Hamilton College Hamilton Digital Commons Articles Works by Type 11-2014 Spirits and the Soul in Confucian Ritual Discourse Thomas A. Wilson Hamilton College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.hamilton.edu/articles Part of the Asian History Commons, Chinese Studies Commons, and the History of Religions of Eastern Origins Commons Citation Information Wilson, Thomas A., "Spirits and the Soul in Confucian Ritual Discourse" (2014). Hamilton Digital Commons. https://digitalcommons.hamilton.edu/articles/1 This work is made available by Hamilton College for educational and research purposes under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. For more information, visit http://digitalcommons.hamilton.edu/about.html or contact [email protected]. WILSON • SPIRITS AND THE SOUL 1 Journal of Chinese Religions 42 (November 2014) 2: 185-212 DOI: 10.1179/0737769X14Z.00000000013 © Society for the Study of Chinese Religions 2015 SPIRITS AND THE SOUL IN CONFUCIAN RITUAL DISCOURSE THOMAS WILSON Hamilton College, New York, USA As early as the Tang 唐 (618–907), Confucian scholars drew from classical sources to articulate a conception of spirits and the soul that provided a canonical foundation for imperial sacrifices performed by members of the court and bureaucracy to the end of the Qing 清 (1644–1911). Contrary to modern accounts, imperial-era commentaries on the Analects 論語 disclose the figure of Confucius as committed to pious sacrifices to gods and spirits. In commentaries on the Record of Rites 禮記 in the imperial edition of the Five Classics (Correct Meaning of the Five Classics 五經正義, 653), Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (574–648) propounds a detailed conception of spirits, ghosts, and the soul based on statements attributed to Confucius. Confucians from the Song 宋 (960–1279) through the Qing, including Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) among others, built on this and other classical sources to formulate feasting rites 祭祀 devoted to gods and spirits. Confucian ritual discourse conceived of the soul as constituted by anima (hun 魂), which animated the body in life, and corporeal soul (po 魄), which constituted the physical senses. As a yang 陽 entity, anima was released from the body upon death and floated upward, whereas the yin 陰 corporeal soul decomposed into the earth. By realizing a state of ritual purity defined by integrity of will, inner reverence and piety, the filial descendant communed with the spirits by means of a process of his affection and the spirits’ response. SACRIFICE AND THE CONFUCIUS OF THE CANON In spite of their reputation for reticence on matters of spirits, Confucian officials nonetheless performed sacrifices to spirits throughout imperial times until the early twentieth century. The emperor, court ministers, and civil officials followed a strict calendar of rites devoted to scores of gods1 and spirits at altars and temples in the capital and throughout the empire. This essay 1 Chinese liturgical sources do not consistently distinguish between gods and spirits. The deity venerated at Heaven’s Altar 天壇 was formally called 昊天上帝 (Heaven-God) and was often referred to 2 WILSON • SPIRITS AND THE SOUL examines uses of the Classics in Confucian ritual discourse to establish the foundation of the imperial cults and ancestor veneration.2 I begin with statements on spirits in the Analects 論語 and follow the tracks of an imperial-era hermeneutics in which Confucius expounds upon gods, spirits, and the human soul in such works as the Record of Rites 禮記 and Book of Filial Piety 孝 經. Many Confucian liturgists and commentators wrote on what the Master said about spirits; here I focus on two, Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (574-648) of the Tang (618-907) and Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200) of the Song (960-1279), who greatly influenced the direction of these discussions conducted primarily at the imperial court.3 An examination of classical commentaries and critical essays spanning no less than 1500 years divulges a remarkably consistent conception of spirits and the rites to venerate them. The history of Confucian discourse on ritual practice discloses subtle if important shifts in emphasis on what rites accomplish, yet the reverent sacrificing to the spirits never ceased to play a definitive role in the lives of men and women steeped in Confucian culture. Recent research on the modern fate of rites to venerate gods and spirits under the onslaught of Republican reforms underscores the importance of examining Confucian discourses on these matters before the advent of secular-modern thinking in China.4 Confucians held no monopoly on rites to spirits and ancestors, yet their insistence upon adherence to particular canonical authority as promulgated by the court in their ritual practices distinguishes their ritual procedures from Daoist or popular forms of veneration, even though they arguably shared ideas about the nature of spirits and the soul. The Confucian conception of spirits and the soul revolves around the basic assumptions that spirits linger after the death of the body and that they must be nurtured through pious feasting rites of cult sacrifice. The Master and his later interpreters rarely spoke directly about the nature as 天神 (Heaven-spirit). I use “spirit” to refer to an array of numinous agents and essences and use “gods” to refer to the most exalted deities venerated at imperial altars. 