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Chapter 1 A Brief History of the Pantheon: Ancestors and Gods in State and Local Religion and Politics In my book published in 1987, Daoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History, I made the outrageous claim that, with regard to the legitimization of dynasties, Confucianism never held a candle to Daoism.1 I had expected howls of protest, but to my surprise, the only response was deafening silence. I consoled myself with the thought that historians had better things to do than read descriptions of Daoist ritual in Tainan. I probably would have left matters at that had I not come upon David Faure’s book on The Structure of Chinese Rural Society. In reviewing it,2

The results of these case studies will be the subject of subsequent chapters, so I will say no more of them here. But in this opening chapter, it seems to me crucial to sketch the background for the chapters to follow, in order to underscore to what degree the same questions inhabit them all: what is the place of Daoist ritual in Chinese society and history? What does our recovery of this foreclosed chapter of Chinese history imply for our understanding of Chinese society, whether viewed from the bottom or from the top? If I have chosen to begin with the top-down view, it is because we know very little of local society in early China, and the history of state religion prior to the emergence of religious Daoism in the second century of our era is vital to our understanding of how Daoism has interacted with state and society since.

I focused on the fact that New Territories lineages created in accord with Confucian ideology invited Daoists to do Jiao 醮 for territorial gods in the lineage hall. If then on the village level there was a lineage (xueyuan 血緣) and a territorial (diyuan 地緣) China, a China of (Confucian) time and history and a China of (Daoist) space and cosmos, then the same Confucian misreading of China I had denounced on the level of the state was just as patent on the level of local society. This in turn led me to concentrate my fieldwork on local society in an attempt to see, from a multitude of case studies, whether Faure’s observations in Hong Kong could be extended to other parts of China.

Pre-imperial China (1250-221 BC) I used to think there was a clear-cut case for contrasting the virtual omnipotence of an anthropomorphic high god Di 帝 in the Shang with the lesser powers of the lineage ancestors: that Di alone could order (ling 令) and give consent (nuo 諾), that he had a court, and that he was in charge of success in warfare and hence the fate of the state, as well as of the weather and hence of the harvest. Robert Eno has convinced me we must be more prudent. In the first place, virtually everything we can say about the Shang “pantheon” depends on oracle bones from the reign of Wuding (1250–1192 BC). Second, Di may be understood simply as a generic term for the Powers. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the fact Di alone does not receive sacrifice may be the best proof that he is indeed a

1 The exact statement is as follows (John Lagerwey, Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History (New York: Macmillan, 1987), p. 274: “Chinese political history is indeed one of an unequal contest between Confucianism and Taoism but contrary to what has always been said, it is Confucianism which never had a prayer, not Taoism.” 2 John Lagerwey, review of The Structure of Chinese Rural Society: Lineage and Village in the Eastern New Territories, by David Faure, in Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 5, 1990), pp. 445–8.

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high god. Eno also mentions the ideas of David Pankenier to the effect that “Di was conceived as a function of astronomical aspects of Shang religion . . . [He notes] the care with which foundations of palatial and ceremonial structures were aligned in relation to the North Celestial Pole.” Pankenier also argues that Di dwelt at the true Pole and links him to Taiyi 太一 of the fourth century.3

However we read the Shang data, everyone seems to agree that the Zhou invented Heaven and its Mandate (tianming 天命). According to Eno, the earliest reference in the bronzes dates to ca. 998 BC, when King Kang is described as saying to a minister: “I have heard that the Yin lost the Mandate because the greater and lesser lords and the many officials assisting the Yin sank into drunkenness and so were bereft of their capital.” The concomitant term “Son of Heaven” (tianzi 天子) “becomes pervasive in the inscriptional record from the reign of King Mu (r. ca. 976–922 BC) on.”

If that could be proven, the virtually automatic character of the ritual-calendrical cycle of the late Shang would also appear as a harbinger of the later link between the emperor’s person and the calendar, and the apparent contradiction between the probably anthropomorphic high god Di of Wuding’s pantheon and his disappearance under later kings in favor of ritual automaticity would be just that: apparent.

