This sequence of four courses will propose a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of Chinese cultural history conceived of as a succession of modes of rationality (philosophical, bureaucratic, and economic). The focus will be on the moments of paradigm shift from one mode of rationality to another. For each of these moments, cultural facts and artifacts—thought, literature, ritual—will be examined in relationship to changing social, political, and economic systems. The first two courses will cover the periods of the Warring States (481-256 BCE) and the Period of Division (220-589 CE), with a brief excursion into the Han (206 BCE-220 CE). The Warring States laid the social and cultural foundations for the emergence of the imperial mode of rationality; the Period of Division saw the Buddhist “conquest” of China and the emergence of a rationality defined by the opposition of the Three Teachings to shamanism, that is, of a clear contrast between elite and popular culture. The third and fourth courses will focus on the emergence of modern China in the Song-Yuan (960-1368) and of today’s China 1850 to the present. We will see how the modern attack on religion, redefined as "superstition", led not only to religious reform movements but also to a society in which science and the nation became the primary value systems promoted by the state. The courses are listed below: A Critical Cultural History of China - Early China I: Intellectual Change in the Warring States and Han (481 BCE-220 CE) A Critical Cultural History of China - Early China II: Religious Transformation in the Period of Division (220-589 CE) A Critical Cultural History of China - Modern China I: Religion and Thought in the Song, Jin, and Yuan (960-1368) A Critical Cultural History of China - Modern China II: Structuring Values (1850-2015)
M04.2 Literati, Orthodoxy, and the First Canon
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Intellectual Change in Early China: Warring States and Han
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MODULE 04: Han Religion
This module is about local and imperial religion in the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 BC).
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Prof. John LagerweyResearch Professor
Centre for China Studies
Okay, now let's come back to the literati who want to push the emperor away from this cult of Taiyi tied to immortality.
They're viscerally opposed to a cult of immortality.
Why? Because it's more about "the personal well-being" of the emperor than about his public role as Son of Heaven.
So once again we see how the literati see themselves as the defenders of public morality,
public service, as opposed to the private gain of people who are in power, in office, okay?
So: you could say that this is the origin of the distinction that leads to ideas of corruption in office,
benefiting personally from public office where you are a public servant, okay.
So: that meant that convergence of the popular and imperial cults was precisely what should be avoided.
Because these popular cults—
we just saw they're about healing, they're about immortality, they're about personal aims, not public aims.
So Marianne Bujard says, "The establishment of the sacrifice to Heaven and associated cults
was intended to isolate imperial religion from all other religious practices.
The emperor himself was somewhat separated from the rest of the population by his position as half-man, half-god."
The phrase used last time was "semi-divine."
So: the literati, what did they do?
They re-engineer the worship of Taiyi to bring it into conformity with the Classics—
the Classics of which they were the hermeneutic guardians.
Big word—hermeneutic: it just means they're the ones who can read it, they're the ones who can interpret it.
So you say, this is what this text means,
the emperor—who may even be illiterate—
has to listen to you. So: the Classics of which they're the hermeneutic guardians.
"The literati," says Marianne Bujard,
"had devised a religious system that centered on the worship of Heaven, the paternal and moral power regulating the universe."
So here we see once again that patriarchal, that paternalistic aspect,
so that even though the emperor is called <i>fumuguan</i> 父母官 and the local magistrate as well,
he is still much more <i>fu</i> than he is <i>mu</i>, okay?
much more father than he is mother.
"The ruler, as Son of Heaven, was to honor this divine father"—
so once again, that anthropomorphic feature of Heaven—
"by conforming to the ancestral rituals inherited from the Zhou dynasty." And as I said,
that is exactly how they reconstructed, reinvented this new sacrifice to Heaven: by referring to these Classics,
these texts that were left over from the Zhou Dynasty. "Basing themselves on citations from the Classics,
the literati insisted on the value and efficacy of the sacrifices as deriving not from the quantity or sophistication of the offerings—
a notion they denounce as a perversion of the rite—but from,"
there it is again, "the sincerity and purity of the one who conducted the sacrifices."
