Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China by Mihwa Choi (review)
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Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China focuses on eleventh-century Chinese discussions about mourning rites (paying particular attention to the years 1008–1085). According to Choi, these rites embodied psychological and social concerns. They also became points of intense political debate, which laid the groundwork for the movement known as Daoxue 道學, or Neo-Confucianism. Daoist (and occasionally Buddhist) rites performed by the state in the early eleventh century led officials to go back into classical Confucian texts to more clearly define and advocate a system of orthopraxis. In the early Song dynasty, court rituals were largely eclectic. By the end of the eleventh century, however, the state more strongly advocated Confucian rites by creating public graveyards, ritual manuals, and laws to punish violators of Confucian death practices.
More broadly speaking, Death Rituals and Politics in Northern Song China attempts to utilize various frameworks within the history of religions to “inquire into how rituals enact diverse types of social imaginary, how the social location of a group influences social imaginary, and how contestations over social imaginaries manifested in rituals imply ritual agents’ envisioning of power relations” (p. 8). Choi defines social imaginary in terms of a normative world view, and explains that her work aims to “examine how conflicts over the material presentation of different social imaginaries can rearrange prevailing power relations, as well as why the position of a particular group in a society prompts its members to opt for a particular social imaginary” (p. 9).
Her book is organized into five chapters, with the first two providing a historical narrative of events, the third describing Confucian death rituals of the time, and the last two chapters analyzing social imaginaries of “the world-beyond” (p. 11).
Chapter 1 largely traces the rise of specific Daoist rituals in the imperial court. Choi does this by describing the Heavenly Text affair of 1008. Toward the end of 1007 and well into 1008, the emperor, Zhenzong 真宗, claimed to have found a divinely created scroll proclaiming the blessing of Heaven on the royal family. Politically speaking, this discovery allowed Zhenzong to respond to the threats of the non-Chinese Liao state, which had recently defeated the Song in battle and forced them into an unflattering alliance. The Heavenly Text affair also encouraged Zhenzong to perform the fengshan封禅 sacrificial rites to various deities on Mt. Tai, which had only been done by five emperors before his time (most recently by Xuanzong 玄宗 in the mid-eighth century). The resources involved in the rite were enormous, including six weeks of travel. The Heavenly Text and fengshan ritual, however, served to legitimate Song superiority over the Liao in the views of those within the Song state. This was in part because it enabled Zhenzong to develop the myth of the Sacred Ancestor, which drew from mostly Daoist ideology to declare the royal family as direct descendants of divine figures. Under the direction of Zhenzong, the Song state disseminated literature that perpetuated the myth, established new holidays, and constructed local temples to relevant deities.
Chapter 2 examines the Confucian response, which prevailed after the death of Zhenzong in 1022. At this time, debates ensued among officials. Confucian officials argued against the lavishness of non-Confucian (especially Daoist) rites, in part because they led to financial problems, but also in part because they deviated from the rites as prescribed in classical Confucian texts such as the Yili 儀禮. These officials also appealed to texts such as the Analects to argue against robust conceptions of the afterlife. This eventually led to government officials performing fewer non-Confucian rites, at least in public. The state [End Page 93] also passed laws restricting lavish burial rites, and attempted to enforce the performance of Confucian burial rites as understood to be advocated in Confucian texts. While the focus of the reform was on the literati, the emerging orthopraxy was also pushed beyond the literati, spreading Confucian practices...