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Having spoken of Heaven, we must speak of Earth, for its cult too is an integral part of the construction and representation of power. Kominami Ichiro traces the basic features of the earth god cult back to King Tang, founder of the Shang ca. 1600 BC and of its first capital in Bo 亳. Kominami cites three references in the oracle bones to Botu, “earth of Bo 亳土” and concludes from their analysis that the earth god (tu 土, understood as she 社) “represented the earth of an area, especially an agricultural area.”

An ethical Heaven that gives the Mandate to the worthy had clear propaganda value for the usurping Zhou. The virtual reduction of the pantheon of the written record to Heaven and the ancestors, together with the fact that Di would seem to be the equivalent of Tian, seems to imply that a shift has also occurred from the anthropomorphic to the abstract and philosophical: Tian is at once the physical heavens of the astronomers and the calendar and a moral “being” not unlike the Hebrew God. Both Confucianism and Daoism will exploit that ambiguity, albeit in quite different ways.

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3 Robert Eno, “Shang State Religion and the Pantheon of the Oracle Texts,” in Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC–AD 220), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 73–4.

The degree to which this cult site was linked with human sacrifice — Kominami wonders whether the drops around the mound on some oracle bones might represent blood — may explain why much later texts refer to the “people-eating she.” As a site which represented conquest, it was also inseparable from the ancestors in whose name conquest was undertaken. So tight was the link, says Kominami, that royal armies could go into battle without the ancestor tablets and carrying only the clods of earth taken from the Boshe 亳社, these clods representing the ancestors and their previous conquests. The relationship of the earth god to Heaven may be seen in the fact it was represented by an open-air tan 壇, and the Shang Boshe in the various states were converted into roofed-in wooden

4 Ibid., p. 101. 5 Kominami Ichirô, “Rituals for the Earth,” in Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC–AD 220), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 216–7.

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enclosures when these states were conquered by the Zhou. Finally, in the myth of Yu 禹taming the flood waters and creating the Nine Continents (jiuzhou 九州) by “spreading out the earth” (futu 敷土) stolen from Heaven by his father Gun 鯀, the cosmic and heavenly dimensions of the earth god cult are clear. As Kominami says, this is xirang息壤, “living earth,” and represents the vitality of Heaven (and the ancestors) transmitted to earth. The she, he suggests in conclusion, is a mediator between Heaven and Earth, because the original clod comes from Heaven and represents the place where the ancestors first “landed” on earth.6

The next step along the way is what has come to be called, since Jessica Rawson first introduced the notion, the “ritual revolution” (or reform) of the ninth century BC. In Lothar von Falkenhausen’s rendition, this reform may be summarized as a transition from shamanistic “dionysian” to formalized “apollonian” rituals. This change may be seen in the move from the mask-like animal decorations of Shang and early Western Zhou bronzes to the abstract, geometric designs of the late Western Zhou, the replacement of wine by meat and grain vessels, the new prominence of chime-bells, the emergence of “standard sets of vessels which were correlated with élite ranks according to strict sumptuary rules,” and, finally, the appearance of new types of vessel that “seem deliberately simple and humble . . . This suggests a desire to reform the spirit of ritual by reducing its complexity and linking it with everyday activities.”

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So vital were the meat vessels to the reformed Zhou order that, in later texts, “eaters of meat” (roushizhe肉食者) referred to the nobility, defined by its right to a share of the “leftovers” of the sacrifices to the ancestors. In the Zhou, the ultimate ancestor was Houji 后稷, lord of grains. According to the Liji 禮記 (Book of Rites), he was sacrificed to secondarily, after the sacrifice to Heaven. Young bulls were first selected by divination and then fed a special diet. The first bull, for Heaven, was burned entirely, while the second, for Houji, was offered in the first place to the grandson — referred to as a “cadaver” (shi 尸) — who represented him in the ritual drama.

