爱华网
Chinese people is peaceful, hardworking and easily contented.They respect elders, love children and are patient with theirfellows. Chinese in general are reserve and humble. They believe inharmony and never look for confrontation. History has told thatChinese is non-invasive. During the period of British and the westexpanding their powers to Asia, North America, Australia and NewZealand, China became the target of the G8 invasion.Chinese arevery proud of their civilized society since the early day. They areopen and pragmatic towards differences in religions and culture.Foreigners are welcome and being treated more fairly. China havebeen very receptive to Jews in the early days in Kaifung city andlater in Shanghai when they were rejected by other countries duringthe World War II. .China has long history or even a painful past.Even China today is a fast developed country, China today is stillvery poor and most of the Chinese are still living in poverty.It istime for Chinese to work together that China will progress withother nations and their people can live happily and peacefully fromhereafter. Tea culture is very Chinese. YetChinese enjoy drinking coffee too. There is no point to comparewhich one is better. Both are good as long as you enjoy it. Bothare bad if you hate it.We respect every culture and have nointention to force our liking upon others.
What Makes ChinaDifferent
"The prestige of the state and its popular identification with thehighest values of Chinese civilization were not accidents; theywere the final result of a centuries-long program of indoctrinationand education directed by the Confucian scholar-officials.Traditional Chinese society can be distinguished from otherpre-modern civilizations to the extent that the state, rather thanorganized religious groups or ethnic segments of society, was ableto appropriate the symbols of wisdom, morality, and the commongood."
Religions of China inPractice
Acknowledging the wisdom of Chinese proverbs, most anthologiesof Chinese religion are organized by the logic of the threeteachings (_sanjiao_) of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism.Historical precedent and popular parlance attest to the importanceof this threefold division for understanding Chinese culture. Oneof the earliest references to the trinitarian idea is attributed toLi Shiqian, a prominent scholar of the sixth century, who wrotethat ``Buddhism is the sun, Daoism the moon, and Confucianism thefive planets.''<1> Li likens thethree traditions to significant heavenly bodies, suggesting thatalthough they remain separate, they also coexist as equallyindispensable phenomena of the natural world. Other opinions stressthe essential unity of the three religious systems. One popularproverb opens by listing the symbols that distinguish the religionsfrom each other, but closes with the assertion that they arefundamentally the same: ``The three teach ings--the gold andcinnabar of Daoism, the relics of Buddhist figures, as well as theConfucian virtues of humanity and righteousness--are basically onetradition.''<2> Stating the pointmore bluntly, some phrases have been put to use by writers in thelong, complicated history of what Western authors have called``syncretism.'' Such mottoes include ``the three teachings are oneteaching''; ``the three teachings return to the one''; ``the threeteachings share one body''; and ``the three teachings merge intoone.''<3>
What sense does it make to subsume several thousand years ofreligious experience under these three (or three-in-one)categories? And why is this anthology organized differently? Toanswer these questions, we need first to understand what the threeteachings are and how they came into existence.There is a certainrisk in beginning this introduction with an archaeology of thethree teachings. The danger is that rather than fixing in thereader's mind the most significant forms of Chinese religion--thepractices and ideas associated with ancestors, the measures takento protect against ghosts, or the veneration of gods, topics whichare highlighted by the selections in this anthology--emphasis willinstead be placed on precisely those terms the anthology seeks toavoid. Or, as one friendly critic stated in a review of an earlierdraft of this introduction, why must ``the tired old category ofthe three teachings be inflicted on yet another generation ofstudents?'' Indeed, why does this introduction begin on a negativenote, as it were, analyzing the problems with subsuming Chinesereligion under the three teachings, and insert a positive appraisalof what constitutes Chinese religion only at the end? Why not beginwith ``popular religion,'' the gods of China, and kinship andbureaucracy and then, only after those categories are established,proceed to discuss the explicit categories by which Chinese peoplehave ordered their religious world? The answer has to do with thefact that Chinese religion does not come to us purely, or withoutmediation. The three teachings are a powerful and inescapable partof Chinese religion. Whether they are eventually accepted,rejected, or reformulated, the terms of the past can only beunderstood by examining how they came to assume their currentstatus. Even the seemingly pristine translations of texts deemed``primary'' are products of their time; the materials here havebeen selected by the translators and the editor according to theconcerns of the particular series in which this book is published.This volume, in other words, is as much a product of Chinesereligion as it is a tool enabling access to that field. And becauseChinese religion has for so long been dominated by the idea of thethree teachings, it is essential to understand where thosetraditions come from, who constructed them and how, as well as whatforms of religious life are omitted or denied by constructing sucha picture in the first place.
