Imperial Power, Legal Cosmology, and Beyond

In the past two decades, new methodologies and new sources have greatly enhanced our knowledge of the legal order in imperial China. A wide range of new studies have shed light on imperial power, the resolution of civil disputes, the nature of Chinese penology, the role of gender and sexuality in Chinese law, the legal dimensions of inheritance and marriage practices, and much more. Today, there is little doubt that imperial China did, indeed, possess a legal system worthy of study and that Chinese law belongs to one of the great legal families in the world.

Yet relatively few studies have tried to grapple with larger questions, such as the ideological foundations of Chinese jurisprudence. Was, for instance, Chinese law just a tool of social control, a mere amalgamation of Confucian ideals with the “behavioral science” of legalism, which was arbitrarily applied by the imperial state and its agents?¹ Or were there deeper metaphysical, or even religious, ideas that constituted a counterweight to arbitrary imperial power? Most previous attempts to deal with these issues have proceeded from the Hundred Schools of Thought from the Spring and Autumn Era through the Warring States Period and assumed, rather than proved, a continuity across dynasties that was only interrupted in the political upheavals of the twentieth century. However, not all dynasties are equally well documented, and the different dynastic agendas of archival and textual preservation have left us with a record that has privileged penal codes at the expense of other normative and prescriptive documents.

Being a relatively well-documented régime, the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) is, in many respects, an ideal site for a temporally and institutionally focused exploration of imperial Chinese jurisprudence, not the least since the Ming provided many of the foundations of the subsequent Qing legal order. As Edward L. Farmer has shown, the Ming dynasty was, indeed, the first dynasty to promote legal texts as an educational tool, and the dynastic founder Zhu Yuanzhang articulated a clear legal and institutional program, which he spelled out in the four foundational documents of the dynasty: the Ancestral Constructions of Ming Taizu, the Ming Commandments, the Placard of People’s Instructions, the Great Ming Code. Since both Farmer and his students have made these texts available in English translation, the present volume is the product of extensive research on these texts, and it would not be fair to call this work a mere “companion volume” to Jiang’s erudite translation of the Ming Code.²

Jiang takes issue with the widely held notion that China lacked a concept of the divine origin of law, a circumstance that allegedly prevented the emergence of a law as an autonomous force that was not subject to the whims of the ruler. In so doing, he treats the Ming Code as an integral part of the institutional and ritual edifice of the first Ming emperor, who was anxious to show that his dynasty did possess the Mandate of Heaven. To Jiang, the Ming state “did not see law merely as a tool for behavioral control,” but rather “as a concrete embodiment of the cosmic order” (p. 4). In order to capture this transcendental dimension of Ming law, Jiang broadens the definition of religion to a belief in a “superhuman force” that “is invoked by means of certain ritual patterns to achieve or prevent transformations in humans and their environment” (p. 17). According to Jiang, this formulation of religion is made up of three elements. The first element is a “belief system, a worldview that defines the cosmos and formulates meaning”; the second is “ritual practice, a set of repeatable, symbolic actions defining the normative human place in the cosmos”; and the third and final element is “the relations between super-human forces and human beings, a pathway for human transformations” (p. 17).

In the second chapter of the book, Jiang employs this definition of religion in identifying what...