8 Thus, as Jean Levi points out, Heaven and the Ancestor did not receive the same victim, and the sacrifice created a radical separation between Heaven on the one hand and ancestors and humans on the other. After the “cadaver” had tasted them, the “leftovers” were presented, first to the king, then to his three highest officials, and so on, in ever-widening circles, until the entire class of nobles had received its share of “blessed food.” “Heaven receives no leftovers but also gives none. It is the source of all leftovers, but no leftovers return to Heaven nor emanate from it. The food Heaven receives involves no leftovers and is foreign to the law of leftovers because it is indivisible.”9

Read in this light, the lack of sacrifice to Di in the Shang would be precisely what implies transcendence: the origin or foundation of a system — its premise — must be outside the system.

6 Ibid., pp. 233–4. 7 Lothar von Falkenhausen, Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (1000–250 BC): The Archaeological Evidence (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, 2006), pp. 48–51. 8 The use of this term suggests quite clearly that the grandson had to be possessed by the ancestor in order to represent him. 9 Jean Levi, “The Rite, the Norm, and the Dao: Philosophy of Sacrifice and Transcendence of Power in Ancient China,” in Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC–AD 220), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2009), p. 657.

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In the rest of the chapter by Jean Levi just cited, he shows how, in the late pre- and early imperial periods, the contending schools of thought characteristic of the Warring States (481–221 BC) sought, each in its own way, to prepare and then justify a unified political order. For the Confucians the key concept was li 禮, ritual, for the Legalists fa 法, norm, and for the Daoists dao 道, way. The Dao as expression of a transcendent Whole, prior to division into Yin and Yang and prior to analysis, becomes the cosmic model for the Saint, that is, the emperor. As the source of all laws and norms, which the ruler applies implacably, he is himself above the law or, rather, he is the law. But this law is itself but the social version of natural law, of the law embodied in the calendar and given ritual expression in the Mingtang 明堂, the Hall of Light. All of this converges in the new myths of the Yellow Emperor 黃帝,10

that is, the invention of the center:

The Yellow Emperor achieved pre-eminence in myths and, as a result, came to serve as a federating symbol of all the diverse themes of sovereignty because he reigned over the center, and because that position is not a priori a part of the cycle of the seasons. If liturgical time coincides with the seasonal cycle, this also means that social and natural norms are replicas one of the other. For the laws decreed by Heaven have as a counterpart the laws promulgated by the sovereign. It is by means of the rites that the laws of nature receive their necessary translation into social action. But in becoming the model of human time, the cycle of seasons is subverted and spatialized. This spatialization is visible in the transition from the four natural to the five ritual seasons, obeying the law of classification by five for the elements. But there is no fifth season. There is no middle of the year. It is but the mark of the centrality of the royal figure par excellence, symbolized by the Yellow Emperor, who reigns from the center of the earth over a fictive season. Emperor of an abstract and supernumerary season, the Yellow Emperor, exemplary image of sovereignty, rules over time. Like the Dao, and like Heaven in the Zhou liturgy, he is at once the vacant point and the motor on which the entire system depends and converges. That is why he has such an intimate link to Taiyi, of whom he is the terrestrial counterpart, but also to Heaven in his role as pivot and central point. In the imperial cult, the Yellow Emperor is constantly assimilated to Taiyi, expression of sovereign power and compass for human conduct, just as the sovereign carries out his civilizing work by circulating in the Hall of Light.11

The center of power is like the hub of Laozi’s wheel which, because it is itself empty of all particularity and specification, holds the wheel together and enables it to turn. If we imagine the spokes emanating from this hub as leading to the specific places of local

10 “Yellow Emperor” is the traditional translation, and I personally long resisted using the alternative translation of di as “thearch” (Edward Schafer), primarily because it was a hybrid neologism combining the Latin theos (“god”) and English “monarch.” But I have come more recently to see this alternate translation as a stroke of genius that underscores the theological nature of Chinese political theorizing: emperors are gods, and it is less a matter of projecting this world onto that as of retrojecting that world onto this. In what follows, however, “thearch” will be primarily used to refer to the divine emperors of the spirit world. 11 Ibid., pp. 671–2. On Taiyi (Great One), see below, the section on Qin and Han in this chapter.

