Ghosts, Gods, and the Ritual Practice of Local Officials during the Song: With a Focus on Zhu Xi in Nankang Prefecture

Research on Song-era scholar-officials’ interactions with ghosts and spirits/gods (guishen 鬼神) has advanced in recent years. Earlier, such leading scholars as Qian Mu and Joseph Needham solidified the mainstream view of how Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) used the terms “ghosts and spirits” to discuss the contractive (gui) and expansive (shen) forces in the universe, and thus enhanced the comprehensive scope of his natural philosophy and systematic metaphysics.¹ Specialists on Chinese religion and society, such as Valerie Hansen, Judith Boltz, Edward Davis, Richard von Glahn, and Liao Hsienhuei, have significantly enhanced our understanding of topics, such as how scholar-officials sought to deal with ghosts who might haunt them or bring retribution for their injustices.² Instead of continuing that rich vein of research, we will concentrate on a path of intellectual historians, whose research on Song views of ghosts have begun to go beyond discussions of the philosophy of Zhu Xi and his eleventh-century predecessors. For instance, Wing-tsit Chan called in 1982 for greater attention to Zhu Xi’s religious practice, particularly his sincere prayers for rain; however, Professor Chan’s emphasis remained on Zhu’s simultaneous implementation of famine relief and cultivation of public virtue. Thus, his call for attention to Zhu’s prayers for rain did not diminish Chan’s image of Zhu as a purely rationalistic philosopher.³ Others, most notably Yung Sik Kim and Daniel Gardner, expanded the focus on “religious” or “spiritual” dimensions of Zhu’s discussions of ghosts and spirits; moreover, they pointed to some tensions between these aspects of Zhu’s thought and his metaphysical philosophy.⁴ More recently, Hoyt Tillman demonstrated a quite different and very practical implication of Zhu Xi’s prayers: how Zhu used prayers to Confucius’ spirit to stake his own unique claim to the daotong 道統 (the transmission of and succession to the Way of the ancient sages) and thus to enhance his authority within, and leadership of, the Daoxue 道 學 fellowship, that is, Learning of the Way Confucianism.⁵ Several Chinese scholars have further enhanced our understanding of sacrifices to the ancestral spirits;⁶ of particular relevance here, Pi Qingsheng’s discussion of spirits explored how “gods crossed borders” (shenling yuejie 神靈越界) when such deified personages were offered sacrifices although they hailed from distant places and had never been in the particular local area during their lifetime.⁷ Despite such advances, and even Valarie Hansen’s pioneering book, we still need to know more about significant ritual activities of Song local officials, especially Zhu Xi, because of his considerable influence on ritual practice and other matters in late imperial China.

The ritual activities of local Qing officials is the focus of Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke’s Dry Spells; although concentrated largely on the nadir of the Qing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his study presents three ancient Chinese models (the “mourner,” the “martyr,” and the “magician”) for rainmaking by officials in late imperial China.⁸ He uses the diverse and “ecumenical” ways of rainmaking to call into question anthropologist James Watson’s landmark “standardization thesis” that credited the late imperial Chinese government’s endorsement of particular deities and rituals with having an important role in standardizing Chinese religious culture, which resulted in a significant degree of cultural integration.⁹ Compared to an earlier generation of anthropologists,¹⁰ Watson recognized that the superficial uniformity of religious beliefs often disguised divergent meanings to different groups, classes and genders; yet, his emphasis on the process of standardization and cultural integration in late imperial China drew criticism as the field increasingly focused on local diversity. Other scholars had already questioned the degree of standardization across borders of region and class, as well as how much local elites actually worked with the central government to change local religious worship.¹¹ Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke adds questions regarding how standardized the state’s standards actually were and how uniformly officials implemented the standards. Most importantly to our own inquiry, he rejects the widespread notion...