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In My Book Published in 1987, Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society And Chapter 1 A Brief History of the Pantheon: Ancestors and Gods in State and Local Religion and Politics In my book published in 1987, Daoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History, I made the outrageous claim that, with regard to the legitimization of dynasties, Confucianism never held a candle to Daoism.1 I had expected howls of protest, but to my surprise, the only response was deafening silence. I consoled myself with the thought that historians had better things to do than read descriptions of Daoist ritual in Tainan. I probably would have left matters at that had I not come upon David Faure’s book on The Structure of Chinese Rural Society. In reviewing it,2 I focused on the fact that New Territories lineages created in accord with Confucian ideology invited Daoists to do Jiao 醮 for territorial gods in the lineage hall. If then on the village level there was a lineage (xueyuan 血緣) and a territorial (diyuan 地緣) China, a China of (Confucian) time and history and a China of (Daoist) space and cosmos, then the same Confucian misreading of China I had denounced on the level of the state was just as patent on the level of local society. This in turn led me to concentrate my fieldwork on local society in an attempt to see, from a multitude of case studies, whether Faure’s observations in Hong Kong could be extended to other parts of China. The results of these case studies will be the subject of subsequent chapters, so I will say no more of them here. But in this opening chapter, it seems to me crucial to sketch the background for the chapters to follow, in order to underscore to what degree the same questions inhabit them all: what is the place of Daoist ritual in Chinese society and history? What does our recovery of this foreclosed chapter of Chinese history imply for our understanding of Chinese society, whether viewed from the bottom or from the top? If I have chosen to begin with the top-down view, it is because we know very little of local society in early China, and the history of state religion prior to the emergence of religious Daoism in the second century of our era is vital to our understanding of how Daoism has interacted with state and society since. Pre-imperial China (1250-221 BC) I used to think there was a clear-cut case for contrasting the virtual omnipotence of an anthropomorphic high god Di 帝 in the Shang with the lesser powers of the lineage ancestors: that Di alone could order (ling 令) and give consent (nuo 諾), that he had a court, and that he was in charge of success in warfare and hence the fate of the state, as well as of the weather and hence of the harvest. Robert Eno has convinced me we must be more prudent. In the first place, virtually everything we can say about the Shang “pantheon” depends on oracle bones from the reign of Wuding (1250–1192 BC). Second, Di may be understood simply as a generic term for the Powers. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the fact Di alone does not receive sacrifice may be the best proof that he is indeed a 1 The exact statement is as follows (John Lagerwey, Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History (New York: Macmillan, 1987), p. 274: “Chinese political history is indeed one of an unequal contest between Confucianism and Taoism but contrary to what has always been said, it is Confucianism which never had a prayer, not Taoism.” 2 John Lagerwey, review of The Structure of Chinese Rural Society: Lineage and Village in the Eastern New Territories, by David Faure, in Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 5, 1990), pp. 445–8. 1 high god. Eno also mentions the ideas of David Pankenier to the effect that “Di was conceived as a function of astronomical aspects of Shang religion . [He notes] the care with which foundations of palatial and ceremonial structures were aligned in relation to the North Celestial Pole.” Pankenier also argues that Di dwelt at the true Pole and links him to Taiyi 太一 of the fourth century.3 If that could be proven, the virtually automatic character of the ritual-calendrical cycle of the late Shang would also appear as a harbinger of the later link between the emperor’s person and the calendar, and the apparent contradiction between the probably anthropomorphic high god Di of Wuding’s pantheon and his disappearance under later kings in favor of ritual automaticity would be just that: apparent. However we read the Shang data, everyone seems to agree that the Zhou invented Heaven and its Mandate (tianming 天命). According to Eno, the earliest reference in the bronzes dates to ca. 998 BC, when King Kang is described as saying to a minister: “I have heard that the Yin lost the Mandate because the greater and lesser lords and the many officials assisting the Yin sank into drunkenness and so were bereft of their capital.” The concomitant term “Son of Heaven” (tianzi 天子) “becomes pervasive in the inscriptional record from the reign of King Mu (r. ca. 976–922 BC) on.”4 An ethical Heaven that gives the Mandate to the worthy had clear propaganda value for the usurping Zhou. The virtual reduction of the pantheon of the written record to Heaven and the ancestors, together with the fact that Di would seem to be the equivalent of Tian, seems to imply that a shift has also occurred from the anthropomorphic to the abstract and philosophical: Tian is at once the physical heavens of the astronomers and the calendar and a moral “being” not unlike the Hebrew God. Both Confucianism and Daoism will exploit that ambiguity, albeit in quite different ways. Having spoken of Heaven, we must speak of Earth, for its cult too is an integral part of the construction and representation of power. Kominami Ichiro traces the basic features of the earth god cult back to King Tang, founder of the Shang ca. 1600 BC and of its first capital in Bo 亳. Kominami cites three references in the oracle bones to Botu, “earth of Bo 亳土” and concludes from their analysis that the earth god (tu 土, understood as she 社) “represented the earth of an area, especially an agricultural area.”5 The degree to which this cult site was linked with human sacrifice — Kominami wonders whether the drops around the mound on some oracle bones might represent blood — may explain why much later texts refer to the “people-eating she.” As a site which represented conquest, it was also inseparable from the ancestors in whose name conquest was undertaken. So tight was the link, says Kominami, that royal armies could go into battle without the ancestor tablets and carrying only the clods of earth taken from the Boshe 亳 社, these clods representing the ancestors and their previous conquests. The relationship of the earth god to Heaven may be seen in the fact it was represented by an open-air tan 壇, and the Shang Boshe in the various states were converted into roofed-in wooden 3 Robert Eno, “Shang State Religion and the Pantheon of the Oracle Texts,” in Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC–AD 220), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 73–4. 4 Ibid., p. 101. 5 Kominami Ichirô, “Rituals for the Earth,” in Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC–AD 220), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 216–7. 2 enclosures when these states were conquered by the Zhou. Finally, in the myth of Yu 禹 taming the flood waters and creating the Nine Continents (jiuzhou 九州) by “spreading out the earth” (futu 敷土) stolen from Heaven by his father Gun 鯀, the cosmic and heavenly dimensions of the earth god cult are clear. As Kominami says, this is xirang息 壤, “living earth,” and represents the vitality of Heaven (and the ancestors) transmitted to earth. The she, he suggests in conclusion, is a mediator between Heaven and Earth, because the original clod comes from Heaven and represents the place where the ancestors first “landed” on earth.6 The next step along the way is what has come to be called, since Jessica Rawson first introduced the notion, the “ritual revolution” (or reform) of the ninth century BC. In Lothar von Falkenhausen’s rendition, this reform may be summarized as a transition from shamanistic “dionysian” to formalized “apollonian” rituals. This change may be seen in the move from the mask-like animal decorations of Shang and early Western Zhou bronzes to the abstract, geometric designs of the late Western Zhou, the replacement of wine by meat and grain vessels, the new prominence of chime-bells, the emergence of “standard sets of vessels which were correlated with élite ranks according to strict sumptuary rules,” and, finally, the appearance of new types of vessel that “seem deliberately simple and humble . This suggests a desire to reform the spirit of ritual by reducing its complexity and linking it with everyday activities.”7 So vital were the meat vessels to the reformed Zhou order that, in later texts, “eaters of meat” (roushizhe肉食者) referred to the nobility, defined by its right to a share of the “leftovers” of the sacrifices to the ancestors. In the Zhou, the ultimate ancestor was Houji 后稷, lord of grains. According to the Liji 禮記 (Book of Rites), he was sacrificed to secondarily, after the sacrifice to Heaven.
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