or arms, stabbing to cause bleed- ing, breaking the fingers, and so on. The gentry also continued to run schools, put into effect various regulations and ceremonies of etiquette, promote har- monious relations within clans, and encourage a climate of respect for the elderly and filial piety toward parents. Due to all of these actions, a quite rapid and widespread process of advancing civilization occurred during the Song dynasty—from the cities expanding to the villages, from the central region radiating out to the peripheral areas, and from the elite scholarly class dis- seminating down to the lower stratum of the general population. Following this process of promotion, social life experienced a transformation. To put it in ordinary terms, society was moving in the direction of a higher level of civilization. Because the influence on society of the intellectual stratum responsible for interpreting culture was increasing, the spread of knowledge had become extremely easy due to the art of printing, and the convenience of travel was making the distance between the cities and the countryside increasingly shorter, the advance of civilization during the Song dynasty seems to have increased at a hitherto unprecedented pace of acceleration. The expansion of civilization from the cities to the countryside, the exten- sion of a moral and rational order of life from the top to the bottom of society, and the shift from external to internal acknowledgement of social rules com- bined to develop a pattern of everyday life customs. This may possibly have been the soil from which the Song dynasty School of Principle grew, and also the basis on which it was accepted by the Song scholar-official class as their ethical and moral doctrine. It was also the result of its progressively entering deeply into the world of everyday life due to its standardization and secular- ization. In any case, this expansion of civilization reconfigured the uniform nature of the ethics of everyday life for the Han Chinese after the Song dynasty. The resulting landscape of everyday social life was seemingly very much differ- ent from that of China in the Tang dynasty and earlier, it would also seem that