This sequence of four courses will propose a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of Chinese cultural history conceived of as a succession of modes of rationality (philosophical, bureaucratic, and economic). The focus will be on the moments of paradigm shift from one mode of rationality to another. For each of these moments, cultural facts and artifacts—thought, literature, ritual—will be examined in relationship to changing social, political, and economic systems. The first two courses will cover the periods of the Warring States (481-256 BCE) and the Period of Division (220-589 CE), with a brief excursion into the Han (206 BCE-220 CE). The Warring States laid the social and cultural foundations for the emergence of the imperial mode of rationality; the Period of Division saw the Buddhist “conquest” of China and the emergence of a rationality defined by the opposition of the Three Teachings to shamanism, that is, of a clear contrast between elite and popular culture. The third and fourth courses will focus on the emergence of modern China in the Song-Yuan (960-1368) and of today’s China 1850 to the present. We will see how the modern attack on religion, redefined as "superstition", led not only to religious reform movements but also to a society in which science and the nation became the primary value systems promoted by the state. The courses are listed below: A Critical Cultural History of China - Early China I: Intellectual Change in the Warring States and Han (481 BCE-220 CE) A Critical Cultural History of China - Early China II: Religious Transformation in the Period of Division (220-589 CE) A Critical Cultural History of China - Modern China I: Religion and Thought in the Song, Jin, and Yuan (960-1368) A Critical Cultural History of China - Modern China II: Structuring Values (1850-2015)
M04.1 Local and Dynastic Religion in the Han
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Intellectual Change in Early China: Warring States and Han
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The Chinese University of Hong Kong
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MODULE 04: Han Religion
This module is about local and imperial religion in the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 BC).
Meet the Instructors
Prof. John LagerweyResearch Professor
Centre for China Studies
So today we're going to leave the Warring States and we're going into the Han dynasty, Han religion.
The Han dynasty is divided into two: the Western Han, starting 206 BC, 205, down to 9 AD.
Then there was an interregnum called the New dynasty,
headed by Wang Mang 王莽, a usurper but who founds his own dynasty,
so there's a period from 9 to 25 AD. And then the Eastern Han begins in 25 AD and continues until 220 AD.
Now, I point out right away that this means that we're no longer in the period of paradigm shift,
so why do we want to look at the Han dynasty if this whole course is about periods of paradigm shift?
Because we want to see what the result looks like.
After all of this period of transformation, radical transformation, how does the result look in practice?
Okay? So: to do that we're going to be looking at a text, a chapter,
by Marianne Bujard, entitled "State and Local Cults in Han Religion." And as soon as we say "state and local,"
we realize that, once again, we have to think,
if we're talking about Chinese religion, not just about what's happening up on top,
but also what's happening down below in local society. And what we're going to discover, first of all,
about local religion is that self-cultivation, which we saw was so important in this period—
important not only subjectively for individuals who were engaging in self-cultivation,
but also important for the definition of the ideal subject, the <i>zhenren</i> 真人, the true, real person that the sovereign is supposed to be.
So self-cultivation leads to a new kind of god that we'll call the immortals or transcendents.
The Chinese is <i>xian</i> 仙, which is a human being next to a mountain,
sort of indicative of the fact that they often lived in distant places, outside,
far from the madding crowd. So that's local religion on the one hand.
The second of course is dynastic religion.
Imperial ancestors are only associated with Heaven in the Han dynasty in the sacrifice to Heaven,
and Heaven is no longer so much the home of the ancestors, as it is the source of the circular and astral rationality of the seasons.
We've talked about that, but I remind you: "In the Hall of Light," says Marianne Bujard, "in the Hall of Light," the Mingtang 明堂,
"the king had to model his conduct on Heaven, 'changing lodging, costume, and food according to the seasons'."
We've already mentioned Taiyi 太一, the Great One.
But Taiyi is particularly interesting, because we're going to
discover a convergence of the local and the dynastic, completely unexpected.
So let's start with the dynastic.
In 113 BC, Han Wudi, who reigned from 140 to 87 BC —one of the longest reigns before the reigns of Qianlong 乾隆
and Kangxi 康熙 in the Qing dynasty—
he is convinced by people called in Chinese <i>fangshi</i> 方士—translated "recipe masters,"
because <i>shi</i> can be translated as masters; <i>fang</i> can be <i>fangfa</i> 方法, that is recipes, methods.
