Chapter 94. Heaven, Ancestors and Spirits: The Foundations of Chinese Religion

Long before anything was called “Confucianism” or “Taoism”, the Yellow River peoples had a complete religious world. It held a high god in the sky, royal ancestors consulted through cracked bones, spirits of mountain and soil, gods of the door and the kitchen, and a crowd of souls and ghosts. Its political theology was just as old. The king ruled because he alone had privileged access to the supreme deity and the royal dead. The Zhou conquerors turned this claim into the Mandate of Heaven: what Heaven had given to a virtuous house it could take away. Every later Chinese tradition, and every later Chinese rebellion, stood on this ground.

The Shang: Di, the royal dead and the oracle bones

The translator’s introduction to the Hackett Analects calls the Shang (traditionally 1751–1122 BCE) the earliest Chinese civilization “for which we have archeological and written evidence”. Its records are oracle bones, inscribed with questions to the Shang ancestors and then heated, the cracks “decoded by the diviner, who was often the Shang king himself” [Analects, with selections from traditional commentaries, #40662, “Pre-Confucian Background”]. Above the ancestors stood the “Lord on High” (shangdi), who “seems originally to have been a nonhuman god who gradually came to be viewed as the first human ancestor of the Shang people”. A ruler who kept up the sacrifices gained de, rendered “Virtue” in the sense of Latin virtus: “a visible mark of the spirits’ favor” [#40662].

Karen Armstrong adds the dynastic myth. A dark bird sent by Di laid an egg that a lady ate, and she bore the first Shang ancestor, so “the king was the only person in the world who was allowed to approach the High God directly” [Armstrong, The Great Transformation, #82303, ch. 1 “The Axial Peoples”]. She counts 150,000 inscribed oracle bones, with questions about hunts, harvests “or even a toothache”. She also notes how unreliable Di was (“It is Di who is harming our harvests”). By the twelfth century the Shang had “stopped addressing him directly at all”.

There was also blood in this religion. At Yin (Anyang) the tombs of nine kings were surrounded by “the remains of soldiers who had been sacrificed at their funerals”, and Armstrong quotes Mozi’s later disgust: “As for the men who are sacrificed in order to follow him, if he should be a Son of Heaven, they will be counted in hundreds or tens” [#82303, ch. 1]. Eugen Celan explains the practice as belief in life after death. Pre-Confucian Chinese “offered human sacrifices, so that in the afterlife the deceased ruler would not be left without a retinue” (“sacrificii umane, pentru ca în viaţa de apoi conducătorul decedat să nu rămână fără suită”) [Celan, Viața după pragul morții, #13294].

The Zhou conquest and the Mandate of Heaven

The Zhou (conquest traditionally 1122 BCE; Armstrong gives 1045) were “very eager to identify with the religious and political systems of their predecessors” and merged the Lord on High with their own sky god tian, an “anthropomorphic figure”. Heaven, however, could charge an earthly representative with the “Mandate” (ming) [#40662]. The introduction states the consequence:

“Heaven … is a supreme deity who has chosen to bestow the Mandate upon the Zhou because of their ritual propriety. In this case, what has been given can also be taken away. Ancestors still play a crucial role, and the Zhou were eager to claim for their ancestral line the same sort of privileged access to the supreme deity that the Shang line enjoyed, but there is no longer any guarantee that the ancestors can protect their descendents from the wrath of Heaven” [#40662, Introduction, near note 5 citing Book of Documents ch. 31].

The early texts present the conquest as almost effortless, the enemy armies submitting to King Wu’s Virtue. From this came the lasting idea that “the need to exert force [is] evidence that a ruler does not truly enjoy Heaven’s favor” [#40662].

Armstrong finds the doctrine in the Duke of Zhou’s speech in the Shujing. The Shang had become “tyrannical and corrupt”, Heaven pitied the people and revoked the mandate, and the new king had to be “in harmony with the little people”. In her reading, “the Zhou had introduced an ethical ideal into a religion that had hitherto been unconcerned about morality”: “if a ruler was selfish, cruel, and oppressive, Heaven would not support him, and he would fall” [#82303, ch. 1]. John Clark Archer’s composite definition of the Chinese Supreme likewise includes “the dethroner of tyrants … [who] will give effect to what the people properly desire” [Archer, Faiths Men Live By, #55131, ch. 3 “An Introduction to Religion in China”]. A legitimacy that could be withdrawn implied a right to resist, and Mencius would draw that conclusion (Chapter 95).

Heaven, Earth and the ritual state

Archer compares China with Greece and India. Zeus headed a pantheon, and India’s “Father Sky” gave way to gods of wind and storm, “in China, on the other hand, the sky maintained its high place and never became subordinated to other nature powers” [#55131, ch. 3, “Nature Worship”]. Earth received equal worship “from about 1000 B.C.”, with sacrifices to Heaven at midsummer in the southern suburb and to Earth at midwinter in the northern suburb. This “was performed for the people, not by them. It was state ceremonial.” The emperor reigned “by Heaven’s appointment (not otherwise by divine right, for China entertained no theory of imperial divinity)” [#55131, ch. 3, “Ritual”].