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society, we must ask of what the spokes are made that they can link hub to wheel? The answer is given by the Classic of Mountains, in which local society is represented in terms of geographic situation, specific products, resources, and, above all, gods, together with their iconography and preferred offerings. The spokes linking center to periphery are thus central recognition of local cults expressed in regular dispatch of offerings to them. The Qin and Han (221 BC-220 AD) The stele inscriptions of the First Emperor are an excellent window on his religious policies. The earliest, for Mount Yi, dated 219, refers in its very first line to the title the First Emperor adopted for himself in 221, huangdi 皇帝, which Martin Kern translates as August Thearch and says has “quasi-religious significance.”12 The emperor goes on to recall how he had reported his conquest of the “six cruel and violent ones” — the last rival states — in his ancestral temple, making manifest the “way of filial piety” (xiaodao 孝道): “Now today, the August Thearch has unified all under heaven under one lineage.”13 If in his first proclamation in the year 221, the First Emperor ascribed his successes “to power he had received from the ancestral temple,”14 he also invested in a great number of other sacrifices to the sacred mountains, main rivers, civilizing heroes, and ancient kings. By the fall of the Qin in 207 BC, there were more than one hundred shrines to “cosmic, mostly astral spirits in Yong alone.”15 Among the sacrifices performed in this ancient Qin capital there must have been one to the Five Emperors or Thearchs (wudi 五帝), for in one of the stele inscriptions, the merits of the emperor are said to “surpass those of the Five Thearchs.”16

If I make special mention of this point, it is because the cult of the Five Thearchs, reflection of the cosmo-calendrical foundations of the newly created imperial power, is usually associated with the “Han synthesis.” Indeed, the traditional account of the origin of the cult, found in Sima Qian’s Records of the Historian (Shiji 史記), says the Qin worshiped only four divine emperors in Yong, and it was the Han Founding Ancestor, Gaozu, who added the fifth, to the Thearch of the North. The importance of this cult to the definition of imperial power may be seen from two facts: when the First Emperor made history’s first fengshan 封禪 sacrifice on Taishan 泰山 to lay claim to the Heavenly Mandate, he made use of the rites of Yong; the Han Martial Emperor, Wudi (r. 134–89 BC), made the Yong sacrifices no less than ten times, on occasion even going in person.

But the real religious novelty of the Former Han was the introduction of the worship of the Great One, Taiyi 太一. In the year 135 BC one Miu Ji, a “master of recipes” (fangshi 方士) from Shandong,17

12 Martin Kern, The Stele Inscriptions of Ch’in Shih-huang: Text and Ritual in Early Chinese Imperial Representation (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2000), p. 10.

having explained the Great One was the master of the Five Thearchs, persuaded the Martial Emperor to have the ritual performed on an altar built in the southeastern suburb of the capital. In 114 BC, the discovery of a tripod

13 Kern, ibid., pp. 12–3. 14 Ibid., p. 61. 15 Ibid., p. 59. 16 Ibid., p. 33. 17 It has always intrigued me that he is said to have come from a place called Bo, as in Botu; cf. below, the “birthplace” of Laozi. The literal meaning of his name, Erroneous Taboos, is also strange, to say the least.

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provided an opening for one Gongsun Qing, another master of recipes from Shandong. According to Gongsun, this discovery made the emperor, like the Yellow Thearch, a candidate for immortality. He told the emperor to put the tripod in the ancestral temple and to build an altar to sacrifice to the Great One in Ganquan 甘泉, 70 kilometers northwest of the capital. The altar, based on that of Miu Ji, placed the Great One in the center, flanked by the Five Thearchs — the Yellow Thearch was moved to the south-west, corresponding to his position in the “center” of the year — and a vast number of other deities was arrayed around them. The ritual used was that of Yong, as were the offerings, with the addition of the jujubes and dried meat that immortals liked. Soon thereafter, the Martial Emperor built a Hall of Light and made sacrifices in it to the Great One and the Five Thearchs on the upper floor and, on the lower, to Earth.18

According to Marianne Bujard, the sacrifice in Ganquan became the model of the reinvented sacrifice to Heaven in the southern suburb (nanjiao 南郊) first performed by Wang Mang (r. AD 9–23) and then by the Brilliant Martial Emperor (Guangwudi 光武帝, r. AD 25–57), founder of the Latter Han. This became the standard sacrifice on the Altar of Heaven (tiantan 天壇) of all successive dynasties until 1914.

