Bureaucratie et salut: Devenir un dieu en Chine by Vincent Goossaert (review)

Known as a specialist of Daoism, Vincent Goossaert has also worked on other religious forms such as Buddhism and redemptive societies as well as Chinese religion as a whole. This book is the result of his many years’ research on state power, bureaucracy, religious institutions, and their relations in Chinese religion. Although Vincent Goossaert says in the introduction that the book is neither a history of death cults, nor a history of practices related to death or immortality and salvation, anyone working on those areas should read and benefit from this original book.

In his comprehensive work, Goossaert surveys previous studies and builds his arguments on Daoist scriptures as well as writings of literati in late imperial China. The book begins with a discussion of how Goossaert defines “transcendence,” “salvation,” and “god” in the context of Chinese religion. Salvation is considered as access to transcendence, which is a new ontological state in which eternal existence is assured, while a god is described as a deceased individual who receives worship from non-genealogically related people and intervenes in their life in a legitimate way and is thus different from ancestors and the dead (gui 鬼). The rest of the book follows a chronological order with an emphasis on the late imperial period. The first chapter covers the period from antiquity to medieval China. Goossaert shows that the idea of deifying extraordinary human beings (especially emperors) can be traced back to ancient times, and was closely related to ancestor worship. The birth of bureaucracy—the first revolution as Goossaert calls it—and the invention of an immortality associated with an individual consciousness opened up a path to deification for powerful people who longed to be accepted into the pantheon. This would be broadened later by Daoism with its religious-merit-based bureaucracy, which is the second revolution according to Goossaert.

The second chapter deals with the early modern period (from the tenth to the nine-teenth century), as Goossaert terms it, when the third revolution spectacularly changed the religious landscape in China. The third revolution involves a “second stage of bureaucracy” characterized by the rationalization and moralization of the religious bureaucratic system along with the expansion of the pantheon, which tended to integrate popular dimensions of Chinese religion by accepting numerous local gods. Goossaert argues that the modern merit-based religious bureaucracy, co-created by the state and the Zhang family-led-Daoist institution, allowed a good person to become a god which made self-deification possible and pursuable.

The chronological survey then leads to a synchronic analysis of soteriology in “the modern period” (from the end of the Qing Dynasty through the Republic) in the third and last chapter. Goossaert suggests that the techniques of immortality continue to be transmitted and practiced in Chinese society, while deification is facilitated by several institutional mechanisms such as canonization, ordination, and self-promotion. Several ante-mortem practices enable more ordinary people to gain a position in the bureaucracy of the Other World. Goossaert concludes by indicating that deification is a limited salvation for it does not bring the dead transcendent immortality and leaves them subject to the rules of divine bureaucracy. Nevertheless, people still long for deification.

Vincent Goossaert’s thesis is undoubtedly illuminating. However, his arguments are not sufficiently convincing and his thesis is applicable only in a limited scope. First, his definition of deification is so broad that even scribes, myrmidons, and soldiers are regarded as deities. If, according to Goossaert, deification is a path that many people wanted to pursue, it should not have included low-ranking officers. No one wants to become a scribe, myrmidon, or soldier in the Other World, who will have to suffer endless drudgery and are not considered divine (shen 神) but simply dead (gui 鬼),¹ as Goossaert himself shows in the introduction. To cite just one example, “Impermanence” (Wuchang 無常) is an emblematic employee of the Other World and always known as...