So once again we see how that emphasis that emerges during the Warring States becomes a permanent feature of all forms of worship,
whether they're local or dynastic, that is to say, it's about purity and sincerity.
And, "In this conception of sacrifice, the ruler was the only possible intermediary between Heaven and man,"
between Heaven and Earth. "Indeed the literati believed in the existence of a common essence,"
a common Qi, "shared between Heaven and the ruler,
who were conceived of as beings of the same nature," <i>tonglei</i> 同類.
That is to say that, we would say now, genetically,
he was somehow genetically different from the rest of us.
He had a Qi, he had an energy,
he had genes that were, that set him apart.
And of course together with this then goes all kinds of legends about the—
born of a dragon who came down and covered his mother and then she was pregnant and Gaozu was born and so on.
Another way of expressing this idea of the emperor as the sole link between Heaven and Earth is the character for king.
The character for king came to be explained, I believe it was by Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒,
who was a contemporaneous intellectual, contemporaneous with Han Wudi,
that the character for king 王, which is composed of three horizontal strokes,
he said representing Heaven, Earth, and Man, and then there is one vertical stroke which links them all together,
and that one vertical stroke, that is the emperor who links the <i>sancai</i> 三才,
Heaven, Earth, and Man, all together.
Okay, so: we see here an intense intellectual effort to shore up the status and legitimacy of the
emperor by giving a whole ideological environment together with ritual practices that state
—declare, make manifest—the ideas,
the doctrines that they are extracting from the Classics.
So, "The proper conduct and efficacy of such sacrifices depended," obviously,
"on the knowledge of these literati, and their presence was therefore indispensable.
As the literati increasingly modeled imperial religion on the heritage of the Classics,
the value of these books was magnified,
and mastery of the Classics gradually became the foundation of social ambition."
And later of the whole examination system based on the Classics.
So, says Marianne Bujard, "The development of the new imperial religion," and especially the sacrifice to Heaven,
"contributed greatly to the movement that made of the ancient texts the orthodox corpus that was firmly in place by the end of the Western Han."
So the corpus is already in place by the end of the Western Han.
It is already in fact a kind of canonical substance.
But then as we've said several times, in the year 175,
these Classics were engraved in stone, and so they're called the <i>Shijing</i> 石經, the Stone Classics.
And they're "carved and displayed in a public place."
Why?
There were "reports that factions inside the palace had bribed the palace eunuchs to change the text of the Classics that were stored in the imperial libraries,
in order to manipulate the court's deliberations on policy matters and selection criteria."
So just like with any, like the biblical corpus,
you want to have a fixed text, a text about which there can be no dispute,
then you can dispute about the interpretation, but you can no longer dispute,
contest the original text itself, so it was carved in stone.
So without any question, this is the first canon,
scriptural canon in Chinese history. Now, what happens?
We've got a set of Classics inscribed in stone.
And all of a sudden, in the second century,
probably before too,
but the ones that have survived and the ones that we know about started to appear in great number:
"The proliferation of revealed texts in the Eastern Han may be seen as a reaction" to the creation of this text-based orthodoxy.
So we've just talked about— suddenly there's these new revealed texts.
And I would like to quote here from yet another chapter by Grégoire Espesset,
called "Latter Han Religious Mass Movements."
I'm quoting and then we'll unpack his extremely complex statement:
"With the weft 緯 or apocryphal remnants and the composite <i>Taipingjing</i>,
we enter the unorthodox sphere of the epistemic alternatives which various social groups felt compelled to offer as a challenge to the centralized state,
its orthodox ideology, and the established canon."
Now what are we talking about here?
Well, let's take the <i>Taipingjing</i> first. It is said to have been introduced to court by <i>fangshi</i> types,
I believe also from Shandong, at several,
on several occasions and finally to have been accepted by one of the Eastern Han emperors; then it supposedly disappeared.
In any case, we now have a very large text which most people agree is by
and large from the [Han-era] <i>Taiping jing</i> and there's a fellow in it called the <i>tianshi</i> 天師,
parts of it are the <i>tianshi yue</i> 天師曰, that Heavenly Master speaks and reveals, okay?