19 Wang Mang set a pattern for what were in fact parallel sacrifices to Heaven and Earth by associating the Han founder, Gaozu, with Heaven, and his wife, the Empress Lü, with Earth. The name Wang Mang used for Heaven, Huangtian Shangdi Taiyi 皇天上帝太一, August Heaven Thearch on High Great One, shows it to be a synthesis of all previous high gods and confirms the central role of the Great One, who is in the Han at once associated with the Polestar (beiji 北極) and portrayed in anthropomorphic manner on the famous Mawangdui document on silk.20

Some staggering statistics give perhaps the best measure of the Han imperial investment in religion: in 31 BC the chief minister Kuang Heng 匡衡 reduced the number of officially supported sites of worship from 683 to 208 and also eliminated 200 of 373 sites for Han ancestor worship. He was, however, removed from office the following year, and by the end of Wang Mang’s reign, the number of cult sites had soared to 1700.

The Vast Martial Emperor also followed Wang Mang in building a Hall of Light south of the capital, where sacrifices were performed until the building was destroyed in the year 219.

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For local cults, the Former Han had a bureau of “shamans” (wu 巫) composed of wu from each of the formerly warring states. It also had a process involving written

The sites for ancestor worship are particularly interesting: when the father of the Han founder died in 197 BC, the emperor ordered the creation of sites of worship for his father throughout the empire, and the same was done for him when he died two years later. This explains why, at the time of the failed reforms of Kuang Heng, there were 167 shrines in the provinces and 176 in the capital city, plus 30 sites dedicated to the memory of various empresses.

18 Michael Loewe, Chinese Ideas of Life and Death (London: Allen & Unwin, 1962), p. 132. 19 Marianne Bujard, “State and Local Cults in Han religion.” In Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang

through Han (1250 BC–AD 220), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski, Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 777–811: 794. This tan, in turn, is the model for the Daoist altar space: see my “Taoist Ritual Space and Dynastic Legitimacy,” (Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 8, 1993), pp. 87–94.

20 Li Ling, “An archaeological study of Taiyi 太 一 (Grand One) worship,” translated by Donald Harper in Early Medieval China 2 (1995–96), p. 35. 21 Loewe, pp. 138, 141.

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reports and inspections to vet local gods, as can be seen in a series of six steles dating AD 117–83 from a single Hebei mountain site. One new kind of local god in the Han is the “immortal” (xian 仙), such as Wangzi Qiao 王子僑, said in a stele to have first appeared in Henan in AD 136. The prefect built a temple for him, and it became a center for adepts who sang hymns to the Great One and meditated on their principal vital organs. The site was sufficiently famous for Huandi (r. 146–68) to have sent a representative to sacrifice to him in 165, the same year he made sacrifice to Laozi: Daoism, in both its local and national forms, had been born.22 The state could also intervene to repress local gods, as in the case of Luan Ba, prefect of Yuzhang (modern Nanchang): seeing the people in his charge ruining themselves for sacrifices to the gods of the mountains and rivers, he destroyed all private cults (fangsi 房祀) and had the shamans executed: “Then all the strange events ceased.”23

When Emperor Huan came to the throne at the age of 14 in the year 146, one of his first acts was to build a temple to Laozi in the latter’s putative birthplace (Bozhou 亳州). The fact that the walls of the temple were adorned with the image of the meeting between Laozi and Confucius is like a premonition of the conflicted relations with the literati that would characterize his reign. After sending a eunuch to sacrifice at Laozi’s birthplace in the first month of the year 165, in the fourth month he issued an edict for the destruction of private shrines (fangsi 房祀) throughout the empire. In the eighth month, he “meditated on the gods and nourished his nature, his aim being transcendence. His mind focused on the Yellow Thearch, he was in mystic accord with the high ancestor and, in a dream, saw Laozi.” He then commissioned the famous “Laozi Inscription” (“Laozi ming” 老子銘), the preface to which is the source of the above quote.