It can also be <i>difang</i> 地方, local, from a specific area, but in any case, <i>fangshi</i> we'll call them "recipe masters"—
so he's convinced by a group of recipe masters coming from Shandong, what is today Shandong province,
that if he were to worship Taiyi, he could become immortal.
Wait a minute!
That means that this new dynastic worship, sacrifice— because all dynastic worship involves sacrifice of animals—
it's about becoming immortal, that is to say becoming one of these immortals or transcendents.
And we already saw the story of the Yellow Emperor, of Huangdi, also the sovereign,
but who also wants to become immortal. So: in 113 BC, then,
he's convinced by them that he should do the worship of Taiyi, and Taiyi is given the same offerings as the Wudi 五帝, the Five Emperors,
plus dates, <i>zao</i> 栆 in Chinese, and dried meat that immortals like. So special offerings, especially for the immortals.
We've already referred to the Wudi, but let me just remind you again who these are.
There's a story, probably apocryphal, but the story is that Han Gaozu 漢高祖—that is to say the founder of the Han dynasty,
who came as we said from the state of Chu 楚, Liu Bang 劉邦—that when he came to power,
he discovered that in the place called Yong 雍, way up in northwest China,
that the Qin had sacrifices to four emperors. And he said, but there's one missing;
I thought there were five emperors, for each of the five directions.
And then he says: Oh! I know! They were waiting for me to show up to add the fifth,
as I recall it was the Emperor of the North—doesn't matter. What matters is that from the very beginning of the Han dynasty
under the founder there is a new form of sacrifice, dynastic sacrifice, to the Wudi, the Five Emperors.
Why? Well, it's obvious that in the Dao, Qi, <i>yin</i> <i>yang</i>, <i>wuxing</i>—
this new cosmology which is so central to everything in the rest of Chinese history,
Chinese medicine, Chinese dynastic imagination, and so forth and so on—
that there had to be some kind of incarnation of each of these five elements,
these <i>wuxing</i> or five agents as they're sometimes called. And so this is the origin of the concept of the Wudi,
of which Huangdi then is the central one, and of course then of the sacrifices.
So again, the Wudi as a set of gods, they represent structuring values, they represent this whole cosmology,
they summarize this new cosmology of Qi.
And this then is converted into a mode of practice: practice of structuring values.
So then why add Taiyi? Well, because you can become immortal.
But we also saw that Taiyi is compared to the Dao.
The term Taiyi designates both undifferentiated unity, a kind of abstract concept of total unity,
before the individuation of beings, before the separation of <i>yin</i> and <i>yang</i>, of Heaven and Earth, and the origin of creation.
So it's very close to the concept that we talked about last time of <i>hundun</i> 渾沌, of chaos.
It represents that unity before things split into <i>yin</i> and <i>yang</i> and <i>wuxing</i> and so on.
In addition, Wudi after all, there's five of them, who is my <i>duixiang</i> 對象,
if I'm the emperor, if I'm the <i>guren</i> 孤人, the solitary person, the Son of Heaven?
It's not like there's an "alter-ego." And so here is Taiyi, master of the Five Emperors.
He becomes "a kind of alter-ego of the emperor in the divine world."
And this of course is where it becomes interesting to note that he lived in a constellation in the center of the heavens called the <i>ziweigong</i> 紫微宮,
the Purple Empyrean Palace.
The ruler sacrificed to Taiyi in the center.
That is to say, on the altar, the <i>tan</i> 壇, which was prepared for the sacrifice to Taiyi,
"the place that was originally occupied by the Yellow Emperor," in the center, was now given to Taiyi.
And what happened to Huangdi then? Well, he got pushed off into the southwest.
Why the southwest? Because the southwest is the center of the year,
between the <i>yang</i> half of the year spring, summer and the <i>yin</i> half of the year autumn, winter.
At the end of summer beginning of fall,
well, that's the center of the year, so Huangdi gets pushed off to the southwest.
This <i>tan</i> in addition is an altar of pounded earth, <i>hangtu</i> 夯土,
of "three stories and eight entrances"; they're called <i>baguidao</i> 八鬼道:
the paths for all the spirits to come and converge on this <i>tan</i>.
And of course they're all placed in very specific places all around.
So in fact this <i>tan</i> represents a huge pantheon incorporating all the gods,
you could say that it represents sacrificial rationalization, sacrificial rationality.
