On Religious Life Before Kongzi (Supplement to Chapter 3)

On religious life before Kongzi (supplement to chapter 3) Table of contents 1. Additional text 2. Additional images 3. Notes https://bloomsbury.com/uk/confucianism-in-china-9781474242431/ © Tony Swain (2017) Confucianism in China, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 1. Additional text I decided to bypass a discussion Chinese religious life before Kongzi in chapter 3. This is an intriguing topic and it is surely relevant insofar as Kongzi claimed he was transmitting the traditions of the early Zhou and the previous Shang and Xia dynasties. I chose to omit this material, however, simply because there is nothing close to scholarly consensus in interpreting the evidence. Any clear and conclusive overview would have been unbalanced while the complexities of an honest appraisal would have resolved very little. In this supplement, I will look at some of the interpretive challenges confronting the study of early Chinese religion, emphasizing shamanism as an example of the difficulties involved. Although tantalizing, it is exceedingly difficult to understand past eras for which we lack contemporary texts. Language is our only reliable window to the past, and even words can be opaque. We do have inscriptions on oracle bones and bronze vessels from early China, but these are terse and only provide fragments of belief and practice. The more forthcoming textual resources shedding light on Chinese religion before Kongzi are problematic. We most certainly do have texts describing events before Kongzi’s time, foremost amongst them, of course, Ru Classics themselves. But are they reliable contemporary accounts or are they latter-day reconstructions of the past? In Before Confucius, Edward Shaughnessy argued against ‘the prejudices of the iconoclasts’ to maintain that the Shijing, Shujing and Yijing were based on widely available historical documents from earlier times.i Likewise, Yuri Pines’s Foundations of Confucian Thought is premised on the claim that the Zuo commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals was not just a narrative from a later era but was rather an account which reproduced recorded speeches contemporaneous with the events being described.ii Not surprisingly, the trust these authors place in their sources has been challenged. As I said at the end of chapter 3, we are constantly being forced to acknowledge that Zhou dynasty scholars had a far greater repertoire of material to draw upon than previously thought, but they were not striving for objectivity and quite feasibly reworked their data in order to generate the desired patterns in history. At this stage, scholars are still obliged to take a significant leap of faith depending upon whether they are inclined towards https://bloomsbury.com/uk/confucianism-in-china-9781474242431/ © Tony Swain (2017) Confucianism in China, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC ‘believing’ or ‘doubting antiquity.’ The alternate approach is to give priority to data truly contemporaneous with the eras being investigated. Besides the inscriptions, we also have archaeological remains, primarily burial mounds and tombs and the artifacts often found at those sites. The most significant of these are vessels, initially ceramic but by Shang times bronze, that are decorated with designs and images that have attracted a great deal of speculation. Archaeologists are not immune from the human predisposition to generate patterns from obscure data; we seem driven to project shapes onto artifacts and clouds alike. When all we have are fragments, our interpretations will be heavily influenced by our expectations. This becomes very evident when we consider the various theories of early Chinese religion. Those who expect continuity, and they are by and large scholars leaning towards ‘believing antiquity’, tend to find support in the archaeological record for the views expressed in subsequent texts. They look at the remote past through the lens of historically documented eras. This results in a model of stability and it is sometimes used to promote the notion that there was a distinctively Chinese ethos from the outset. On the other hand, those who expect discontinuity assume that as human societies develop there will be major changes to religious belief and practice. This is not at all an unreasonable presumption but its application creates problems. What should we expect early China to look like? As interpreters search for paradigms they are inevitably drawn to compare Chinese archaeological evidence with material drawn from other ‘early’ societies. I qualify ‘early’ because much of the comparative data is in fact not at all early but comes from ethnographies of nineteenth and twentieth century small-scale societies. This approach tends to assume all societies pass through predictable stages, an idea once widespread amongst evolutionary social theorists, and this results in Chinese data being interpreted in terms of non-Chinese comparative theories. What these developmental theories prime us to anticipate is that China must have once been host to phenomena such as totemism, animism