Confucianism
The myth of origins told by proponents of Confucianism (and byplenty of modern historians) begins with Confucius, whose Chinesename was Kong Qiu and who lived from 551 to 479 B.C.E. Judging fromthe little direct evidence that still survives, however, it appearsthat Kong Qiu did not view himself as the founder of a school ofthought, much less as the originator of anything. What does emergefrom the earliest layers of the written record is that Kong Qiusought a revival of the ideas and institutions of a past goldenage. Employed in a minor government position as a specialist in thegovernmental and family rituals of his native state, Kong Qiu hopedto disseminate knowledge of the rites and inspire their universalperformance. That kind of broad-scale transformation could takeplace, he thought, only with the active encouragement ofresponsible rulers. The ideal ruler, as exemplified by thelegendary sage-kings Yao and Shun or the adviser to the Zhourulers, the Duke of Zhou, exercises ethical suasion, the ability toinfluence others by the power of his moral example. To the virtuesof the ruler correspond values that each individual is supposed tocultivate: benevolence toward others, a general sense of doing whatis right, loyalty and diligence in serving one's superiors.Universal moral ideals are necessary but not sufficient conditionsfor the restoration of civilization. Society also needs what KongQiu calls _li_, roughly translated as ``ritual.'' Although peopleare supposed to develop propriety or the ability to actappropriately in any given social situation (another sense of thesame word, li), still the specific rituals people are supposed toperform (also li) vary considerably, depending on age, socialstatus, gender, and context. In family ritual, for instance, ritesof mourning depend on one's kinship relation to the deceased. Ininternational affairs, degrees of pomp, as measured by ornatenessof dress and opulence of gifts, depend on the rank of the foreignemissary. Offerings to the gods are also highly regulated: thesacrifices of each social class are restricted to specific classesof deities, and a clear hierarchy prevails. The few explicitstatements attributed to Kong Qiu about the problem of history ortradition all portray him as one who ``transmits but does notcreate.''<4> Such a claim can, ofcourse, serve the ends of innovation or revolution. But in thiscase it is clear that Kong Qiu transmitted not only specificrituals and values but also a hierarchical social structure and theweight of the past.The portrayal of Kong Qiu as originary and thecoalescence of a self- conscious identity among people tracingtheir heritage back to him took place long after his death. Twoimportant scholar-teachers, both of whom aspired to serve as closeadvisers to a ruler whom they could convince to institute aConfucian style of government, were Meng Ke (or Mengzi, ca. 371-289B.C.E.) and Xun Qing (or Xunzi, d. 215 B.C.E.). Mengzi viewedhimself as a follower of Kong Qiu's example. His doctrines offereda program for perfecting the individual. Sageliness could beachieved through a gentle process of cultivating the innatetendencies toward the good. Xunzi professed the same goal butargued that the means to achieve it required stronger measures. Tobe civilized, according to Xunzi, people need to restrain theirbase instincts and have their behavior modified by a system ofritual built into social institutions.It was only with the foundingof the Han dynasty (202 B.C.E.-220 C.E.), however, thatConfucianism became Confucianism, that the ideas associated withKong Qiu's name received state support and were disseminatedgenerally throughout upper-class society. The creation ofConfucianism was neither simple nor sudden, as three examples willmake clear. In the year 136 B.C.E. the classical writings touted byConfucian scholars were made the foundation of the official systemof education and scholarship, to the exclusion of titles supportedby other philosophers. The five classics (or five scriptures,_wujing_) were the _Classic of Poetry_ (_Shijing_), _Classic ofHistory_ (_Shujing_), _Classic of Changes_ (_Yijing_), _Record ofRites_ (_Liji_), and _Chronicles of the Spring and Autumn Period_(_Chunqiu_) with the _Zuo Commentary_ (_Zuozhuan_), most of whichhad existed prior to the time of Kong Qiu. (The word _jing_ denotesthe warp threads in a piece of cloth. Once adopted as a genericterm for the authoritative texts of Han-dynasty Confucianism, itwas applied by other traditions to their sacred books. It istranslated variously as book, classic, scripture, and samutra.)Although Kong Qiu was commonly believed to have written or editedsome of the five classics, his own statements (collected in the_Analects_ [_Lunyu_]) and the writings of his closest followerswere not yet admitted into the canon. Kong Qiu's name wasimplicated more directly in the second example of the Confuciansystem, the state-sponsored cult that erected temples in his honorthroughout the empire and that provided monetary support forturning his ancestral home into a national shrine. Members of theliterate elite visited such temples, paying formalized respect andenacting rituals in front of spirit tablets of the master and hisdisciples. The third example is the corpus of writing left by thescholar Dong Zhongshu (ca. 179-104 B.C.E.), who was instrumental inpromoting Confucian ideas and books in official circles. Dong wasrecognized by the government as the leading spokesman for thescholarly elite. His theories provided an overarching cosmologicalframework for Kong Qiu's ideals, sometimes adding ideas unknown inKong Qiu's time, sometimes making more explicit or providing aparticular interpretation of what was already stated in Kong Qiu'swork. Dong drew heavily on concepts of earlier thinkers--few ofwhom were self-avowed Confucians--to explain the workings of thecosmos. He used the concepts of yin and yang to explain how changefollowed a knowable pattern, and he elaborated on the role of theruler as one who connected the realms of Heaven, Earth, and humans.The social hierarchy implicit in Kong Qiu's ideal world wascoterminous, thought Dong, with a division of all naturalrelationships into a superior and inferior member. Dong's theoriesproved determinative for the political culture of Confucianismduring the Han and later dynasties.What in all of this, we need toask, was Confucian? Or, more precisely, what kind of thing is the``Confucianism'' in each of these examples? In the first, that ofthe five classics, ``Confucianism'' amounts to a set of books thatwere mostly written before Kong Qiu lived but that later traditionassociates with his name. It is a curriculum instituted by theemperor for use in the most prestigious institutions of learning.In the second example, ``Confucianism'' is a complex ritualapparatus, an empire-wide network of shrines patronized bygovernment authorities. It depends upon the ability of thegovernment to maintain religious institutions throughout the empireand upon the willingness of state officials to engage regularly inworship. In the third example, the work of Dong Zhongshu,``Confucianism'' is a conceptual scheme, a fluid synthesis of someof Kong Qiu's ideals and the various cosmologies popular well afterKong Qiu lived. Rather than being an updating of somethinguniversally acknowledged as Kong Qiu's philosophy, it is aconscious systematizing, under the symbol of Kong Qiu, of ideascurrent in the Han dynasty.If even during the Han dynasty the term``Confucianism'' covers so many different sorts of things--books, aritual apparatus, a conceptual scheme--one might well wonder why wepersist in using one single word to cover such a broad range ofphenomena. Sorting out the pieces of that puzzle is now one of themost pressing tasks in the study of Chinese history, which isalready beginning to replace the wooden division of the Chineseintellectual world into the three teachings--each in turn marked byphases called ``proto-,'' ``neo-,'' or ``revival of''--with a morecritical and nuanced understanding of how traditions are made andsustained. For our more limited purposes here, it is instructive toobserve how the word ``Confucianism'' came to be applied to all ofthese things and more.<5> As a word,``Confucianism'' is tied to the Latin name, ``Confucius,'' whichoriginated not with Chinese philosophers but with Europeanmissionaries in the sixteenth century. Committed to winning overthe top echelons of Chinese society, Jesuits and other Catholicorders subscribed to the version of Chinese religious historysupplied to them by the educated elite. The story they told wasthat their teaching began with Kong Qiu, who was referred to asKongfuzi, rendered into Latin as ``Confucius.'' It was elaboratedby Mengzi (rendered as ``Mencius'') and Xunzi and was givenofficial recognition-- as if it had existed as the same entity,unmodified for several hundred years--under the Han dynasty. Theteaching changed to the status of an unachieved metaphysicalprinciple during the centuries that Buddhism was believed to havebeen dominant and was resuscitated-- still basicallyunchanged--only with the teachings of Zhou Dunyi (1017- 1073),Zhang Zai (1020), Cheng Hao (1032-1085), and Cheng Yi (1033- 1107),and the commentaries authored by Zhu Xi (1130-1200). As a genealogycrucial to the self-definition of modern Confucianism, that myth oforigins is both misleading and instructive. It lumps togetherheterogeneous ideas, books that predate Kong Qiu, and a state-supported cult under the same heading. It denies thediversity ofnames by which members of a supposedly unitary tradition chose tocall themselves, including _ru_ (the early meaning of which remainsdisputed, usually translated as ``scholars'' or ``Confucians''),_daoxue_ (study of the Way), _lixue_ (study of principle), and_xinxue_ (study of the mind). It ignores the long history ofcontention over interpreting Kong Qiu and overlooks the debt owedby later thinkers like Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming (1472-1529) toBuddhist notions of the mind and practices of meditation and toDaoist ideas of change. And it passes over in silence the roleplayed by non-Chinese regimes in making Confucianism into anorthodoxy, as in the year 1315, when the Mongol government requiredthat the writings of Kong Qiu and his early followers, redacted andinterpreted through the commentaries of Zhu Xi, become the basisfor the national civil service examination. At the same time,Confucianism's story about itself reveals much. It names thefigures, books, and slogans of the past that recent Confucians havefound most inspiring. As a string of ideals, it illuminates whatits proponents wish it to be. As a lineage, it imagines a line ofdescent kept pure from the traditions of Daoism and Buddhism. Theconstruction of the latter two teachings involves a similarprocess. Their histories, as will be seen below, do not simply movefrom the past to the present; they are also projected backward fromspecific presents to significant pasts.
