In Search of Personal Welfare: A View of Ancient Chinese Religion (review)

In Search of Personal Welfare is a broad and informative account of religion and its various expressions from the Shang through the Han periods. The author, Mu-chou Poo, demonstrates a familiarity with his sources—both literary and archaeological— that few contemporary scholars can boast. Poo's knowledge of the main debates concerning issues on early Chinese religion helps make this book an excellent reference for both beginners and specialists in early Chinese history and thought. In many ways, however, the book is too generalized, and it does not approach its main theme, "popular religion," in an organized or sufficiently critical fashion.

Poo's book touches upon a wide range of important issues, from definitions of religion and discussions of scholarship on popular religion in the first chapter to issues addressed in later chapters (2-9) concerning death, the afterlife and netherworld, immortality, mantic techniques, correlative cosmology, official and local cults, burial styles, religion in everyday life, and the relationship between elite and popular religions. Poo also achieves great chronological breadth by beginning his discussion with comments on evidence from the Neolithic, Shang, and early Zhou periods and then moving quickly into a glimpse of religiosity during the core period from which he draws his evidence: the Warring States and the Qin and Han empires. Thus, although the focus of his research concerns a period from roughly 500 B.C. to A.D. 220, Poo frames it within a much longer history starting as early as 4000 B.C.

Not only is the quantity of sources available to Poo impressive, but the variety of materials he uses also adds richness to the book. An entire chapter (4) is dedicated to revealing the contents of the recently excavated daybooks (jih-shu), which are important for what they reveal about how religion both weaves into and emerges out of everyday activities and concerns. In addition to the daybooks, Poo examines histories, elite documents and treatises (including many works that later become part of the Confucian and Daoist canons), religious travelogues, court-related documents, and medical writings as a means of illustrating the manifold arenas in which religion is discussed and conducted. Indeed, there is much that recommends this book in terms of content and chronological and theoretical scope.

This review focuses on two of Poo's central claims that I feel should be discussed more carefully in future works. Poo posits the existence of a single "basal" system of popular religion that develops continuously from ancient times (Shang and early Zhou China) and constitutes the background on which complex Buddhist and Taoist institutions are later overlaid. This primary and persistent religious system, he claims, endures along with an unchanging motivation for religious practice: the individual's search for happiness and avoidance of misfortune vis-à-vis supernatural powers (p. 207), specifically "the practical abilities of extra-human powers" and "things that concerned people's welfare, injury, or peril" (p. 213)—hence the title of his book, In Search of Personal Welfare.

Implicit in Poo's claims is an assumption that all of the ancient religious systems found in the region now known as "China" were not just related, but, more strongly put, constituted a unified religion of the masses. It is this assumption of a single religious tradition in all of the so-called "Chinese" states, along with Poo's central claims for a religion of the common people and its typology of practical concerns, that I believe needs reexamination. So while I applaud Poo for boldly bringing these issues to the forefront of debate, I also encourage other scholars to engage him in these very issues through other projects on the religious history of the Warring States and Qin-Han periods.

On the Issue of "Popular" and "Elite" Religions

Dr. Poo spends a great deal of time examining the complicated relationship between elite and...