The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture

1. Ancestors, Ghosts, and Gods in Ancient China

chapter 1 Ancestors, Ghosts, and Gods in Ancient China Although only dimly perceived before the advent of modern archaeology , the Shang kingdom, which ruled over the North China Plain in the late second millennium b.c.e. (ca. 1700–ca. 1045 b.c.e.), is now recognized as the progenitor of many basic features of Chinese religious culture. The eudaemonistic beliefs and practices that became the foundation for later Chinese vernacular religion were already present in the court religion of the Shang. The subsequent Zhou dynasty (ca. 1045–256 b.c.e.) incorporated many of these practices into its own ritual culture, but the Zhou also departed from the Shang in formulating the earliest version of the moral equilibrium orientation, the cult of Heaven. Wolf’s tripartite division of the supernatural realm into gods, ancestors, and ghosts can also be observed in ancient times, but the status and significance of these categories of divine beings differed greatly from their modern counterparts . Indeed, in terms of historical evolution, it would be more proper to invert (as the title of this chapter does) Wolf’s ordering of “gods, ghosts, and ancestors” to trace the successive emergence of “ancestors, ghosts, and gods” as epitomes of supernatural power. The Shang kingdom was a dynastic state encompassing an extensive network of noble domains under the dominion of a paramount king. Each domain was centered on a walled town, the seat of its ruling lineage. The royal clan consisted of ten lineages that alternated succession to kingship . Periodic fission of the royal lineages and award of domains to junior branches impelled aggressive expansion of the Shang realm through 19 war and conquest. The royal and noble lineages who ruled over this polity were above all warriors and sacrificers; conquest and ritual symbiotically nourished each other and swelled the might of the kingdom. The bonds of royal kinship formed the sinews of military and political power. Ultimately, though, Shang kings derived their authority from powers they could command through the mediation of their deified ancestors . The Shang kings, and indeed the entire noble class, communicated with their deceased ancestors by means of divination. Records of royal divinations were inscribed on the animal bones (cattle scapulae and tortoise plastrons) used to perform the divination. After a king died the archive of inscribed oracle bones accumulated during his lifetime was sometimes interred in the tomb of the deceased or in nearby pits, thus preserved until they were once again brought into the world of light by archaeological excavations. Much of our knowledge about the activities of the Shang ruling class has been obtained from these oracle bones, the oldest literary remains in East Asia.1 The Shang projected the social and political hierarchy of the mundane world beyond death and onto the world of the divine.2 Shang rulers addressed their deceased ancestors as deified spirits, imagining that death only augmented their majesty and power. The divine hierarchy, organized along kinship lines, largely replicated the secular one: the ancestor gods were ranked according to the order of precedence of the royal lineage . Thus the Shang kings ruled by virtue of their charisma, in Weber’s sense of a special relationship to the divine that endows a mortal being with extraordinary powers.3 The thaumaturgic powers the Shang kings could exercise through divination and ancestral sacrifices enabled them to obtain bountiful harvests and victory in battle, which in turn enhanced their charismatic authority. The eclipse of brute force by charismatic authority undoubtedly contributed to the stability of the Shang kingdom. But the divine realm was also subject to the same strife among warring clans that beset the mortal world. The Shang kings did not enjoy exclusive access to divine power; rather, every noble lineage, including the enemies of Shang, could make similar claims based on their intimate relationships with their own exalted ancestors. The exact means by which the ancestor gods aided their mortal descendants remains murky. Prevailing scholarly opinion holds that the Shang believed in a supreme deity known as Di, or Thearch, who was the ultimate arbiter of human fate but stood aloof from ordinary mortals.4 In contrast to the Yahweh of Abrahamic religions, Di did not impose his moral will on humanity. Di was an impersonal god, indiffer20 Ancestors, Ghosts, and Gods ent to mortal concerns and largely inaccessible to human supplicants. Living rulers sought to curry favor with...