Daoism
Most Daoists have argued that the meaningful past is the periodthat preceded, chronologically and metaphysically, the past inwhich the legendary sages of Confucianism lived. In the Daoistgolden age the empire had not yet been reclaimed out of chaos.Society lacked distinctions based on class, and human beings livedhappily in what resembled primitive, small-scale agriculturalcollectives. The lines between different nation-states, betweendifferent occupations, even between humans and animals were notclearly drawn. The world knew nothing of the Confucian state, whichdepended on the carving up of an undifferentiated whole into socialranks, the imposition of artificially ritualized modes of behavior,and a campaign for conservative values like loyalty, obeying one'sparents, and moderation. Historically speaking, this Daoist visionwas first articulated shortly after the time of Kong Qiu, and weshould probably regard the Daoist nostalgia for a simpler,untrammeled time as roughly contemporary with the development of aConfucian view of origins. In Daoist mythology whenever a wise manencounters a representative of Confucianism, be it Kong Qiu himselfor an envoy seeking advice for an emperor, the hermit escapes to aworld untainted by civilization.For Daoists the philosophicalequivalent to the pre-imperial primordium is a state of chaoticwholeness, sometimes called _hundun_, roughly translated as``chaos.'' In that state, imagined as an uncarved block or as thebeginning of life in the womb, nothing is lacking. Everythingexists, everything is possible: before a stone is carved there isno limit to the designs that may be cut, and before the fetusdevelops the embryo can, in an organic worldview, develop into maleor female. There is not yet any division into parts, any name todistinguish one thing from another. Prior to birth there is nodistinction, from the Daoist standpoint, between life and death.Once birth happens--once the stone is cut--however, the worlddescends into a state of imperfection. Rather than a mythologicalsin on the part of the first human beings or an ontologicalseparation of God from humanity, the Daoist version of the Fallinvolves division into parts, the assigning of names, and theleveling of judgments injurious to life. _The Classic on the Wayand Its Power_ (_Dao de jing_) describes how the original whole,the _dao_ (here meaning the ``Way'' above all other ways), wasbroken up: ``The Dao gave birth to the One, the One gave birth tothe Two, the Two gave birth to the Three, and the Three gave birthto the Ten Thousand Things.''<6> Thatdecline-through-differentiation also offers the model for regainingwholeness. The spirit may be restored by reversing the process ofaging, by reverting from multiplicity to the One. By understandingthe road or path (the same word, dao, in another sense) that thegreat Dao followed in its decline, one can return to the root andendure forever.
Practitioners and scholars alike have often succumbed to thebeauty and power of the language of Daoism and proclaimed anotherversion of the Daoist myth of origins. Many people seem to movefrom a description of the Daoist faith-stance (the Dao embraces allthings) to active Daoist proselytization masquerading as historicaldescription (Daoism embraces all forms of Chinese religion). Aswith the term ``Confucianism,'' it is important to consider notjust what the term ``Daoism'' covers, but also where it comes from,who uses it, and what words Daoists have used over the years torefer to themselves.The most prominent early writings associatedwith Daoism are two texts, _The Classic on the Way and Its Power,_attributed to a mythological figure named Lao Dan or Laozi who ispresumed to have lived during the sixth century B.C.E., and the_Zhuangzi_, named for its putative author, Zhuang Zhou or Zhuangzi(ca. 370-301 B.C.E.). The books are quite different in language andstyle. _The Classic on the Way and Its Power_ is composed largelyof short bits of aphoristic verse, leaving its interpretation andapplication radically indeterminate. Perhaps because of thatopenness of meaning, the book has been translated into Westernlanguages more often than any other Chinese text. It has been readas a utopian tract advocating a primitive society as well as acompendium of advice for a fierce, engaged ruler. Its author hasbeen described as a relativist, skeptic, or poet by some, and byothers as a committed rationalist who believes in the ability ofwords to name a reality that exists independently of them. The_Zhuangzi_ is a much longer work composed of relatively discretechapters written largely in prose, each of which brings sustainedattention to a particular set of topics. Some portions have beencompared to Wittgenstein's _Philosophical Investigations_. Othersdevelop a story at some length or invoke mythological figures fromthe past. The _Zhuangzi_ refers to Laozi by name and quotes somepassages from the _Classic on the Way and Its Power_, but the textas we know it includes contributions written over a long span oftime. Textual analysis reveals at least four layers, probably more,that may be attributed to different authors and different times,with interests as varied as logic, primitivism, syncretism, andegotism. The word ``Daoism'' in English (corresponding to Daojia,``the School [or Philosophy] of the Dao'') is often used to referto these and other books or to a free-floating outlook on lifeinspired by but in no way limited to them.``Daoism'' is alsoinvoked as the name for religious movements that began to developin the late second century C.E.; Chinese usage typically refers totheir texts as Daojiao, ``Teachings of the Dao'' or ``Religion ofthe Dao.'' One of those movements, called the Way of the CelestialMasters (Tianshi dao), possessed mythology and rituals andestablished a set of social institutions that would be maintainedby all later Daoist groups. The Way of the Celestial Masters claimsits origin in a revelation dispensed in the year 142 by the MostHigh Lord Lao (Taishang Laojun), a deified form of Laozi, to a mannamed Zhang Daoling. Laozi explained teachings to Zhang andbestowed on him the title of ``Celestial Master'' (Tianshi),indicating his exalted position in a system of ranking that placedthose who had achieved immortality at the top and humans who wereworking their way toward that goal at the bottom. Zhang was activein the part of western China now corresponding to the province ofSichuan, and his descendants con tinued to build a localinfrastructure. The movement divided itself into a number ofparishes, to which each member-household was required to pay anannual tax of five pecks of rice--hence the other common name forthe movement in its early years, the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice(Wudoumi dao). The administrative structure and some of thepolitical functions of the organization are thought to have beenmodeled in part on secular government administration. After the Weidynasty was