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The Sacrality of the Mountain the Sacrality of the Mountain University of Arkansas, Fayetteville ScholarWorks@UARK Theses and Dissertations 12-2014 The aS crality of The ounM tain Manuel Rivera Espinoza University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd Part of the Asian History Commons, Asian Studies Commons, Comparative Philosophy Commons, History of Religions of Eastern Origins Commons, and the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Rivera Espinoza, Manuel, "The aS crality of The ounM tain" (2014). Theses and Dissertations. 2072. http://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/2072 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UARK. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UARK. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. The Sacrality of the Mountain The Sacrality of the Mountain A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts in History by Manuel Rivera Espinoza Universidad de Chile Bachelor in History, 2008 December 2014 University of Arkansas This thesis is approved for recommendation of the Graduate Council. _______________________________ Dr. Rembrandt Wolpert Thesis Director _______________________________ _______________________________ Dr. Liang Cai Dr. Elizabeth Markham Committee Member Committee Member Abstract In this thesis I explore the conception of the mountain as a “sacred space” based on the definition provided by Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and The Profane and other works. I recognize three major elements in Eliadean sacral spatiality: a) order and orientation b) liminality and c) reality. Using various sources but mainly the oracle bones inscriptions, the Yugong (“Tributes of Yu”) of the Shujing (“Book of Documents”) and the Shanjing (“Classic of Mountains”) of the Shanhaijing (“Classic of Mountains and Seas”), I demonstrate how the three basic components of sacrality are to be found in each of the aforementioned sources, therefore showing the prevalence of the understanding of the mountain as a sacred space from the late Shang, through the Warring States, until the early imperial periods; and explaining its epochal variations throughout the course of early Chinese history. In doing this, I also argue that the acquisition of numinous properties from mountains was quintessential to the construction of religious power and political legitimacy in Early China. ©2014 by Manuel Rivera Espinoza All Rights Reserved Dedication To my parents, Berta y Manuel, and sister, Isadora “Everything that is not ‘our world’, is not yet a world” Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane “Strange days have found us. Strange days have tracked us down” Jim Morrison, “Strange Days”, The Doors “Dear God, I wish that I could touch you. How strange, sometimes I feel like almost do. But then, I’m back against the glass again. Oh God, what you keep out it keeps me in” Jim James, “Dear God”, Monsters of Folk Contents: Introduction...................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Mountains and the sacrality of space in late Shang 商 religion: The suitability of the Eliadean frame................................................................................. 9 Chapter Two: Ordering space by means of mountains in the Yugong 禹貢 ..............90 Chapter Three: Liminality and strangeness in the Shanjing 山經.............................189 Conclusions............................................................................................................. 269 Bibliography............................................................................................................. 282 Introduction: Considering the persistence of the understanding of the mountain as a sacred space throughout Chinese history, it is surprising that no systematic study to trace its roots in early Chinese religious culture has ever been attempted. I am not speaking here of studies dedicated to late Han, medieval, early or late modern China, but to surveys devoted to delve into the origins of the widespread and traditional admiration the Chinese have professed for mountains, and which has expressed in the poetry of Li Po (701-762 CE) and Wang Wei (701-761 CE)1, the paintings of Lu Guang (late 14th c.), Weng Jia (1501-1583) Dong Bangda (1699-1769) and Wang Yun (1652-1735)2, the literature of hermits and recluses 3, the religious scriptures of Taoism 4 and Buddhism5 as well as in the mountain pilgrimages of villagers and emperors in early modern China.6 In order to trace the origins of the believes which originated these literary, poetic or religious creations, we must turn our attention toward the formative ages of Chinese civilization. Therefore, in this study I have covered the period spanning from the late Shang, through the late Zhou and until the the early imperial dynastic eras in an attempt to identify the sprouts of the enduring idea of the mountain as a “sacred space”. 