And this is an extraordinary complex
text—of which Grégoire Espesset
is one of the past masters—
very very difficult to read.
People who are used to reading Han dynasty literature find <i>Taiping jing</i> extremely difficult.
Its grammar is strange, its vocabulary is strange, and so on.
So this is not a text written by a great literat[us], exactly: it's a revealed text, okay?
So, on the one hand, we have these social groups who produced the <i>Taiping jing</i>.
There's all kinds of debates about that.
We're not exactly sure, but what is clear is that they come from some locality,
from some social groups who don't find their preferences in the established canon,
the established orthodoxy of Chang'an 長安 or Luoyang 洛陽. In the Eastern Han, it's—the capital is Luoyang.
So that's on the one hand, we have the first Daoist texts that are being revealed and that will continue to be revealed throughout Chinese history,
throughout Daoist history. This is one of the characteristic features of Daoism—
is that texts are constantly being revealed. Now he calls them "the weft or apocryphal remnants:"
weft, as opposed to <i>jing</i> 經, which is the warp.
So we've already mentioned that, it's like the warp and the weft of a tissue, which is being woven on a loom.
So if we've got the vertical strands, the vertical strings of the <i>jing</i>, of the Classics,
we now have the horizontal, which complete them.
But these weft texts, first of all, there are only remnants left. Why?
Well, they were very important to the rise of Guangwudi during the—at the beginning of the Eastern Han.
They're predictive texts. But they're also mystical texts referring to all kinds of mystical events, about people like Dayu, the Great Yu, and so on.
And so they helped to lead to the founding of the Eastern Han.
But then they had this political significance, political religious significance,
and of course then they started to become dangerous, because they could be re-used for another pretender to the throne.
And so they get forbidden. They get forbidden at various times and so the result is we don't have a canon inscribed in stone in this case,
we have these fragments. And they were collected back in the 1970s or 1980s,
I forget now, by a couple of Japanese scholars.
And this set off a whole new form of Sinological studies of this period,
of these strange mystical texts that we call "the weft or apocryphal" texts,
okay, that represent then this unorthodox sphere.
"Epistemic alternatives": what does he mean here?
Well, that means that—"epistemic" refers to epistemology: how do we know?
Well, if we've got a canon set in stone,
the text cannot be manipulated anymore. We can debate about the exact meaning of this or that phrase,
but it's still basically set in stone. Whereas these texts which keep pouring out,
these new revelations, they could say anything, anything new.
They could support somebody who represents a rebel group as opposed to an orthodox group.
So they give access to alternative knowledge, alternative structuring values,
alternative rituals. And that is why,
as the foundation of new social groups, they become a challenge to the centralized state,
to orthodox ideology and the established canon.
Now, it's above all Wang Mang who, "even before his ascension to the throne,"
reformed the imperial rites "in the direction the exegetes of the Classics wanted."
So I already mentioned, he's the first to perform in fact the sacrifice to Heaven.
This involved moving the altars to Heaven and Earth respectively to the southern and northern suburbs of the capital.
Let's just stop there a moment.
Why did he want the altar to Heaven to be in the southern suburb and the altar to Earth be in the northern suburbs, outside?
Well, the southern suburb is what the emperor is facing when he's sitting in his palace,
because we've already seen that an emperor or a king is <i>nanmian erzuo</i> 南面而坐.
So just as you—if you go to Beijing today to enter the Zijincheng 紫禁城, enter the Forbidden City,
you enter the Wumen 午門, the Gate of the South.
Why? Again, because way way at the back of that very long series of courtyards and palaces
is the place where the emperor in the Qing dynasty held audience.
He's seated facing south as he receives other people.
And behind the emperor in the Qing dynasty and in the Ming dynasty, starting with the third emperor of the Ming,
Yongle Huangdi 永樂皇帝, who built modern Beijing in the years,
the first years of the fifteenth century; Behind it,
there was a temple to Zhenwu 真武 and behind that the gate was called Xuanwumen 玄武門; now it's called Shenwumen 神武門,
the Divine Warrior. But originally already in the Chang'an in the Tang dynasty,
that gate to Chang'an in the north side was called Xuanwumen. Why?