founded in 220, the government extended recognition tothe Way of the Celestial Masters, giving official approval to theform of local social administration it had developed and claimingat the same time that the new emperor's right to rule wasguaranteed by the authority of the current Celestial Master.Severalcontinuing traits are apparent in the first few centuries of theWay of the Celestial Masters. The movement represented itself ashaving begun with divine-human contact: a god reveals a teachingand bestows a rank on a person. Later Daoist groups receivedrevelations from successively more exalted deities. Even beforereceiving official recognition, the movement was never divorcedfrom politics. Later Daoist groups too followed that generalpattern, sometimes in the form of millenarian movements promisingto replace the secular government, sometimes in the form of anestablished church providing services complementary to those of thestate. The local communities of the Way of the Celestial Masterswere formed around priests who possessed secret knowledge and heldrank in the divine-human bureaucracy. Knowledge and position wereinterdependent: knowledge of the proper ritual forms and theauthority to petition the gods and spirits were guaranteed by thepriest's position in the hierarchy, while his rank was confirmed tohis community by his expertise in a ritual repertoire. Nearly alltypes of rituals performed by Daoist masters through the ages areevident in the early years of the Way of the Celestial Masters.Surviving sources describe the curing of illness, often throughconfession; the exorcism of malevolent spirits; rites of passage inthe life of the individual; and the holding of regular communalfeasts.
While earlier generations (both Chinese bibliographers andscholars of Chinese religion) have emphasized the distinctionbetween the allegedly pristine philosophy of the ``School of theDao'' and the corrupt religion of the ``Teachings of the Dao,''recent scholarship instead emphasizes the complex continuitiesbetween them. Many selections in this anthology focus on thebeginnings of organized Daoism and the liturgical and socialhistory of Daoist movements through the fifth century. The historyof Daoism can be read, in part, as a succession of revelations,each of which includes but remains superior to the earlier ones. InSouth China around the year 320 the author Ge Hong wrote _He WhoEmbraces Simplicity_ (_Baopuzi_), which outlines different methodsfor achieving elevation to that realm of the immortals known as``Great Purity'' (Taiqing). Most methods explain how, after theobservance of moral codes and rules of abstinence, one needs togather precious substances for use in complex chemical experiments.Followed properly, the experiments succeed in producing a sacredsubstance, ``gold elixir'' (_jindan_), the eating of which leads toimmortality. In the second half of the fourth century newscriptures were revealed to a man named Yang Xi, who shared themwith a family named Xu. Those texts give their possessors access toan even higher realm of Heaven, that of ``Highest Clarity''(Shangqing). The scriptures contain legends about the level of godsresiding in the Heaven of Highest Clarity. Imbued with a messianicspirit, the books foretell an apocalypse for which the wise shouldbegin to prepare now. By gaining initiation into the textualtradition of Highest Clarity and following its program forcultivating immortality, adepts are assured of a high rank in thedivine bureaucracy and can survive into the new age. The fifthcentury saw the canonization of a new set of texts, titled``Numinous Treasure'' (Lingbao). Most of them are presented assermons of a still higher level of deities, the Celestial Worthies(Tianzun), who are the most immediate personified manifestations ofthe Dao. The books instruct followers how to worship the godssupplicated in a wide variety of rituals. Called ``retreats''(_zhai_, a word connoting both ``fast'' and ``feast''), those ritesare performed for the salvation of the dead, the bestowal of boonson the living, and the repentance of sins.As noted in thediscussion of the beginnings of the Way of the Celestial Masters,Daoist and imperial interests often intersected. The founder of theTang dynasty (618-907), Li Yuan (lived 566-635, reigned 618-626,known as Gaozu), for instance, claimed to be a descendant ofLaozi's. At various points during the reign of the Li family duringthe Tang dynasty, prospective candidates for government servicewere tested for their knowledge of specific Daoist scriptures.Imperial authorities recognized and sometimes paid forecclesiastical centers where Daoist priests were trained andordained, and the surviving sources on Chinese history are filledwith examples of state sponsorship of specific Daoist ceremoniesand the activities of individual priests. Later governmentscontinued to extend official support to the Daoist church, andvice-versa. Many accounts portray the twelfth century as aparticularly innovative period: it saw the development of sectsnamed ``Supreme Unity'' (Taiyi), ``Perfect and Great Dao'' (Zhendadao), and ``Complete Perfection'' (Quanzhen). In the early part ofthe fifteenth century, the forty-third Celestial Master took chargeof compiling and editing Daoist ritual texts, resulting in thepromulgation of a Daoist canon that contemporary Daoists stillconsider authoritative.Possessing a history of some two thousandyears and appealing to people from all walks of life, Daoismappears to the modern student to be a complex and hardly unitarytradition. That diversity is important to keep in mind, especiallyin light of the claim made by different Daoist groups to maintain aform of the teaching that in its essence has remained the same overthe millennia. The very notion of immortality is one way ofgrounding that claim. The greatest immortals, after all, are stillalive. Having conquered death, they have achieved the originalstate of the uncarved block and are believed to reside in theheavens. The highest gods are personified forms of the Dao, theunchanging Way. They are concretized in the form of stars and otherheavenly bodies and can manifest themselves to advanced Daoistpractitioners following proper visualization exercises. Thetranscendents (_xianren_, often translated as ``immortals'') beganlife as humans and returned to the ideal embryonic conditionthrough a variety of means. Some followed a regimen of gymnasticsand observed a form of macrobiotic diet that simultaneously builtup the pure elements and minimized the coarser ones. Otherspracticed the art of alchemy, assembling secret ingredients andusing laboratory techniques to roll back time. Sometimes the elixirwas prepared in real crucibles; sometimes the refining process wascarried out eidetically by imagining the interior of the body tofunction like the test tubes and burners of the lab. Personalizedrites of curing and communal feasts alike can be seen as smallsteps toward recovering the state of health and wholeness thatobtains at the beginning (also the infinite ending) of time. Daoismhas always stressed morality. Whether expressed through specificinjunctions against stealing, lying, and taking life, through moreabstract discussions of virtue, or through exemplary figures whotransgress moral codes, ethics was an important element of Daoistpractice. Nor should we forget the claim to continuity implied bythe institution of priestly investiture. By possessing revealedtexts and the secret registers listing the members of the divinehierarchy, the Daoist priest took his place in a structure thatappeared to be unchanging.Another way that Daoists have representedtheir tradition is by asserting that their activities are differentfrom other religious practices. Daoism is constructed, in part, byprojecting a non-Daoist tradition, picking out ideas and actionsand assigning them a name that symbolizes ``theother.''