![]()
1
Readings of the “Sacred”
Chinese Religion, Chinese Religions, and Religions in China
The subjects on which the Master did not talk were—extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder, and spirits.
—Analects 7, 20
Ji Kang asked: “What kind of man is Confucius?” Ran Qiu, [one of Confucius’s students] replied: “In acting, he is principled; in reaching out to the common people, he tries to value spirits and ghosts so that he would have no regrets. In carrying out his plans, even if he accumulated the wealth of one thousand villages, he would not regard it as a gain.”
—Shiji 47, 1934
The Hegemony of Monotheism, Founding Fathers, and the Necessity of a Chinese Religion
From a methodological point of view, a crucial advance in recent scholarship on the history of religions has been a reappraisal of the influence of unitary and essentialist historiographical biases on analyses of pre-Christian realities and non-Christian religions. Among its most noteworthy contributions, this new direction has led researchers to reconsider the Christian/pagan dichotomy as an anachronistic retrojection, while highlighting the pluralism and fluidity of the ancient Roman cultural world. According to Clifford Ando, for example, the flexibility and adaptability of ancient Roman religion was a consequence of its reliance on orthopraxy, which was in turn based on “empiricist epistemology.” This means that instead of founding their rituals on a scriptural, mythological corpus, ancient Romans privileged direct observations of phenomena purportedly produced by the gods, which could obviously vary. A further insight provided by Ando’s historicization is an interpretation of the Roman religion in pluralistic terms. In his analysis of popular English translations of the Latin religio, he points out that usage of this word in ancient Roman contexts referred to “the sum total of current cult practice.” Namely, among ancient Romans, the word did not refer to an essentialist understanding of religion but rather implied that there existed different religiones—that is, different forms of connection with and commitment to different gods. Consistently, the current study of Roman religion pays particular attention to the tension between prescribed and proscribed, public and private cults as vehicles for the negotiation of identities and hierarchies within and among specific communities of the ancient world. As James Rives observes:
[T]he mainstream Greco-Roman religious tradition, the tradition of the Roman Empire’s social, economic, and political elite … did not conform to the expectations that many people would have of “a religion”: there was no unified and coherent set of beliefs and principles, no sacred scriptures, no priestly class, and no associated moral code. Instead of “a religion” we can more usefully think of it as a group of loosely related but largely distinct ways of thinking about the interacting with the divine world.
The question of religion becomes even more complex when we consider imperial or state religions, where references to the “sacred” are instrumental in justifying institutional changes in terms of continuity with past traditions. Claims about the privileged connection of a particular lineage with the “divine” served the purpose of de-historicizing the origins of the lineage’s political authority. Through association with absolute, transcendental factors or immortal beings that played a crucial role in the foundational phases of a given civilization, the political privileges of certain families and groups become impervious to contingency, despite the possible incompetence, eventual fallibility, and inevitable mortality of their members.
In monotheistic systems, the theoretical coincidence of the “divine of the rulers” with the “divine of the ruled” facilitates propagandistic efforts required for the “sacralization” of specific institutions. For example, the Catholic Church in Italy exploited the resilience of “polytheism” among the common people by formally embracing the countless saints worshipped throughout the peninsula as discrete emanations of the same, unique, and indivisible divine substance. In non-monotheistic systems the de-historicization of power requires more socially nuanced approaches. For example, Octavian Augustus (r. 27 BCE–14 CE) succeeded in legitimizing the establishment of hereditary monarchy by successfully catering to different social groups. Through different media, he famously managed to satisfy different attitudes towards the notion of “divine rulership”—from the openly hostile senators in the capital to commoners and slaves in the western and eastern portions of the empire.
Octavian’s strategy benefited from the relative cultural integration of the Mediterranean world. In those times, save a few exceptions, “religion” did not determine cultural identity and political allegiance in an exclusionary way. In addition, the similitudes among the gods worshipped among Indo-European and non-Indo-European peoples, thanks to millennia of intense contacts and migrations, allowed for the so-called interpretatio romana—the practice of accepting the deities of conquered peoples as simply different versions of those worshipped by the Romans.
As for the Han Empire, at least until Emperor Wu’s death, the extant sources do not attest to the existence of public rituals in which rulers and subjects could participate together. The ceremonies and practices described in the “Confucian” Classics, in which the divine had basically no active function, would become fundamental in defining elite roles and identities only in a later period. At least during the early Han, the coexistence of different regional ritual traditions had not yet given way (and would not for centuries) to a unitary, identitary, or exclusionary conception of the sacred that could be considered “orthodox.” The bureaucratic centralization that progressively brought local ritual activities under the aegis of the government was mainly aimed at fiscal and political control of regional centers of power. Despite the adoption of a common vocabulary for administrative purposes, the process of bureaucratization did not correspond to the creation of a “common religion.” Han documents show that local ritual traditions were not necessarily mutually intelligible.