24 The following year, he himself made sacrifice in the palace to Huang-Lao 黃老 and the Buddha: “From these items of evidence it appears that Emperor Huan, in the last years before his death, was attempting to take over the patronage and the authority of the popular religion which centered on the worship of Laozi, and re-establish its mystical alliance and approval of the House of Han.”25

As Anna Seidel has shown, The Book of the Transformations of Laozi (Laozi bianhua jing 老子變化經) is perhaps the best commentary on the events of Huandi’s reign. In it, Laozi is a cosmic god on the model of the Great One. He makes a series of five appearances in Chengdu in the years 132–55 and says to his disciples: “If you think of me even in your dreams, I will appear to you as proof of my confidence. In order to shake up the Han dynasty, I have transformed my body . . . If you wish to know where I am, recite the text of five thousand words ten thousand times.”

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Another new form of worship which cannot go unmentioned is that of the Queen Mother of the West 西王母. In the year 3 BC, during a drought, “people were running around hither and thither, exchanging tokens, preparing for the royal advent and

22 Bujard, p. 808. 23 Cited from the Hou Hanshu by Lin Fu-shih, Handai de wuzhe (Taipei: Daoxiang, 1987), p. 35. 24 Anna Seidel, La divinisation de Lao Tseu dans le taoïsme des Han (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1969), p. 124. 25 Rafe de Crespigny, “Politics and Philosophy under the Government of Emperor Huan, 159–168 A.D.” (T’oung Pao 66.1-3, 1980), p. 80. 26 Seidel, p. 70. The “text of five thousand words” is the Daode jing or Laozi.

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worshipping the Queen Mother of the West . . . They held services and set up gaming boards for a lucky throw, and they sang and danced in worship of the Queen Mother of the West. They also passed around a written message, saying, ‘The Mother tells the people that those who wear this talisman will not die.’”27

It is perhaps not mere chance that the earliest known representation of the Queen Mother dates to the same period and shows her, on the ceiling of a tomb, welcoming a deceased couple “shown in their ascension to the heavens, escorted by mythical animals . . . Representing and venerating Xiwangmu in the sepulture must have helped the deceased attain Mount Kunlun, considered as an axis mundi, and enter into the world of the immortals.”

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The Period of Division (220-589 AD) The primary feature of this period is the emergence of Daoism and Buddhism as rivals of Confucianism for state support together with the creation of a kind of united front of the “three teachings” (sanjiao 三教) against shamanism. We know from the work of Lin Fu-shih that shamanism nonetheless continued to play a part in state politics, as well as in local society, but our focus here will be on the Three Teachings and, in particular, on their respective relationships with the state. The reason for this shift in focus is simple: all three religions have (relatively) systematic “theologies,” that is, unifying principles which incorporate the gods into a system. These systems either distinguish themselves from the state, as in the case of Buddhism and, to a lesser extent, Daoism, or continue to identify themselves entirely with the state, as in Confucianism. To put it another way, hitherto the state was the church; henceforth, the state had rival social organizations. The Han synthesis of the Classics with Yin/Yang-Wuxing cosmological theory continued to play a major rule in court debates, and from the Wei (220–65) to the Sui (581–617), each successive dynasty saw itself as the expression of the ascendancy of one or another of the Five Agents (wuxing 五行). The suburban sacrifice on the round altar to Heaven was carried out by almost every emperor in this period. The importance of this sacrifice to the definition of legitimacy may be seen in Wang Su’s 王肅 (195–256) challenge to the interpretation of the great Han commentator, Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127–200). Whereas for Zheng the sacrifice was addressed to the Five Thearchs and the Supreme Thearch of Bright Heaven (Haotian shangdi 昊天上帝), Wang contended the Five Thearchs were human, not celestial, and that there was but one Heavenly Thearch. Worship of the Five Thearchs was to be done in the Hall of Light, where they were associated with the welcoming of the seasonal ethers. Sima Yan, the maternal grandson of Wang Su, was the first to adopt the latter’s view, and he therefore eliminated the seats of the Five Thearchs before sacrificing to Heaven in the year 266. Subsequent dynasties, however, followed Zheng Xuan, and the debate was not settled until the Tang, which opted for the views of Wang Su. As in the Han, the ancestors were associated with this sacrifice and therefore received sacrifice secondarily, after Heaven. Most dynasties also

27 Loewe, p. 99. 28 Michele Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens, “Death and the Dead: Practices and Images in the Qin and Han,” Early Chinese Religion, Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC–AD 220), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 982–3.