<7> The most common others inthe history of Daoism have been the rituals practiced by the lessinstitutionalized, more poorly educated religious specialists atthe local level and any phenomenon connected with China's otherorganized church, Buddhism. Whatever the very real congruences inbelief and practice among Daoism, Buddhism, and popular practice,it has been essential to Daoists to assert a fundamentaldifference. In this perspective the Daoist gods differ in kind fromthe profane spirits of the popular tradition: the former partake ofthe pure and impersonal Dao, while the latter demand the sacrificeof meat and threaten their benighted worshippers with ill ness andother curses. With their hereditary office, complex rituals, anduse of the classical Chinese language, modern Daoist masters viewthemselves as utterly distinct from exorcists and mediums, whoutilize only the language of everyday speech and whose possessionby spirits appears uncontrolled. Similarly, anti-Buddhist rhetoric(as well as anti- Daoist rhetoric from the Buddhist side) has beensevere over the centuries, often resulting in the temporarysuppression of books and statues and the purging of the priesthood.All of those attempts to enforce difference, however, must beviewed alongside the equally real overlap, sometimes identity,between Daoism and other traditions. Records compiled by the statedetailing the official titles bestowed on gods prove that the godsof the popular tradition and the gods of Daoism often supportedeach other and coalesced or, at other times, competed in ways thatthe Daoist church could not control. Eth nographies about modernvillage life show how all the various religious personnel cooperateto allow for coexistence; in some celebrations they forge anarrangement that allows Daoist priests to officiate at the esotericrituals performed in the interior of the temple, while mediumsenter into trance among the crowds in the outer courtyard. Inimperial times the highest echelons of the Daoist and Buddhistpriesthoods were capable of viewing their roles as complementary toeach other and as necessarily subservient to the state. Thegovernment mandated the establishment in each province of templesbelonging to both religions; it exercised the right to accept orreject the definition of each religion's canon of sacred books; andit sponsored ceremonial debates between leading exponents of thetwo churches in which victory most often led to coexistence with,rather than the destruction of, the losing party.
Buddhism
The very name given to Buddhism offers important clues about theway that the tradition has come to be defined in China. Buddhism isoften called Fojiao, literally meaning ``the teaching (_jiao_) ofthe Buddha (Fo).'' Buddhism thus appears to be a member of the sameclass as Confucianism and Daoism: the three teachings are Rujiao(``teaching of the scholars'' or Confucianism), Daojiao (``teachingof the Dao'' or Daoism), and Fojiao (``teaching of the Buddha'' orBuddhism). But there is an interesting difference here, one thatrequires close attention to language. As semantic units in Chinese,the words Ru and Dao work differently than does Fo. The word Rurefers to a group of people and the word Dao refers to a concept,but the word Fo does not make literal sense in Chinese. Instead itrepresents a sound, a word with no semantic value that in theancient language was pronounced as ``bud,'' like the beginning ofthe Sanskrit word ``buddha.''<8> Themeaning of the Chinese term derives from the fact that it refers toa foreign sound. In Sanskrit the word ``buddha'' means ``one whohas achieved enlightenment,'' one who has ``awakened'' to the truenature of human existence. Rather than using any of the Chinesewords that mean ``enlightened one,'' Buddhists in China have chosento use a foreign word to name their teaching, much as nativespeakers of English refer to the religion that began in India notas ``the religion of the enlightened one,'' but rather as``Buddhism,'' often without knowing precisely what the word``Buddha'' means. Referring to Buddhism in China as Fojiao involvesthe recognition that this teaching, unlike the other two,originated in a foreign land. Its strangeness, its non-nativeorigin, its power are all bound up in its name.Considered fromanother angle, the word buddha () also accentuates the ways inwhich Buddhism in its Chinese context defines a distinctiveattitude toward experience. Buddhas--enlightened ones--are unusualbecause they differ from other, unenlightened individuals andbecause of the truths to which they have awakened. Most people livein profound ignorance, which causes immense suffering. Buddhas, bycontrast, see the true nature of reality. Such propositions, ofcourse, were not advanced in a vacuum. They were articulatedoriginally in the context of traditional Indian cosmology in thefirst several centuries B.C.E., and as Buddhism began to tricklehaphazardly into China in the first centuries of the common era,Buddhist teachers were faced with a dilemma. To make theirteachings about the Buddha understood to a non-Indian audience,they often began by explaining the understanding of humanexistence--the problem, as it were--to which Buddhism provided theanswer. Those basic elements of the early Indian worldview areworth reviewing here. In that conception, all human beings aredestined to be reborn in other forms, human and nonhuman, over vaststretches of space and time. While time in its most abstract sensedoes follow a pattern of decline, then renovation, followed by anew decline, and so on, still the process of reincarnation iswithout beginning or end. Life takes six forms: at the top aregods, demigods, and human beings, while animals, hungry ghosts, andhell beings occupy the lower rungs of the hierarchy. Like the godsof ancient Greece, the gods of Buddhism reside in the heavens andlead lives of immense worldly pleasure. Unlike their Greekcounterparts, however, they are without exception mortal, and atthe end of a very long life they are invariably reborn lower in thecosmic scale. Hungry