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71 6 Signifying Scriptures in Confucianism Yan Shoucheng “Signifying scriptures” as a social-cultural phenomenon is of critical importance for revealed religions such as Christianity and Islam. As pointed out by the historian Jonathan Riley-Smith in his recent article “Religious Authority,” Christians and Muslims believe in an interventionary God who has revealed something of his nature, his intentions for mankind and the future of the created cosmos through prophets and inspired scriptures and, in the case of Christianity, through a personal intervention in human history. Given such a belief it is, of course, vitally important to decide what God’s messages are, particularly as they are expressed through a medium, the written word, which is notoriously difficult to interpret. This is, as true of the Gospels as it is of the Old Testaments and of the Koran. There are ambivalences which have to be clarified and contradictions which must be resolved. . . . But who decides how the ambivalences should be clarified and the contradictions resolved and what the principles are which can then be universally applied? This was an issue in Christianity from the start.1 The same is true in Islam, another revealed religion. It is clear from this perspective that the church government that controls the practices of signifying “scriptures” has the authority and power over clerics. But what about the case of other civilizations such as Sinic, which, unlike Western and Islamic, have neither revealed religion nor the concept of interventionary God? Only one century ago there was even no equivalent of the word “religion” in Chinese language. Jing, the Chinese equivalent of “scripture,” actually means a classic. For example, wujing means a classic of military affairs or arts of war, and yijing means a classic of medicine; jing as a word is never limited to religious “scriptures.” If we research how Confucian classics or “scriptures” were invented and made to work and how they evolved throughout Chinese history, however, we will find that “signifying scriptures” is a social-cultural phenomenon of significant relevance in Chinese civilization. The Chinese case, with its rich history and ample literary records, provides a good example for analyzing “scriptures” in terms of signifying practices. Vincent Wimbush’s program for the study of “scriptures” places focus on “textures” instead of content-meaning.2 Strikingly the original meaning of jing, Yan Shoucheng 72 the Chinese equivalent of “scriptures,” is none other than “textures” of cloth, especially of silk. When jing is used as a verb it means to “thread,” especially to thread the bamboo slips which were used for writing before the invention of paper. From “threading” bamboo slips it extends to the meaning of managing or governing the world, or as a noun it means statecraft or the way of governance, and thus implies “standard” or “principle.” It also denotes the works which represent the “way” or “principle,” wherein it derives the meaning of “classics” or, in a certain sense, “scriptures.”3 After the rise of Confucianism the name of jing was usually ascribed to Confucian “scriptures.” Yet we must keep in mind that Confucian “scriptures,” unlike the Bible or the Qur’an, are not tantamount to “holy books” given by the gods. After all Confucius was not a god or demigod. Due to this fact “signifying scriptures” was probably more important in Confucianism than in revealed religions. As suggested by the archaeologist K. C. Chang, shamanism played the central role in ancient Chinese politics. He cited a myth that describes that in the past there was communication between heaven and earth, but later it was severed by the order of a king. Thereafter only the shamans had access to heaven, where the wisdom of human affairs lies. This myth implies that after the “severance of heaven -earth communication” the access to heaven was limited to the shamans; only they could get the wisdom for running human affairs, which can be found nowhere except in heaven. That implies that in ancient China political authority was derived and inseparable from shamanistic power.4 As pointed out by the Chinese scholar Chen Mengjia (Ch’en Meng-chia), there are quite a number of oracle bone inscriptions that describe “the king dancing to pray for rain and the king prognosticating about a dream”; obviously the king himself was the head shaman.5 The rites wherein the shamans danced to pray for rain and so on were accompanied by music, especially played with bronze bells and drums. The Chinese character for rites (li) originally denotes the...

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