"Along with the Great One," himself, "and the Five Emperors,
a multitude of gods were honored including the Sun, the Moon, the Big Dipper."
If you go to Beijing today, there's a <i>ritan</i> 日壇 and a <i>yuetan</i> 月壇 still left over, okay?
And this also recalls the worship of these star bodies, these astral bodies,
and of course the Big Dipper. Why the Big Dipper?
The Big Dipper is always the third of the three heavenly bodies which always goes together with the sun and the moon.
Why? Well, first of all, once again we see 1 plus 2 equals 3.
Because the sun of course is <i>yang</i>.
It's what lights up our day and so we live in the light of the sun; it's called <i>yangjian</i> 陽間.
But of course the light, the astral body of the night, is the moon, and so if this one is <i>yang</i>, that one is <i>yin</i>,
just as the day is <i>yang</i> and the night is <i>yin</i>.
But what then transcends that duality of the sun and the moon, of the <i>yang</i> and the <i>yin</i>,
it's always that third term, and the third term is the Big Dipper. <i>Beidou</i> 北斗, it's called in Chinese.
Why? Well, for that, you have to think about—most of us don't know that sort of information anymore,
because we can find it on Google,
and most of us don't spend our time traveling on the seas and having to find out where we are without GPS and using compasses and so on—
but where to find the north was of course always extremely important for orientation.
And so the Chinese, with a study of the sky, the <i>tiandao</i> 天道, the Heavenly Way,
that we've talked about before,
they discovered this regularity and of course they discovered that the Big Dipper, the <i>beidou</i>,
always is going around the <i>beiji</i> 北極, that is to say this Polar Star,
the Polar Star that Confucius in Chapter II says that the sovereign is like the Polar Star:
he's in the center of the heavens and all of the stars circle around him through the year.
So the one fixed spot in the center of the night heavens—not the day heavens, of the night heavens,
with those <i>tianwen</i> 天文, those heavenly patterns, those constellations— the center of course is the <i>beiji</i>, the Polar Star, the Pole Star.
But where we are in the year can be discovered by the position of the <i>beidou</i>,
the Big Dipper, with respect to the Pole Star.
And so the Big Dipper was placed on what I referred to in the last presentation,
it's placed on this <i>shi</i> 式, which is the ancestor of the <i>luopan</i> 羅盤, and so you had a movable top part of the <i>shi</i>,
which you could position to adapt the <i>yinyang wuxing bagua</i> and so on, you could adapt it to the particular moment, the time of year, okay?
So: the <i>beidou</i> is extremely important and to this day one of the texts that every Daoist knows how to recite is the <i>Beidoujing</i> 北斗經, okay?
So: the altar and the rites for Taiyi that we've just described in a very succinct way became the model for the sacrifice to Heaven.
You say, but wait a minute.
The sacrifice to Heaven, we talked about that last time,
it was done in the Zhou dynasty. Yes,
well, wait a minute, maybe it was.
There's a debate about that.
I'm quite convinced that it was, but the point is that it stopped at some point—
if it ever existed and was not just an ideal system that was written down in the Books of Ritual.
And it was reconstructed out of fragments of information that had survived in the different ritual books.
So as the Five Classics, the so-called <i>sanli</i> 三禮—
the <i>Liji</i> 禮記, the <i>Yili</i> 儀禮, and the <i>Zhouli</i> 周禮—
the three collections of rituals that was made in the Han dynasty,
with texts which are more ancient than the imperial period, that come from the royal period,
but still, these were used by the literati during the Han dynasty to reconstruct a sacrifice to Heaven,
you'll see why in a moment. So the rites for Taiyi that we just described,
with that whole pantheon, with the <i>sanjie</i> 三階,
the three steps up to the center, and the eight entryways called <i>guidao</i>,
which of course corresponds to the <i>bagua</i>—that <i>tan</i>,
that altar became the model for the sacrifice to Heaven that was first done by Wang Mang,
who reigned from 9 to 23 AD, and then it was performed by the founder of the Eastern Han, Guangwudi 光武帝.
And then it continued to be done on the Tiantan, now in Beijing, before that in Nanjing,
but of course the capital has shifted over the centuries back and forth over many many different places.
But every capital built a Tiantan for the emperor to perform the sacrifice to Heaven based on the original sacrifice to Taiyi.
