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)
M03.1.1 The Zhou Sacrifice to Heaven
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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 03: The Philosophical Preparation of Political Unity
We are going to learn about the meaning of “transcendence” as seen in the sacrifice to Heaven of the “Son of Heaven” (the king and later the emperor) and in the new cosmology of the Dao (Way) and Qi (vital energy).
Rencontrer les enseignants
Prof. John LagerweyResearch Professor
Centre for China Studies
So today we move on to the philosophical preparation of political unity.
And the chapter that we'll be reading today or working on today is written by Jean Levi.
It's called "The Rite, the Norm and the Dao:
Philosophy of Sacrifice and Transcendence of Power in Ancient China."
That's a whole program just in the title,
but let me explain immediately why it's called "the Rite, the Norm and the Dao."
The rite, that refers to the Confucian term <i>li</i> 禮,
the norm refers to the Legalist term <i>fa</i> 法,
and finally Dao refers to the Daoist term <i>dao</i> 道.
And what Jean Levi is looking at is really just in the very last period of the Warring States and even after the end of the Warring States,
the period that leads directly to the founding of this first bureaucratic empire.
And what he shows is that the different currents of thought that are associated traditionally with the names of the Confucians,
or the schools of the Confucians, the Legalists and the Daoists, that they converge into one.
And that preparation for political unity is therefore the ideological unity
that has been constructed prior to the actual unification politically of the first empire.
So to talk about once again this transition from the feudal period, the royal period,
to the imperial bureaucratic period, we have to go back.
We go back to the Zhou and above all to their sacrifice to Heaven.
This is the way Jean Levi describes the sacrifice to Heaven.
He says it's "a doubly nested hierarchy deployed" in the following manner:
on the one hand, you have "a vertical hierarchy of the gods," which includes the ancestors, "to whom one sacrifices."
And then you have "the geographic extent of the fief over which one has authority on the other."
So, a vertical and a horizontal: the vertical is the timeline that goes back to the ancestors close and distant,
and then as we saw all the way up to Heaven or to Di,
and the spatial extension that corresponds to that.
This is how he says that: "The hierarchy of the ancestor cult corresponds to that of the territorial gods."
"Symbolically speaking, to go further back in time means to extend farther spatially.
The Son of Heaven is in charge of the entire empire"—of kingdom we should actually say
—"because he belongs to the eldest lineage segment of all the feudal lords,
who are members of junior lineage branches that at a given moment separated off from the trunk of the [dynastic] genealogical tree."
Okay, so: this reminds us of how that Zhou empire was constructed around kinship and why the sacrifice to the ancestors was still central,
as it had been in the Shang, but we also saw that they had added the sacrifice to Heaven.
And it's precisely by analyzing the sacrifice to Heaven as it was done under the Zhou that Jean Levi shows how that ritual
which had no political meaning anymore could be turned into something that had attitudinal, psychological, and therefore political meaning.
And this is done by analyzing how the sacrifice first to Heaven
and then right after that the sacrifice to the ancestors was done.
So, to both the Heaven and the ancestors, a young <i>niu</i> 牛, a young bullock, was sacrificed.
And there were very special rules for how they were raised, especially the one for Heaven.
But the one for the ultimate ancestor of the Zhou—he's called Houji 后稷,
that is to say the lord of agriculture, because he's seen as, mythologically,
as the person who invented, the sage who invented agriculture.
If something would happen to the bullock being raised for Heaven,
well, then they had to have another one which was raised in exactly the same way with all of the taboos and so on.
And so in fact the second bullock was raised in the same way,
just so that he could replace the bullock for Heaven.
But then how these two bullocks are treated during the course of the sacrifice is extremely interesting.
First of all, the young bullock for Heaven "was killed by arrow shot by the king himself."
So here we're seeing what patrimonial means
—the centrality of the king in this whole operation of the sacrifice to Heaven.
And then first "the blood was collected," which of course always represents life, "and presented as a first offering."
"Then the bullock was placed on a pyre lit by means of a mirror," well, it's a natural process, "and committed to the flames.
This was followed by a ritual pantomime," a kind of dance,
"which exalted the merits of Heaven and gave thanks to Houji," the ancestor,
"for having invented agriculture and created the suburban sacrifice"
—that is to say the sacrifice that they were performing.
But now listen carefully:
"Once the victim had been entirely consumed by the flames and all leftovers had disappeared,
the ashes were swept away and a second offering was made," to Houji,
"according to the protocol of the great sacrifices to the royal ancestors."