Armstrong describes ninth-century Zhou cities as places where “life was entirely dominated by religion”. Through ritual (li) the king kept the seasons and the heavens on course [#82303, ch. 2 “Ritual”]. Every city had two Earth altars, and “Location was everything in Chinese religion”: tilling the soil joined the living to “the ancestors, who had tilled the ground before them”. Expeditions set out from the Earth mound, where “subversive prisoners” were sacrificed on return. The king stood in a different corner of a ritual hall each season, because “his personal likes and dislikes were wholly unimportant”. Order produced the “Great Peace (tai-ping)”. Drought obliged him to confess his faults publicly. For Armstrong, this ritualisation of all noble activity is the seedbed of the Chinese Axial Age [#82303, ch. 2].

Souls, spirits and the ancestral tablet

Archer maps the yang–yin dualism onto the spirit world. “The gods and godly forces are called shen, while demons and things devilish are kuei.” Originally ambivalent, the kuei became “altogether vengeful ghosts and evil spirits” [#55131, ch. 3]. At death the intelligent spirit “ascends ‘on high'” (the earlier edition adds “not to Heaven, for Heaven was not conceived of as a Paradise” [#55131, earlier edition, ch. 3 n. 36]). Spirits lingered with the power “to occupy and control inanimate objects, such as ancestral tablets or a dead body, to enter the bodies of living animals (a girl’s soul in a rat), or to enter human bodies as disease” [#55131, ch. 3].

In the seven-shrined Zhou royal temple each ancestor “was represented not by an image but by a tablet (shen chu)”, into which the souls were called at worship. Commoners, whose ancestors “were all kuei“, worshipped at household shrines. Under what Archer calls Sinaean ritual, “sacrifices and prayers were offered to all the spirits”. The sacrifice was a family communion with no expiatory element: “Prayer was not for pardon, but to ask the spirits to ‘regard’ the offering” [#55131, ch. 3, “Ritual”]. Archer refuses to reduce religion to this cult: “Not all gods were first human spirits. All ancestor-worship is religion, but religion is not entirely ancestor-worship” [#55131, ch. 2].

Filial piety and the household religion

For Archer, filial piety is “the ruling idea in religion”. It is the attitude toward living elders that “extends itself in worship of their spirits after they have died”, and the root of Chinese conservatism, since “the faces of the living have been set toward the past” [#55131, ch. 3]. Even the Chinese idea of history begins inside this frame: “What the Chinese writings call ‘history’ (shu, to write) began with the accession of the emperor Yao … in 2356 B.C.”, although “the first verifiable date in Chinese history is 842 B.C.” [#55131, ch. 3, “The Past”]. The Analects chronology gives Yao 2357–2257 BCE and notes no archaeological evidence for the Xia [#40662, “Traditional Chronology”].

Sorajjakool reports that traditional Chinese religions “are widely practiced in 60 countries around the world with more than 225 million adherents”. Ancestor worship, one of the four family rites of the Jiali, “was a central religious activity which carried from generation to generation reinforcing the core virtue of Confucianism: filial piety”. When Mahayana Buddhism arrived, “the concept of heavenly beings in Mahayana could accommodate ancestor worship” [Sorajjakool, World Religions for Healthcare Professionals, #35015, ch. 5].

Many teachings, one people

Archer warns against Western-style counting: “It is useless to assign percentages of the population to these actually noncompetitive faiths … The average Chinese may be Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist—and an ‘animist,’ as well—without much sense of inconsistency” [#55131, ch. 3, “Religion Today in China”]. The Romanian essayist Paul Anghel stresses continuity. Compared with Europeans, he writes, “the Chinese have kept, almost to the present day, the religions of antiquity. It is as though the Romanians of today still worshipped Zamolxis”, adding George Călinescu’s parallel (from Am fost în China nouă) that it is as if Greeks and Italians still worshipped Zeus-Jupiter or Minerva-Pallas Athena [Anghel, O clipă în China, #25703]. Archer’s 1950s revision ends with a political question: “Will Marxism be offered the Chinese as a new state religion? It is likely that the attempt will be made, but a study of Chinese history throws doubt upon its success” [#55131, ch. 3].

Key points

• Shang kings consulted Di and the royal dead by oracle bone, and royal tombs held sacrificed retainers (Armstrong citing Mozi; Celan).
• The Zhou merged Di with Tian and made rule conditional: “what has been given can also be taken away” (#40662).
• Armstrong dates the entry of ethics into Chinese religion to the Duke of Zhou, and Archer’s composite Heaven is “the dethroner of tyrants”.
• The cult of Heaven and Earth was state ceremonial “performed for the people, not by them”, and “location was everything”.
• Archer divides spirits into shen and kuei. Souls could enter tablets, animals or bodies as disease, and sacrifice went “to all the spirits”.
• Filial piety extended into ancestor worship. Sorajjakool counts over 225 million adherents and records Mahayana accommodation of the ancestor cult.
• For Archer the faiths were “noncompetitive”, and he doubted that Marxism would succeed as a state religion.