ghosts wander in search of food and water yetare unable to eat or drink, and the denizens of the various hellssuffer a battery of tortures, but they will all eventually die andbe reborn again. The logic that determines where one will be rebornis the idea of _karma_. Strictly speaking the Sanskrit word karmameans ``deed'' or ``action.'' In its relevant sense here it meansthat every deed has a result: morally good acts lead to goodconsequences, and the commission of evil has a bad result. Appliedto the life of the individual, the law of karma means that thecircumstances an individual faces are the result of prior actions.Karma is the regulating idea of a wide range of good works andother Buddhist practices.The wisdom to which buddhas awaken is tosee that this cycle of existence (_saymsmara_ in Sanskrit,comprising birth, death, and rebirth) is marked by impermanence,unsatisfactoriness, and lack of a permanent self. It is impermanentbecause all things, whether physical objects, psychological states,or philosophical ideas, undergo change; they are brought intoexistence by preceding conditions at a particular point in time,and they eventually will become extinct. It is unsat isfactory inthe sense that not only do sentient beings experience physicalpain, they also face continual disappointment when the people andthings they wish to maintain invariably change. The thirdcharacteristic of sentient existence, lack of a permanent self, hasa long and complicated history of exegesis in Buddhism. In Chinathe idea of ``no-self'' (Sanskrit: _anmatman_) was often placed increative tension with the concept of repeated rebirth. On the onehand, Buddhist teachers tried to convince their audience that humanexistence did not end simply with a funeral service or memorial tothe ancestors, that humans were reborn in another bodily form andcould thus be related not only to other human beings but toanimals, ghosts, and other species among the six modes of rebirth.To support that argument for rebirth, it was helpful to draw onmetaphors of continuity, like a flame passed from one candle to thenext and a spirit that moves from one lifetime to the next. On theother hand, the truth of impermanence entailed the argument that nopermanent ego could possibly underlie the process of rebirth. Whatmigrated from one lifetime to the next were not eternal elements ofpersonhood but rather temporary aspects of psychophysical life thatmight endure for a few lifetimes--or a few thousand--but wouldeventually cease to exist. The Buddha provided an analysis of theills of human existence and a prescription for curing them. Thoseills were caused by the tendency of sentient beings to grasp, tocling to evanescent things in the vain hope that they remainpermanent. In this view, the very act of clinging contributes tothe perpetuation of desires from one incarnation to the next.Grasping, then, is both a cause and a result of being committed toa permanent self.The wisdom of buddhas is neither intellectual norindividualistic. It was always believed to be asoteriologicalknowledge that was expressed in the compassionate activity ofteaching others how to achieve liberation from suffering.Traditional formulations of Buddhist practice describe a path tosalvation that begins with the observance of morality. Layfollowers pledged to abstain from the taking of life, stealing,lying, drinking intoxicating beverages, and engaging in sexualrelations outside of marriage. Further injunctions applied tohouseholders who could observe a more demanding life-style ofpurity, and the lives of monks and nuns were regulated in evengreater detail. With morality as a basis, the ideal path alsoincluded the cultivation of pure states of mind through thepractice of meditation and the achieving of wisdom rivaling that ofa buddha.The discussion so far has concerned the importance of theforeign component in the ideal of the buddha and the actual contentto which buddhas are believed to awaken. It is also important toconsider what kind of a religious figure a buddha is thought to be.We can distinguish two separate but related understandings of whata buddha is. In the first understanding the Buddha (represented inEnglish with a capital B) was an unusual human born into a royalfamily in ancient India in the sixth or fifth century B.C.E. Herenounced his birthright, followed established religious teachers,and then achieved enlightenment after striking out on his own. Hegathered lay and monastic disciples around him and preachedthroughout the Indian subcontinent for almost fifty years, and heachieved final ``extinction'' (the root meaning of the Sanskritword _nirvana_) from the woes of existence. This unique being wascalled Gautama (family name) Siddh;amartha (personal name) duringhis lifetime, and later tradition refers to him with a variety ofnames, including Sakyamuni (literally ``Sage of the Sakya clan'')and Tathagata (``Thus-Come One''). Followers living after his deathlack direct access to him because, as the word ``extinction''implies, his release was permanent and complete. His influence canbe felt, though, through his traces--through gods who encounteredhim and are still alive, through long-lived disciples, through theplaces he touched that can be visited by pilgrims, and through hisphysical remains and the shrines (_stupa_) erected over them. Inthe second understanding a buddha (with a lowercase b) is a genericlabel for any enlightened being, of whom Sakyamuni was simply oneamong many. Other buddhas preceded Sakyamuni's appearance in theworld, and others will follow him, notably Maitreya (Chinese:Mile), who is thought to reside now in a heavenly realm close tothe surface of the Earth. Buddhas are also dispersed over space:they exist in all directions, and one in particular, Amitayus (orAmitabha, Chinese: Amituo), presides over a land of happiness inthe West. Related to this second genre of buddha is another kind offigure, a bodhisattva (literally ``one who is intent onenlightenment,'' Chinese: ). Bodhisattvas are found in most formsof Buddhism, but their role was particularly emphasized in the manytraditions claiming the polemical title of Mahayana (``GreaterVehicle,'' in opposition to Hinayana, ``Smaller Vehicle'') thatbegan to develop in the first century B.C.E. Technically speaking,bodhisattvas are not as advanced as buddhas on the path toenlightenment. Bodhisattvas particularly popular in China includeAvalokitesvara (Chinese: Guanyin, Guanshiyin, or Guanzizai),Bhaisajyaguru (Chinese: Yaoshiwang), Ksitigarbha (Chinese: Dizang),Manjusri (Wenshu), and Samantabhadra (Puxian). While buddhas appearto some followers as remote and all-powerful, bodhisattvas oftenserve as mediating figures whose compassionate involvement in theimpurities of this world makes them more approachable. Like buddhasin the second sense of any enlightened being, they function both asmodels for followers to emulate and as saviors who interveneactively in the lives of their devotees.