2 For detailed discussions of the liturgy of sacrifice to Confucius, see Wilson, “Sacrifice and the Imperial Cult of Confucius”; “The Cultic Confucius in the Imperial Temple and Ancestral Shrine,” in Nylan and Wilson, Lives of Confucius, 165-191 and Wilson, “The Ritual Formation of Confucian Orthodoxy and the Descendants of the Sage,” 577-578. For the liturgy of the imperial cult of Heaven- God, see “Confucianism: The Imperial Cult,” in Encyclopedia of Religion 2nd Edition, 3: 1914-1916. 3 I also discuss Kong Anguo 孔安國 (d. ca. 100 BCE), Bao Xian 包咸 (6 BCE-65 CE), Zheng Xuan 鄭 玄 (127-200 CE), Fan Zuyu 范祖禹 (1041-98), and Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲 (1610-1695). 4 See especially Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity and Goossaert and Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China. WILSON • SPIRITS AND THE SOUL 3 of spirits outside of the specific ritual contexts in which spirits and human agents interacted according to strict guidelines prescribed by the court. Imperial-era commentaries on the classics elaborated on the Master’s description of two components of the soul – a yang hun 魂 spirit and a yin po 魄 ghost – and the rites, devised by the sages of remote antiquity, to venerate them properly. Classical commentaries well before the Tang and throughout the longue durée of Confucian ritual discourses on spirits and the soul stressed the moral effects on those who purify themselves and participate in such rites personally. By situating Confucius’s statements on spirits found in the Analects within the larger corpus of canonical works, I depart from the perception of the Master as bounded by the singular confines of the Analects, in which he purportedly expressed a rational attitude toward spirits and so reserved judgment on them.5 I focus instead on what I call the “canonical Confucius,” who speaks as the consummate authority on the ritual feasting of spirits in several canonical works. For the purposes of this analysis, I distinguish the canonical Confucius from what modern interpreters regard as the historical Confucius – the figure who speaks in sources that date roughly to the time when he lived.6 In contrast to the latter, classical commentators and court officials who oversaw rites to venerate the gods at imperial altars accepted the authenticity and authority of the words attributed to Confucius in classical texts to fashion a foundation on what the Master said. The canonical Master’s pronouncements on ritual feasting of gods and spirits are dispersed throughout the Rites, including the Constant Mean 中庸, doubly canonized in the Four Books 四書, and Filial Piety. The canon, as interpreted by such imperial-era commentators as Kong Yingda and Zhu Xi, yields a protean figure that intersects with a range of historical, liturgical, and philosophical concerns. In this essay I discuss the classical filaments of the Master who spoke on matters of spirits and who was repeatedly invoked as a preeminent authority in the formation of cults patronized by imperial courts devoted to Heaven-God 昊天上帝 and other celestial, terrestrial, and ancestral gods and spirits. Confucian officials formulated and performed 5 Fung Yu-lan, for example, maintains that Confucians “displayed a rationalist attitude [toward spirits], making it probable that there were other superstitions of his time in which he did not believe” (A History of Chinese Philosophy 1:58 and Feng Youlan, Zhongguo zhexue shi 1:84). 6 Two classic examples of this approach are Gu Jiegang, “Chunqiu shidai de Kongzi he Handai de Kongzi” and Zhu Weizheng, “Lishi de Kongzi yu Kongzi de lishi.” 4 WILSON • SPIRITS AND THE SOUL the liturgies of the imperial cults based on principles enunciated by the canonical Master that would remain essentially intact for the duration of late imperial China.7 SACRIFICE IN THE ANALECTS An anonymous voice in the Analects declaims, “the Master did not speak of strange powers and chaotic spirits” 子不語怪力亂神 (7.21).8 Although the Confucius of the Analects says little about the nature of spirits themselves, he presupposes an understanding of them in Book Three where he repeatedly stresses the necessity of sacrificing to them properly. He laments, for example, a powerful family’s usurpation of rites appropriately performed only by royalty (3.1-2) and wonders if a mountain spirit will decline to partake in that family’s sacrifice offered in violation of the rites (3.6).9 Confucius insists that animals kept especially for a long-neglected but necessary sacrifice remain penned to serve as a reminder that there was once a time when rites were performed assiduously.