So, with the second bullock we're going to have a very different treatment of this bullock,
because he is going to be not burned totally, consumed totally so that there are no leftovers.
On the contrary, part of it, in fact, will be used in raw offering, part of it will be cooked.
And this cooked part will then become what Jean Levi calls a "cascade of leftovers."
Cascade, like a waterfall going down through the levels, the hierarchical levels of society.
So after it's been cooked and then offered to Houji, the ancestor,
it was "first tasted by the gods in the person of the 'corpse'."
Now what on earth is that?
First of all, the gods here are the ancestors
—that's how they're understood.
They're understood as being in Heaven, they're not understood as being down under the earth.
So it's "tasted first by the gods in the person of the 'corpse'."
Who is the corpse?
Well, he's "usually the grandson of the deceased into whom the ancestor has descended."
So, do you recall that we saw that the <i>wu</i>, the shamans, the spirit mediums,
they had gods who descended into their person and they were possessed by that person [god].
So what we're seeing here is that possession was also a part of the ritual sacrifice to the ancestors.
But, why was he called a corpse?
Well, a corpse is someone who's dead.
That means that his person, his souls, if you were [will], are gone, they're obliterated.
So that this empty space of his body can be filled by the spirit of the ancestors.
So this is a perfect description of what possession is.
So here we see once again that the sacrifice to the ancestors,
part of the whole shamanistic or spirit medium tradition,
was also right at the heart of the Zhou dynasty practice of sacrifice, of religion.
So once it had been given to the grandson, it was then passed on to the sovereign,
his three highest officials, and so on,
until "the whole court and nobility" had received its share:
"The lower in rank ate what the higher had left."
This hierarchical communion in the meat of the sacrifice to the ancestor created a "duty of recognition
—the return gift, <i>bao</i> 報," <i>huibao</i> 回報 in modern Chinese
—an absolutely key term that Yang Lien-sheng has written an entire article on that everybody still reads
—because that notion of a return gift—owing somebody a favor, in gratitude for, the expression of thanks
—but also a duty to respond with gift by gift.
So what is the return gift?
It's your absolute loyalty, <i>zhong</i> 忠,
one of the key ethical Confucian concepts, <i>zhong</i> 忠, the other being <i>xiao</i> 孝, the son who must obey his father. <i>Zhong</i> and <i>xiao</i>.
So here we see that the idea
—so we have this feudal blood relationship between the members of the entire feudal territory, but also of the court.
But this is reinforced by means of the sacrifice,
which creates a relationship of obligation:
you've received the meat, you're given in return, you give your loyalty.
And Levi then links this participation in the meat sacrifice to the fact that, "in ancient times, high officials,"
called <i>daifu</i> 大夫, "were called <i>roushizhe</i> 肉食者, meat-eaters."
And then he summarizes what this tells us about the transcendence of Heaven.
Why do I keep using that word "transcendence"?
Because there are a lot of people,
a lot of sinologists, people who study China, ancient China,
who just as they think that there's an ontological monism and therefore completely ignore the dualism of whatever kind,
also think that the Dao is only immanent and not transcendent,
that there is no transcendence like—there's, say, in the biblical tradition,
"the absolute transcendence of god in all the monotheisms."
The point is that there is transcendence in the Chinese tradition.
In fact, we saw it with the previous discussion of how the individual separates himself from politics and becomes transcendent.
In fact, that will be the term that we'll be using increasingly,
instead of <i>chengxian</i> 成仙, becoming an immortal, people prefer to use now, they become transcendents.
So there is a path to transcendence of an individual type,
but there's also a path to transcendence for the sovereign.
And this then is in the Zhou dynasty related to the sacrifice of Heaven, the transcendence of Heaven.
So how is it explained?
Number one, there are no leftovers, because Heaven is indivisible.
The meat can be divided and create a hierarchical
—remember we said that ritual is about segmentation, about distinction between the hierarchical levels.
Heaven is indivisible.
The ancestor is part of that lineage segmentation,
which is expressed by the "cascade of leftovers."
No leftovers. Heaven is indivisible, transcendent.
It depends on no lineage. It's outside the system. And of course it controls the Mandate, <i>tianming</i> 天命.
And Levi's whole chapter is designed to show how, what Heaven was for the Zhou,
the Dao becomes for the imperial bureaucratic empire.
And it's De 德, that we talked about the last time, its inner virtue, its power: that's like the leftovers.
So we have that same balancing act between the sacrifice to Heaven, the sacrifice to ancestors:
it'll become the Dao and its manifestation as power,
whether inner power or political power.
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