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built a Hall of Light, as well as a square altar for worship of the earth god. In the year 325, the descendants of Confucius were given the wherewithal to sacrifice to him four times a year.29

The story of the state’s relations with Daoism in this period begins with the capitulation by Heavenly Master Zhang Lu 張魯 to Cao Cao in the year 215. Cao Cao gave titles to Zhang and his five sons, a fief of ten thousand families to Zhang, and the hand of his son in marriage to Zhang’s daughter. Li Fu, a close collaborator of Zhang’s, was so intimately involved in the founding of the Wei in 220 that Howard Goodman concludes: “This may be the first episode in a long tradition of Daoist legitimation of emperors.”

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But if Daoists may thus be seen to have “fired the first shot,” Erik Zürcher was clearly right to speak of the “Buddhist conquest of China” in this period, as may be seen from the following table, based on the early Tang polemical work, the Bianzheng lun 辯正論 by Falin 法琳:

Dynasty Temples Monks Eastern Jin 1,768 24,000 Liu-Song 1,913 36,000 Qi 2,015 32,500 Liang 2,846 82,700

These statistics for the South may be juxtaposed with those given by the “Treatise on Buddhism and Daoism” (Shi-Lao zhi 釋老志) of the Weishu 魏書: in 477, twenty-five years after the end of the first persecution of Buddhism, there were about one hundred monasteries in the capital and more than two thousand monks and nuns; in the Wei empire, there were 6,478 temples and 77,258 monks and nuns. By the early sixth century, there were 13,727 Buddhist temples, and by the end of the dynasty, 30,000 temples and two million monks and nuns.31

The attractiveness of Buddhism in the political realm lay in its dualistic universalism: the Indian religion assumed a distinction between matter and spirit — between the political and religious realms — far more radical than anything China had known hitherto, and the emperor could appropriate the prestige of the new transcendent principle by identifying himself, either with the Tathâgata (in Chinese, Rulai 如來) himself or with the royal patron of the Buddhist community, King Aśoka 育王. Daoism responded to the challenge with a form of initiation that had its roots in the Han apocryphal texts. They transmitted to the emperor registers (shoulu 授籙) that gave him power over the world of the gods and thereby implied the recognition of his legitimacy

29 For a full account of the incessant changes in all these sacrifices, see Chen Shuguo, “State Religious Ceremonies,” in Early Chinese Religion, Part Two: The Period of Division, edited by John Lagerwey and Lü Pengzhi (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 53-142. 30 Howard Goodman, Ts’ao P’i Transcendent: The Political Culture of Dynasty-founding in China at the End of the Han (Seattle: Scripta Serica, 1998), p. 86. 31 Leon Hurvitz, translator, Wei Shou Treatise on Buddhism and Taoism, an English translation of the original Chinese text of Wei-shu CXIV and the Japanese annotation of Tsukamoto Zenryû, reprint of Yün-kang, the Buddhist Cave-Temples of the Fifth Century A.D. in North China, vol. 16 supplement (Kyoto: Jimbunkagaku kenkyusho, 1956), p. 103.

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by Heaven and the Dao.32

At the heart of the controversy launched by Yu Bing 庾冰 (296–344) in the year 340 was the question whether monks should, like officials, bow before the emperor or whether, as representatives of the transcendent principle, they were above the emperor and should revere only the Buddha. To upholders of the literati tradition, this amounted to contravening the fundamental Confucian virtue of zhong 忠, loyalty, just as the Buddhist monk’s “exit from the family” (chujia 出家) meant he was unfilial (buxiao 不孝). Yu Bing therefore insisted on the universal nature of the state, based on the Confucian doctrine of human relationships. According to Yu, the kings of antiquity “did not allow foreign customs to interfere with the administration of the state . . . Let the monks practice Buddhism in the family or as individuals, but its practice on the level of the state and the court must be forbidden.”

