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Ritualizing Confucius/Kongzi the Family and State Cults of the Sage of Culture in Imperial China

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Ritualizing Confucius/Kongzi the Family and State Cults of the Sage of Culture in Imperial China ONE Ritualizing Confucius/Kongzi The Family and State Cults of the Sage of Culture in Imperial China Thomas A. Wilson THE CANONICAL AND THE NONCANONICAL SAGE It is said that he transcribed the sagely traditions of the ancients in sacred books that would be transmitted for ten thousand generations. The imperial courts of the last thousand years worshipped him as the "supreme sage" of state orthodoxy in temples devoted to him. To Confucian scholars of the same era, he played a pivotal role in the transmission of the Dao ~Me; in~ deed, without him it would have been lost forever.1 To common folk, he was Research in China was supported by the American Philosophical Society and the Couper faculty research fund of Hamilton College. The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Zhu Weizheng **fE~ (Fudan University), Kong Xianglin :f~~ and Luo Chenglie .~~f.U of Qufu, Kong Xiangkai :fLJHW and Kong Liuxian :f~IJ)t; of Quzhou, He Jun fill ~ (Hangzhou University), Huang Chin-shing (Academia Sinica, Taiwan), and Jun Jing {CCNY) during his research travels in China and Taiwan, and Sue Naquin, Michael Nylan, Benjamin Elman, and participants in a colloquium at the Institute for Advanced Study in November 1999 for their comments on earlier drafts of this piece. The writing was fi:mded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. 1. Consider, e.g., Zhu Xi's statement: "IfKongzi had never been born after Yao and Shun, where could anyone go to understand [the Dao}t He then goes on to say the same thing about Mengzi and the Cheng brothers (Zhuzi yulei 93-'·350). 44 Thomas A. Wilson the inventor of the written language and the rituals that governed their con~ duct in everyday life.2 Statues of him found their way into Buddhist and Daoist temples, where he was worshipped as a god in the pantheon of deities and culture heroes, despite the throne's periodic proscriptions of such activi~ ties.3 To conservative reformers at the end of the imperial era, his teachings were tantamount to the spirit of Chinese cul~ure.4 To many in the West, he was "Confucius," the founder of a humanistic ethical philosophy called Con~ fucianism. 5 Here, I call him Kongzi JL.::f (Master Kong), although he has had many names through the ages. His surname was Kong JL. His parents named him Qiu £i:. (literally, "hill"), and he took the style name (zi *) Zhongni {~JTI, second son Ni. These names allude to the mountain southeast of his resi~ dence in the Watchtower district ( Queli)6 in present~day Qufu, Shandong, where his mother prayed for a son and later gave birth to him.7 Duke Ai of Lu ~${0 eulogized him with the name of Venerable Ni (Nifu JTI)() in 478 BCB and his disciples simply called him Master (Zi -T and Fuzi ;J(.::f ). Later generations would call him the Supreme Sage (zhi sheng :¥~), al~ though it is not clear that he considered himself one. Indeed, he said he had never seen one (Lunyu lffiij~ 7.26). His "canonicaf' persona-that found in the Analects (Lunyu)-was concerned principally with the Dao of the true 2. Gu Jiegang, "Chunqiu shidai de Kongzi he Handai de Kongzi," 2: 494· Fwd {t~ is usually credited with inventing a writing system after seeing the eight trigrams on a tortoise, and the four-eyed CangJie ~WI (a contemporai:y of the Yellow Emperor) is regarded as the inventor of Chinese characters (see Sancai tuhui, "Renwu," 4.3a-b). 3· The court proscribed popular worship of Kongzi in 1438 (Zhengtong 3/3) (Ming tong­ jian 22.905) and 1836 (Qing shi gao 84.2536). 4· For Kang Y ouwei' s identification of Kongzi and Chinese culture, see Qian Mu, Zhong­ guo jinsanbainian xueshu shi, p. 689. 5· Modern scholars tend to view Confucius as a rationalist (Creel, Confucius, the Man and the Myth, pp. 82-84, 113-22, 169) and Confucianism as an ethical philosophy (e.g., Shryock, The Origin and Development of the State Cult of Confucius). See the Introduction to this volume, PP· 7-13. 6. On the meaning of Queli, see Gn Yanwu, Rizhi lu jishi 31.38a-b. 7· It was also said that his forehead protruded in a manner resembling Mount Ni, inviting the names Qiu and Zhongni (Analects, pp. 181-82). For fuller treatment of the significance of this, see the chapter by Lionel Jensen in this volume, pp. 196-97. Traditional sources date his birth to the twenty-first day of the tenth lunar month of King Ling's twenty-first year (551 BeE). He died at 74 sui~, on the ninth day of the sixth lunar month ofKingJing's forty-first year (479 BeE). See Kong Shangren, Kongzi shijia pu 2.2a, 33b; and Kong Jifen, Queli wenxian kao 2.1a. .
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