Auspicious Omens and Miracles in Ancient China: Han, Three Kingdoms and Six Dynasties (review)

Tiziana Lippiello's monograph is the latest in a series of important studies on omens by Western sinologists that began in 1950, if not earlier, when Hans Bielenstein published his masterful work on Han portents. Most of the attention in the earlier studies focused on inauspicious signs as documented in the Wuxing(five elements, five phases) and Tianwen(astronomy/astrology) treatises in the dynastic histories. Conversely, Dr. Lippiello's study deals primarily with auspicious auguries.

Her work is really three studies in one, based on three traditions: the state cult (often loosely labeled Confucianism), Buddhism, and the Taoist religion. In the first part (chapters 1 to 3) she has undertaken an investigation of omens as manifestations of "cosmic resonance." Portents manifest themselves in an impersonal, natural, and mechanistic manner as Heaven reacts to the behavior of rulers, monarchs, and bureaucrats. This notion of response was a core element of imperial ideology that was the particular province of the throne and its servitors. Lippiello's analysis of this theme begins with a summary of the theories and literature upon which the prognostication of auspicious signs was based. Here she also examines illustrations of the portents found at the Wu Liang shrine of the Latter Han and in an untitled Dunhuang manuscript (P 2683) recovered by Pelliot. She then moves on to examine the concrete manifestations of auguries that manifest themselves as signs of Heaven's approbation for the virtuous administration of Governor Li Xi in what is now Gansu from an inscription dated 171. She concludes with a detailed study of the only treatise, and the typology therein, from the dynastic histories devoted solely to auspicious portents, the Song shu's Furui zhicompiled by Shen Yue (441-512).

In the second section (chapter 4) Lippiello shifts her attention to the role of signs in Buddhist miracles with particular regard to relics of the Buddha, images, and saintly monks. With the exception of the white elephant, omens and portents become secondary to marvels. The concept of miracles was based on the religious notion of stimulus and response ( ganying). There was nothing impersonal, mechanistic, or natural about that belief. Furthermore, the state is only incidentally a recipient of divine grace. In Buddhist tales of the supernatural the hand of god was directly at work in the world of humankind. Miracles were divine rewards for the devotion and piety of the faithful.

The final part of this monograph is a study of "Auspicious Signs in Taoist Texts." Here the author is on solid ground in her examination of the gestation of the Lingbao's Perfect Writings and the use of traditional portents—those of the state cult—in the Santian neijiejing. However, she is on shaky ground when she deals with the character of talismans, registers, scriptures, diagrams, and writs. None of these were signs, omens, or otherwise, of investiture (p. 218) or decrees sent down by Heaven as signs of a mandate (p. 221). The conferral of Heaven's mandate on the emperor did not come to signify Taoist investiture (p. 245). Heaven as a deity vanishes in the Taoist religion, to be replaced by the Celestial Venerables, who have a vastly different character and role in the cosmos. Scriptures, talismans, and especially registers were not signs, although the act of conferring them might be so considered. The conferral, be it to the founder of the order who received it by virtue of exceptional spirituality or to successors (priests), was not a bestowal of a mandate. Taoist priests were not rulers, but servitors. Their investiture entailed the transmission of a commission that empowered them to intervene for the welfare of the ruler, the people, and themselves. The priest was a functionary, the lowest creature in a cosmic bureaucracy that stretched upward to the celestial realms and downward to the...