The Spirits of ChineseReligion
Up to this point the discussion has touched frequently on thesubject of gods without explaining what gods are and how they arebelieved to be related to other kinds of beings. To understandChinese theology (literally ``discourse about gods''), we need toexplore theories about human existence, and before that we need toreview some of the basic concepts of Chinese cosmology.
What is the Chinese conception of the cosmos? Any simple answerto that question, of course, merely confirms the biases assumed butnot articulated by the question--that there is only one suchauthentically Chinese view, and that the cosmos as such, presentunproblematically to all people, was a coherent topic of discussionin traditional China. Nevertheless, the answer to that questionoffered by one scholar of China, Joseph Needham, provides a helpfulstarting point for the analysis. In Needham's opinion, the dominantstrand of ancient Chinese thought is remarkable for the way itcontrasts with European ideas. While the latter approach the worldreligiously as created by a transcendent deity or as a battlegroundbetween spirit and matter, or scientifically as a mechanismconsisting of objects and their attributes, ancient Chinesethinkers viewed the world as a complete and complex ``organism.''``Things behaved in particular ways,'' writes Needham, ``notnecessarily because of prior actions or impulsions of other things,but because their position in the ever-moving cyclical universe wassuch that they were endowed with intrinsic natures which made thatbehaviour inevitable for them.''<17>Rather than being created out of nothing, the world evolved intoits current condition of complexity out of a prior state ofsimplicity and undifferentiation. The cosmos continues to change,but there is a consistent pattern to that change discernible tohuman beings. Observation of the seasons and celestial realms, andmethods like plastromancy and scapulimancy (divination usingtortoise shells and shoulder blades), dream divination, andmanipulating the hexagrams of the _Classic of Changes_ allow peopleto understand the pattern of the universe as a whole by focusing onthe changes taking place in one of its meaningful parts.The basicstuff out of which all things are made is called _qi_. Everythingthat ever existed, at all times, is made of qi, including inanimatematter, humans and animals, the sky, ideas and emotions, demons andghosts, the undifferentiated state of wholeness, and the world whenit is teeming with different beings. As an axiomatic concept with awide range of meaning, the word qi has over the years beentranslated in numerous ways. Even in this anthology, differenttranslators render it into English in three different ways. Becauseit involves phenomena we would consider bothpsychological--connected to human thoughts and feelings--andphysical, it can be translated as ``psychophysical stuff.'' Thetranslation ``pneuma'' draws on one early etymology of the word asvapor, steam, or breath. ``Vital energy'' accentuates the potentialfor life inherent to the more ethereal forms of qi. These meaningsof qi hold for most schools of thought in early Chinese religion;it is only with the renaissance of Confucian traditions undertakenby Zhu Xi and others that qi is interpreted not as a single thing,part-matter and part-energy, pervading everything, but as one oftwo basic metaphysical building blocks. According to Zhu Xi, allthings partake of both qi and _li_ (homophonous to but differentfrom the _li_ meaning ``ritual'' or ``propriety''), the latterunderstood as the reason a thing is what it is and its underlying``principle'' or ``reason.''
While traditional cosmology remained monistic, in the sense thatqi as the most basic constituent of the universe was a single thingrather than a duality or plurality of things, still qi was thoughtto move or to operate according to a pattern that did conform totwo basic modes. The Chinese words for those two modalities are_yin_ and _yang_; I shall attempt to explain them here but shallleave them untranslated. Yin and yang are best understood in termsof symbolism. When the sun shines on a mountain at some time otherthan midday, the mountain has one shady side and one sunny side.Yin is the emblem for the shady side and its characteristics; yangis the emblem for the sunny side and its qualities. Since the sunhas not yet warmed the yin side, it is dark, cool, and moist;plants are contracted and dormant; and water in the form of dewmoves downward. The yang side of the mountain is the opposite. Itis bright, warm, and dry; plants open up and extend their stalks tocatch the sun; and water in the form of fog moves upward as itevaporates. This basic symbolism was extended to include a host ofother oppositions. Yin is female, yang is male. Yin occupies thelower position, yang the higher. Any situation in the human ornatural world can be analyzed within this framework; yin and yangcan be used to understand the modulations of qi on a mountainsideas well as the relationships within the family. The socialhierarchies of gender and age, for instance--the duty of the wifeto honor her husband, and of younger generations to obey olderones--were interpreted as the natural subordination of yin to yang.The same reasoning can be applied to any two members of a pair.Yin-yang symbolism simultaneously places them on an equal footingand ranks them hierarchically. On the one hand, all processes aremarked by change, making it inevitable that yin and yang alternateand imperative that humans seek a harmonious balance between thetwo. On the other hand, the system as a whole attaches greatervalue to the ascendant member of the pair, the yang. Such are thephilosophical possibilities of the conceptual scheme. Someinterpreters of yin and yang choose to emphasize the nondualistic,harmonious nature of the relationship, while others emphasize theimbalance, hierarchy, and conflict built into the idea.How is humanlife analyzed in terms of the yin and yang modes of ``materialenergy'' (yet another rendering of qi)? Health for the individualconsists in the harmonious balancing of yin and yang. When the twomodes depart from their natural course, sickness and death result.Sleep, which is dark and therefore yin, needs to be balanced bywakefulness, which is yang. Salty tastes (yin) should be matched bybitter ones (yang); inactivity should alternate with movement; andso on. Normally the material energy that constitutes a person,though constantly shifting, is unitary enough to sustain a healthylife. When the material energy is blocked, follows improperpatterns, or is invaded by pathogens, then the imbalance betweenyin and yang threatens to pull the person apart, the coarser formsof material energy (which are yin) remaining attached to the bodyor near the corpse, the more ethereal forms of material energy(which are yang) tending to float up and away. Dream-states andminor sicknesses are simply gentler forms of the personaldissociation--the radical conflict between yin and yang-- thatcomes with spirit-possession, serious illness, and death. At deaththe material force composing the person dissipates, and even thatdissipation follows a pattern analyzable in terms of yin and yang.The yin parts of the person--collectively called ``earthly souls''(_po_)--move downward, constituting the flesh of the corpse,perhaps also returning as a ghost to haunt the living. Since theyare more like energy than matter, the yang parts of theperson--collectively called ``heavenly souls'' (_hun_)--floatupward. They--notice that there is more than one of each kind of``soul,'' making a unique soul or even a dualism of the