1 Hinton (2005) 2 Munakata (1991) 3 Vervoorn (1990), Berkowitz (2000) 4 Verellen (1995), Raz (2009) 5 Robson (2009) 6 Naquin & Yü (1992) 1 I can only count a few works which have come close to do something like this in the past. About twenty years ago Terry Kleeman wrote a brief but suggesting article entitled “Mountain Deities in China: The Domestication of the Mountain God and the Subjugation of the Margins”7, that is still widely quoted. However, this study, which covers an extensive period of time in only a few pages, dedicates very little space to pre and early imperial ideas about mountains. Kleeman’s article serves as an excellent introduction to the subject of the sacrality of the mountain in Chinese religious culture but is of little help for those attempting to obtain a more precise understanding of early Chinese religious conceptions on mountains. Something similar occurs with “Unto the Mountain: Toward a Paradigm for Early Chinese Thought”8, an obscure article written by Franklin Doeringer which focuses on certain repetitive cosmographic and cosmological concepts (centricity, circularity and circumfluency) in the diviner’s (shi) boards and TLV mirrors of the Han dynasty. While the article succeeds in suggesting a relationship between the mountain and the ordering of space, it does not read this in religious terms as it is mostly preoccupied with identifying a general rationale (“paradigm”, “matrix”) for early Chinese philosophical reasoning. Probably the single most solid article written so far regarding the sacred character of mountains in early China is Kenneth Brashier’s “The Spirit Lord of Baishi Mountain: Feeding the Deities or Heeding the yinyang?”9, a detailed study of an inscribed stelae dated to 183 C.E10 which offers a comprehensive analysis of the mountain as a sacred site, describing the cosmological systems in 7 Kleeman (1994) 8 Doeringer (1990) 9 Brashier (2001-2002) 10 Brashier (2001-2002) p. 160. 2 which it participated, its numinous abilities and the diverse ritual procedures used to appropriate them, with a view to assert the coexistence of theistic and correlative cosmologies during the late Han period. The stelae which the article analyses, however, belongs to a historical period which is beyond the scope of this work and that differs from late Zhou and early Han conceptions of mountains on certain points, mostly because of the great importance which correlative cosmology plays in the cosmological and ritual systems associated with Lord of Baishi Mountain.11 Therefore, notwithstanding Brashier offers a meticulous research on the “ritual landscape” which mountains defined, his work is not useful for an investigation into the origin and character of the most pristine Chinese ideas about mountains. Besides from these articles there are a few books which dedicate at least one chapter or an entire section to the subject of the sacrality of the mountain. Kiyohiko Munakata’s Sacred Mountains in Chinese Art12 dedicates several pages to analyze the sacral character of mountains by reviewing various pictorial and iconographic materials, drawing connections between their symbolic import and the descriptions of mountains in the Shanhaijing 山海經 (“The Book/Classic of Mountains and Seas”), the Huainanzi 淮南子(“Master from Huainan”) and the Chuci 楚辭 (“Songs of the Chu”). The language Munakata uses, however, is too often highly technical and his shamanistic interpretation of both the graphic and written sources he reviews, specially the Shanhaijing and the mountain iconography of late Zhou ceramic vessels, is questionable inasmuch as that the actual shamanistic character of early 11 Contrarily to the late Han period, the late Zhou and early Han eras granted more importance to theistic than to correlative cosmologies. See Puett (2002) pp. 225-258. 12 Munakata (1991) 3 Chinese religion is a highly controversial issue13. Therefore, the approach adopted by Munakata to address the sacrality of the mountain is debatable and probably deficient. Nevertheless, his work deserves credit for considering a vast array of sources –including the oracle bone inscriptions– and it constitutes the earliest systematic attempt to offer a panoramic view of mountain worship from the late Shang to the Eastern Han dynasties. More recently, similar tasks have been pursued by Julius Tsai and James Robson. Robson assigns the first chapter of his book Power of Place14 to an evaluation of the sacred nature of mountains and its relations
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