and shamanism and that there must have been a plentiful population of ghosts and gods, pantheons, and perhaps even a High God presiding over all. I will now proceed to give a very brief summary of two alternate views of the significance of shamans in early Chinese religion, the first detecting major shifts in belief https://bloomsbury.com/uk/confucianism-in-china-9781474242431/ © Tony Swain (2017) Confucianism in China, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC and practice, the latter contesting these findings in favor of a more homogenous past. *** You will recall from chapter 3 that Kongzi was born in the latter part of the Zhou dynasty (1045 – 256 BCE) which was preceded by the Shang (c. 1600 – 1046 BCE) and the Xia dynasties (c. 2200 – c. 1600 BCE). As I then noted, the oracle bones provided proof of the historicity of the Shang but we have no definite corroboration of the Xia. An archaeological site known as Erlitou (near Luoyang) is at the location suggested by later texts, dates from the right period (about 1900-1600 BCE) and shows evidence of appropriate levels of urban development and social stratification. Most Chinese scholars tend to ‘believe antiquity’ and accept this is the old Xia capital, but in the absence of written proof the doubters, mostly Western, remain. We do not have data evenly distributed from across these dynasties. As we actually have more from the late Shang than the early Zhou, the Shang has attracted most speculation. The oracle bones are pivotal evidence (figure 1), and besides their rather obvious testimony to the fact that divination was being practiced, they also indicate that religious specialists were working on behalf of Shang kings. The divination process was demanding. The bones and shells had to be obtained and carefully prepared, heat applied and the cracks read, although we still don’t understand how the interpretations were made. The divination question were cast in both positive and negative forms, dates and the names of diviners were recorded, and sometimes subsequent events corroborating the forecasts were also noted. The enquiries span all those things which were important and unknown: Will the rains come? Will harvests be plentiful? What will be the outcome of military campaigns? Or, more personally, why has the king a toothache? What did his dream mean? Finally, we are also told who these questions are being addressed to: they were directed to important ancestors in the Shang lineage, pre-dynastic ancestors, the powers of natural phenomena such as the earth, Yellow river and mountains and, beyond all these, to di. As di is ‘above’ and ‘sends down’ rains, lightning, winds and sometimes calamities, di is frequently interpreted to be be a storm god, High God and a Supreme Being presiding over the other figures in the pantheon.iii Here is an array of data that at first sight seems quite alien to the subsequent Way of the Ru. The animistic powers and magical manipulation of the cosmos seem entirely https://bloomsbury.com/uk/confucianism-in-china-9781474242431/ © Tony Swain (2017) Confucianism in China, Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC at odds with Kongzi’s this-worldly focus; the communication with and propitiation of ancestors appears opposed to the calm filiality of later times; and here is a transcendent God on high revealing all the anthropomorphism and personal intervention lacking in the Ru notion of Heaven. Kwang-chih Chang in particular has seen these efforts to communicate with spirits and gods as aspects of shamanism at the Shang court. Indeed, as the kings were themselves named as diviners, he argues they were in fact shaman-kings. He speculated: ‘The descent of the spirits or the ascent of the shaman or the king was achieved in a manner not altogether clear. Music and dance were apparently part of the ceremony. Alcoholic drinks were possibly involved: the Shang were notorious drinkers, and many bronze ritual vessels were designed to serve alcoholic beverages. Did the alcohol or other substances bring about a trance, during which the shaman engaged in imagined flight? Possibly, but there is as yet no concrete evidence for this. The role of animals in the ritual art of the Shang may provide significant clues.’iv While some scholars, such as Sarah Allan, have interpreted animal motifs as signs of Shang totemism,v Chang follows Mircea Eliade’s comparative study Shamanism (first released in French in 1951) which emphasizes that a shaman’s ‘familiar’ often takes animal form. After throwing him or herself into an ecstatic state, with the aid of music, dance and intoxicants, the shaman’s familiar arrives to provide transportation to the spirit world. There is incontestable evidence for so-called ‘shamanism’ at the time of China’s oldest books. Zhou texts refer frequently to wu, men and women who made flights to encounter spirits, and since Arthur Waley’s The Nine Songs: A Study of Shamanism in Ancient China (1955) (also inspired by Eliade) is has been common practice to translate this with the Siberian ‘shaman’ (saman), although some dispute the convention.

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