Okay, we're going to leave for the moment,
we're going to leave that sacrifice, the dynastic sacrifice to Taiyi,
and we're going to talk about one of the most famous immortals in Chinese history.
He's called Wangzi Qiao 王子喬.
And in the year 136 AD, we have an inscription,
a <i>beike</i> 碑刻, that says that he made a "miraculous appearance" in that year.
And so the local magistrate built a temple which "soon became the meeting place of Daoist followers.
Masses of devotees would gather in search of healing or to practice meditation."
So here we're suddenly shifting to local religion built around an immortal,
Wangzi Qiao, with people—commoners, ordinary people—coming,
always in search of the first thing—healing, but also to practice meditation,
because of course meditation is related to healing, long-term healing,
you might say it's preventive medicine.
"The inscription notes that prayers that came from sincere hearts would be fulfilled,
while hypocrites would suffer the opposite." So this too is interesting,
because what we see here is that the idea of sincerity which was so central to the Confucian,
elite Confucian cult, is now also important in a commoner's cult.
"'Good faith' <i>qiancheng</i> 虔誠," again that term <i>cheng</i>,
good faith here, faith is sincerity,
"was always a prerequisite for those who wanted to be understood by the deity.
Wangzi Qiao also attracted devotees who gathered at his temple to"—listen carefully!—
"to sing hymns to the Great One and to meditate on the organs of their bodies,
a practice linked, like the ingestion of drugs,
to the quest for immortality." So here we have commoners singing hymns to the Great One,
the same—so about two hundred years after we saw Wudi making the sacrifice to Taiyi,
but remember that it had come from these <i>fangshi</i> who are local specialists of immortality in the far east,
Shandong.
"And to meditate on the organs of their bodies."
So what we have here is ordinary commoners practicing an interiorized version of an imperial sacrificial cult
that was itself derived from <i>fangshi</i> self-cultivation practices:
Self-cultivators could become immortals, a new kind of god, as we've already said.
And Taiyi, the newest high god,
is locatable both in the "celestial writings," the <i>tianwen</i>,
in the center of the heavens and in the human body. Now we don't know exactly what text these people,
these devotees of Wangzi Qiao had in the middle of the second century, but we do have another text called <i>Laozi zhongjing</i> 老子中經,
which probably dates also from the second century. And in it we have many Taiyi,
so from this we can understand more or less what they must've been meditating on.
And this image of the body in the <i>Laozi zhongjing</i> starts up here (above the head).
And up here there's a god called Shangshang Taiyi 上上太一, Up Up Taiyi,
Taiyi way up there.
And then there's another Taiyi when you get down here on the top of the head and then he's also here in the eyes,
which are the sun and the moon.
And then you get down here (at the level of the breast) and you find him again,
and down in the lower belly you find him again.
So there's all different manifestations of Taiyi and of course of the sun and the moon,
also down in the lower belly with the kidneys, okay?
So: these gods which are out there are also inside and this of course according to the principle
first enunciated by Laozi [Mencius] that <i>wanwu douzainei</i> 萬物都在內: you can shut off the <i>wuguan</i> 五官, the five senses.
In <i>neiguan</i> 內觀, you can turn inward and meditate on the energy centers in your body, okay?
So out there, up there, but also in here, okay?
So: here we see how self-cultivation is producing a new kind of god which is shared in fact with the emperor,
at least the Han Wudi, because after that the cult to Taiyi was replaced by the sacrifice to Heaven,
which we'll come back to. So what do we have here?
Well, we have a process of rationalization,
clearly, where we saw at the end of the last session,
we saw how the literati did everything to exclude—the whole system,
dynastic system was to make sure that it was absolutely clear that the Son of Heaven was the Son of Heaven and there's only one.
And so the people were excluded, <i>libuxia shumin[ren]</i> 禮不下庶民[人],
the rites don't go down to the people, okay?
But here we see this new cosmological system and its forms of self-cultivation
producing a kind of rationalization which incorporates both the top and the bottom.
So we can also speak of a universalization, a <i>pujihua</i> 普及化,
that is to say that something becomes common to top and bottom, to low and high.
And of course we can speak of popularization, that is to say,
we start to know things actually about how popular religion functions,
because this is clearly popular religion of a very very different kind from the popular religion
of the shamans or the spirit mediums that we talked about back in the Warring States period.
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