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

Richard von Glahn's earlier published work on the cult of Wutong in late imperial China¹ is supplemented and expanded by a full-length study of demonic spirits from the Shang to the Qing in his new book, The Sinister Way. Von Glahn, a social and economic historian of the Jiangnan region in the late imperial period, has written a comprehensive work on Chinese conceptions of divinity from antiquity to the present day.

The book has seven chapters that can be divided into two parts. The second (chapters 5 to 7) focuses on Wutong, with a general introductory chapter on religion in the Song, which von Glahn identifies as a turning point in the history of Chinese religions. The first part (chapters 1 to 4) is a survey of ghosts and demons in ancient China, the Han, and medieval Daoism. Building on recent work on deity cults by Robert Campany, Terry Kleeman, Robert Weller and Meir Shahar, Kenneth Dean, and Paul Katz,² von Glahn's contribution is twofold: he shows that "sinister forces" have been part of Chinese religious culture since very early antiquity, and he reinforces the growing sense among scholars that traditional demarcations between gods, ghosts, and ancestors and between "good" and "evil" are porous and indeterminate. The book is not merely a survey of demons but also a critical essay on traditional categories and classifications in the study of Chinese religion.

Prior to the pioneering work of von Glahn and his cohort, the prevailing view was that premodern China lacked a concept of evil (in the sense of unmitigated or metaphysical evil as a cosmic force). The pre-Qin philosophers saw evil as a distortion of the natural order (not built into it), resulting from social forces that were perverted or misapplied rather than inherently "wrong." Benjamin Schwartz has argued that most early thinkers sided with Mencius, believing in a natural inclination to the good. Goodness is sometimes overwhelmed by wants and desires that arise in response to social temptations, but the good is more fundamental, better identified as "innate," than is evil.³ Things that the Confucians recognized as evil—the pursuit of wealth and power and the satisfaction of sensual desires—were not inherently wrong, but wrong only in excess, in misapplication, or in response to their denial or frustration. Even in the case of Xunzi, whose famous statement that "the nature of man is evil, his goodness acquired" is usually pitted against Mencius' more sanguine view, there was never a sense that that evil was demonic or incorrigible. Evil for Xunzi, Schwartz comments, is a "disorder" that "arises somewhere in the area of interaction between the perceptions and the world of objects." Human desires are boundless and cannot be satisfied, and from this, conflict arises. Yet Xunzi's "genuinely optimistic faith that the 'internalization' of the moral-cultural heritage may in the end lead some to the attainment of virtue . . . has led some [scholars] to doubt that [Xunzi] genuinely believed that 'the nature is evil.'"⁴ When the possibility of moral rectification by one's own effort is affirmed as religiously as it was by Xunzi, it is hard to conclude that any of the Confucian moralists believed in metaphysical evil.

For Chinese intellectuals, the conflict was not so much between cosmic forces of good and evil as it was between material and sensual desires, on the one hand, and societal expectations of virtue and duty, on the other. This internal battle, appearing vividly in Song and Ming Neo-Confucians like Wang Yang-ming, engendered a preoccupation with wrongdoing and led to the production of moralizing literature such as the "morality books" and "ledgers of merit and demerit" of late imperial China. Wolfram Eberhard famously described the internalized "sense of guilt" as the distinguishing characteristic of Chinese "shame culture."⁵ Eberhard ignored any nuance of time and place, collapsing hundreds of...