Well, because the idea is that there were— and already we have from the Han dynasty,
we have representations of what they're called <i>siling</i> 四靈,
Four Animals, who are around the space.
So any space is defined by: the <i>qinglong</i> 青龍, the Green Dragon, on the left,
on the east side; the <i>baihu</i> 白虎, the White Tiger,
on the right hand side; the <i>zhuque</i> 朱雀, the Red Phoenix, in front;
and behind <i>xuanwu</i> 玄武. Now <i>xuanwu</i> is different than all the others,
because he's two: he's a serpent and a tortoise wrapped around each other. We'll see them many many centuries later,
we'll come back to this, okay?
So: already in the Tang dynasty, then the Xuanwumen. But here we see that that idea is already there,
because <i>nanmian erzuo</i>, facing the <i>yang</i>, facing the sun, behind is <i>beifang</i> 北方,
which is the heart of winter. It's the midnight,
it's <i>zishi</i> 子時, it's the twelfth month, it's the winter solstice,
that is to say it's the time when the <i>yang</i> has reached its lowest point and the <i>yin</i> its highest point.
And so it's the time when the <i>yang</i> will start once again to rise as we move towards spring and then summer.
Okay? So: in fact it's the <i>kangua</i> 坎卦 that we talked about last time,
that is to say it's that point in time when <i>yangqi</i> 陽氣 is pure potential, has not yet begun to grow and manifest itself in nature.
So that's the northern suburb.
That is also associated therefore with exorcism, that which is negative.
And it's probably not just because China was regularly invaded throughout its history from the north—
Mongols and Manchus we've already referred to.
But throughout Chinese history this has always been a problem.
The problem is not the South China Seas; the problem is the north.
That's where the invaders come from, okay?
So: here we see that distinction between the positive nature of the <i>yang</i>, the south here,
and is associated with Heaven, and the negative where there are <i>gui</i> 鬼 that have to be <i>quxie gangui</i> 驅邪趕鬼 and
that's why you have the Xuanwumen; that's why you say you have a divine tortoise and serpent who can—
in fact, <i>xuanwu</i> means Dark Heaven Warrior,
so the Dark Warrior, he's often translated as, okay?
To fend off these demonic forces that come from the north.
So here too, we see that the <i>yang</i> and the <i>yin</i> are embedded cosmologically even in the structure of the space of the capital, okay?
So: from then on, the place where the sacrifice to Heaven is done is always called <i>nanjiao</i> 南郊,
that is to say southern suburb.
And if you go to Beijing,
you'll see immediately that it's way south of the Forbidden City that you have the Tiantan Park where the emperor used to go to worship Heaven.
So then, in the year 4 BC, he built a Hall of Light,
also "south of the capital"—very interesting! Of course, <i>ming</i>, bright, light.
Isn't it the word bright "ming" combines the characters for sun and moon.
So it's—that's what's bright, when you have the sun and the moon,
the <i>yin</i> and the <i>yang</i> energies together: also built "south of the capital." After founding his New dynasty,
"he installed his own ancestors in the Mingtang."
And Emperor Guangwu, founder of the Eastern Han, followed him in both regards.
As we've already seen from Jean Levi's chapter,
"The circulation of the sovereign," in the Mingtang,
"by the mere fact of his route, wove a fabric of seasons converted into a liturgical norm."
The worship of the Five Emperors, the Wudi,
also moved by Wang Mang to the suburbs of the capital, likewise became an expression of this norm,
as a place to celebrate "the arrival of the seasons."
So each of the five seasons had to be greeted in its appropriate place in the suburbs of the capital.
"The arrival of autumn was carried out twice so that each of the Five Emperors could preside over one of the annual periods."
So, of course, that corresponds to what we saw that Huangdi was,
as a result of Taiyi taking the central role, Huangdi pushed off to the southwest,
the center of the year, so that's why the arrival of autumn is celebrated twice.
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