spiritimpossible in principle--are thought to be reborn in Heaven or asanother being, to be resident in the ancestral tablets, to beassociated more amorphously with the ancestors stretching backseven generations, or to be in all three places at once.Above Iclaimed that a knowledge of Chinese cosmology and anthropology wasessential to understanding what place gods occupy in the Chineseconceptual world. That is because the complicated term ``god,'' inthe sense either of a being believed to be perfect in power,wisdom, and goodness or a superhuman figure worthy of worship, doesnot correspond straightforwardly to a single Chinese term with asimilar range of meanings. Instead, there are general areas ofoverlap, as well as concepts that have no correspondence, betweenthe things we would consider ``gods'' and specific Chinese terms.Rather than pursuing this question from the side of modern Englishusage, however, we will begin with the important Chinese terms andexplain their range of meanings.One of the terms crucial tounderstanding Chinese religion is _shen_, which in thisintroduction I translate with different versions of the Englishword ``spirit.'' Below these three words are analyzed separately asconsisting of three distinct spheres of meaning, but one shouldkeep in mind that the three senses are all rooted in a singleChinese word. They differ only in degree or realm of application,not in kind.The first meaning of shen is confined to the domain ofthe individual human being: it may be translated as ``spirit'' inthe sense of ``human spirit'' or ``psyche.'' It is the basic poweror agency within humans that accounts for life. To extend life tofull potential the spirit must be cultivated, resulting in everclearer, more luminous states of being. In physiological terms``spirit'' is a general term for the ``heavenly souls,'' incontrast to the yin elements of the person.The second meaning ofshen may be rendered in English as ``spirits'' or ``gods,'' thelatter written in lowercase because Chinese spirits and gods neednot be seen as all-powerful, transcendent, or creators of theworld. They are intimately involved in the affairs of the world,generally lacking a perch or time frame completely beyond the humanrealm. An early Chinese dictionary explains: ``Shen are the spiritsof Heaven. They draw out the ten thousandthings.''<18> As the spiritsassociated with objects like stars, mountains, and streams, theyexercise a direct influence on things in this world, makingphenomena appear and causing things to extend themselves. In thissense of ``spirits,'' shen are yang and opposed to the yin class ofthings known in Chinese as _gui_, ``ghosts'' or ``demons.'' The twowords put together, as in the combined form _guishen_ (``ghosts andspirits''), cover all manner of spiritual beings in the largestsense, those benevolent and malevolent, lucky and unlucky. In thisview, spirits are manifestations of the yang material force, andghosts are manifestations of the yin material force. Thenineteenth-century Dutch scholar Jan J. M. de Groot emphasized thisaspect of the Chinese worldview, claiming that ``animism'' was anapt characterization of Chinese religion because all parts of theuniverse--rocks, trees, planets, animals, humans--could be animatedby spirits, good or bad. As support for that thesis he quotes adisciple of Zhu Xi's: ``Between Heaven and Earth there is no thingthat does not consist of yin and yang, and there is no place whereyin and yang are not found. Therefore there is no place where godsand spirits do not exist.''Shen in its third meaning can betranslated as ``spiritual.'' An entity is ``spiritual'' in thesense of inspiring awe or wonder because it combines categoriesusually kept separate, or it cannot be comprehended through normalconcepts. The _Classic of Changes_ states, `` `Spiritual' means notmeasured by yin and yang.'' Things that are numinous crosscategories. They cannot be fathomed as either yin or yang, and theypossess the power to disrupt the entire system of yin and yang. Arelated synonym, one that emphasizes the power of such spiritualthings, is _ling_, meaning ``numinous'' or possessing unusualspiritual characteristics. Examples that are considered shen in thesense of ``spiritual'' include albino members of a species; beingsthat are part- animal, part-human; women who die before marriageand turn into ghosts receiving no care; people who die in unusualways like suicide or on battlefields far from home; and peoplewhose bodies fail to decompose or emit strange signs afterdeath.The fact that these three fields of meaning (``spirit,''``spirits,'' and ``spiritual'') can be traced to a single word hasimportant implications for analyzing Chinese religion. Perhaps mostimportantly, it indicates that there is no unbridgeable gapseparating humans from gods or, for that matter, separating goodspirits from demons. All are composed of the same basic stuff, qi,and there is no ontological distinction between them. Humans areborn with the capacity to transform their spirit into one of thegods of the Chinese pantheon. The hagiographies included in thisanthology offer details about how some people succeed in becominggods and how godlike exemplars and saints inspire people to followtheir example.The broad range of meaning for the word shen isrelated to the coexistence, sometimes harmonious, sometimes not, ofa number of different idioms for talking about Chinese gods. Anearlier section quoted Xunzi's comment that distinguishes between anaive fear of gods on the part of the uneducated and a pragmatic,agnostic attitude on the part of the literati. Although they sharecommon practices and might use the same words to talk about them,those words mean different things. Similarly, in one of thetranslations in this volume (``Zhu Xi on Spirit Beings''), Zhu Xiuses homonyms and etymology to abstract--to disembody--the usualmeaning of spirits and ghosts. Spirits (_shen_), he says, arenothing but the ``extension'' (_shen_, pronounced the same but infact a different word) of material energy, and ghosts (_gui_)amount to the ``returning'' (_gui_, also homophonous but adifferent word) of material energy.
Chinese gods have been understood--experienced, spoken to,dreamed about, written down, carved, painted--according to a numberof different models. The bureaucratic model (viewing gods asoffice- holders, not individuals, with all the duties and rightsappropriate to the specific rank) is probably the most common butby no means the only one. Spirits are also addressed as sternfathers or compassionate mothers. Some are thought to be more purethan others, because they are manifestations of astral bodies orbecause they willingly dirty themselves with birth and death inorder to bring people salvation. Others are held up as paragons ofthe common values thought to define social life, like obedience toparents, loyalty to superiors, sincerity, or trustworthiness. Stillothers possess power, and sometimes entertainment value, becausethey flaunt standard mores and conventional distinctions.Books onChinese religion can still be found that attempt to portray thespirit--understood in the singular, in the theoretical sense ofessential principle--of Chinese tradition. That kind of book treatsthe subject of gods, if it raises the question at all, as aninteresting but ultimately illogical concern of the superstitious.The primary texts translated in this anthology represent an attemptto move from a monolithic and abstract conception of the Chinesespirit to a picture, or an occasionally contentious series ofpictures, of the many spirits of Chinese religion.
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