The identification of China’s political unification with the establishment of shared morals and a coherent vision of the cosmos probably took place in the decades between the Western and Eastern Han. The notion that the elaboration of a “Han state doctrine” corresponded to the formalization of a state religion was the invention of late nineteenth-century Qing reformers. However, betraying a “unitary bias,” scholars have regularly ignored or misinterpreted available evidence. The Sinologist Derk Bodde, for example, author of a seminal work on Han festivals, relied more on later Eastern Han accounts than on the Records’ closer (and in some cases firsthand) descriptions. Lester Bilsky, in his study of state religion in ancient China, admits that “[g]overnment policies during the reign of Emperor Wu were not predicated on a single, coherent philosophical system.” Yet by applying an arbitrary distinction between philosophy and religion, Bilsky interprets Han cults in light of the synthetic approach to “Han Confucianism” that would prevail only later on. Similarly, the temptation of favoring unitary models despite a lack of historical evidence is still conspicuous in otherwise theoretically sophisticated contemporary analyses.
It seems that for professional Sinologists abandoning the construct of a “Chineseness” founded on the cultural preeminence of a holistic cosmology, the integration of moral and political spheres, or the correspondence of macrocosm and microcosm, is tantamount to admitting the subalternity of Chinese civilization. Recently, as the foreign and modern origins of a unitary conception of religion have entered mainstream academic conversations, scholars of China have begun to exercise special caution around the notion of the sacred. Nonetheless, their recourse to “subcategories” such as myth and ritual, secular and sacred, or the distinction between philosophy and religion does not necessarily yield a less problematic approach.
For example, K. E. Brashier, in the most erudite and insightful study to date of the cognitive and social aspects ritual in early China, observes:
The people of early China had no ready word for “religion” as a sui generis discourse, but that of course does not mean that they had no religion. They had many of the components that we may consider “religious”—spirits, prayers, sacrifices, afterlife and so forth—but they simply did not draw a circle around those components and then label the circle as we do.
The problem with this reasoning is that although it seems to relativize the category of “religion” as a non-Chinese creation, it uncritically accepts its traditional attributes, or those elements that we customarily include in the same sphere as religion, i.e. “spirits, prayers, sacrifices, afterlife and so forth.” If we imagined the Abrahamic notion of religion as a jar in which we arbitrarily collect disparate elements of Chinese civilization, we could consider Brashier’s approach as simply removing the label without breaking the glass. Even if we were willing to hold on to the conceit of religion as a meta-cultural and meta-historical notion, should we not prioritize instead the categories and practices that explicitly concerned the ancient Chinese? For example, if, we replaced “religion,” as Brashier does, with the equally foreign notion of “the sacred” (understood as the superior realm of the paradigmatic and superhuman) why should we not also include in the same category all those speculative instruments to which the ancient Chinese would resort to explore their relationship with the cosmos, such as the calendar, music, astronomy, or the art of reading facial features?
Also, if we adopt the phenomenological dichotomy between the spheres of the sacred and of the profane, how ought we to categorize Chinese ghosts and spirits, since their non-human, or more-than-human unruly nature seems to partake of both realms? Finally, should we not feel as uncomfortable in conceptualizing an “early Chinese religion” as we would if we were called to tackle the issue of an early Roman Confucianism since, after all, ancient Romans had patria potestas (i.e., moral and legal authority of fathers) and pietas (i.e., devotion to all kinds of recognized authorities).
My point is that the biggest problems in the more or less implicit application of Abrahamic notions to the study of Early China lie in the (1) old conceit about the preeminence of theological knowledge over all other speculative doctrines; (2) the assumption that the divine or invisible must occupy an ontologically superior realm in early China as well; (3) the idea that the sacred-profane dichotomy can be unproblematically assumed as a cross-cultural category; (4) the fundamental role of religion in defining individual and collective identities in an exclusionary way; (5) the extra-human origin of foundational shared values; (6) and finally the expectation that all societies must conceptualize non-human phenomena as all parts of one integrated system, or coherent universe.
Chinese Religions and Comparative Approaches
In the last three decades, the impact of postmodernism and postcolonialism has prompted the most preeminent American scholars in the field to reconsider the foundational methodology of the comparative study of religion. Postmodernism has discredited universalistic approaches, both phenomenological and diffusionist, as well as the search for meta-narratives, while radically challenging the epistemological premises of the knowability of the Other. Postcolonialism, on the other hand, has deconstructed traditional Western scholarly attitudes toward non-European civilizations, denouncing their foundations as ethnocentric and driven by more or less overt cultural and political imperialism. Under the severe scrutiny of these intellectual movements, the comparative study of religions suddenly appeared inadequate, arbitrary, or illegitimate. In short, it was clearly in need of a radical overhaul.
A Magic Still Dwells, a collection of papers given at the American Academy of Religion in 1995 and 1996, provided a compelling defense of cross-cultural approaches. By building on the work of Jonathan Z. Smith, the authors proposed a new framework that is more focused on historical processes and the specificity of contexts, while programmatically aware of the biases and agen...