Being cut of the same cosmological cloth as state Confucianism, the Daoists regularly presented themselves, in the imperially sponsored debates of the period, as “natives,” by opposition with foreign Buddhism.

33 He Chong 何充 (292–346) responded that there was no precedent for such restrictions on monks’ liberty and affirmed that Buddhism, by encouraging virtue, produced subjects who obeyed the laws. In addition, the monks’ prayers were beneficial to the state. Buddhist apologists such as the monk Zhi Dun 支遁 (314–66) identified Buddhist compassion (ci 慈) with the supreme Confucian value of humanity (ren 仁) and explained the Buddhist model of holiness in Daoist terms of eliminating desire and returning to the simple Origin. “Thus were commingled,” writes Zürcher, “Chinese ideas of a cosmic and natural order with the Buddhists’ ‘thus-so-ness.’”34

Northern Buddhists apparently had fewer reservations about bowing to the emperor: the head of the monks at the court of the Northern Wei, Faguo 法果 (fl. 396–409), explained that he was “paying homage, not to the emperor but to the Buddha.”

35 The “Treatise on Buddhism and Daoism” portrays the Wei state as totally invested in the promotion of Buddhism. In 398, an edict ordered officials to build residences for the faithful. When Taizong 太宗 (r. 409–24) came to the throne, he “erected images in the capital and its suburbs and ordered monks to instruct the people.”36 Of Shizu 世祖 (r. 424–52) it is said that he continued the practice of his predecessors in “inviting superior monks in order to discuss doctrines with them. On the birthday of the Buddha, when the statues of the buddhas were paraded in the avenues of the capital, the emperor ascended the watchtower of his palace in order to watch and to throw flowers so as to display his devotion.”37

32 See Anna Seidel, “Imperial Treasures and Taoist Sacraments: Taoist Roots in the Apocrypha,” Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R.A. Stein, vol. 2, edited by Michel Strickmann (Brussels: Institut Belge des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1983), pp. 291–371.

It was, nonetheless, the same emperor who led the first great repression of Buddhism beginning in 445.

33 Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China (Leiden: Brill, 1959), p. 108. From present-day perspective, it is ironical that Yu Bing is in fact proposing a “modern” definition of religion as belonging to the private sphere! 34 Ibid., p. 125. 35 Hurvitz, p. 53. 36 Cf. Hurvitz, p. 52. 37 Ibid., p. 56.

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This campaign was occasioned by a memorial to the throne by the minister Cui Hao 崔浩 (381–450), in which he claimed that books revealed by the Most High Old Lord (Taishang laojun 太上老君) to the Daoist Kou Qianzhi 寇謙之 (d. 448) in the years 415 and 423 on the Central Peak (Songshan 嵩山) were “truly a sign your majesty, like the Yellow Thearch, is in accord with Heaven.” The emperor Shizu invited Kou and his numerous disciples to the capital and built for them a five-story altar for their rituals. Monthly banquets for thousands were also provided.38 酈 According to Li Daoyuan 道元 (d. 527), the altar was modeled on the Hall of Light. In the year 431, altars were created with Daoist priests to serve them in every provincial capital. This is the first recorded unified system of state-supported religious institutions in Chinese history.39

In 439, imperial steles evoking these events were set up on Songshan 嵩山 and Huashan 華山, the central and western of the five sacred mountains. That on Huashan refers to Kou as the successor to the Heavenly Master 繼天師who, during his more than thirty years on the Central Peak,

accumulated merit, accomplished the Dao, and moved the obscure Void. The gods approached him from on high and invested him as True Master of the Nine Continents, in charge of the governance of men and demons, to aid the state and support the mandate, and sustain and guide the True Lord of Great Peace太平真

君.40

It is in the revelations of 423 that Kou had been told how to reform Daoist liturgy so as to help the True Lord of Great Peace, Shizu, who, after a victory over Liangzhou, in 440 promulgated the new reign era title of “True Lord of Great Peace.” In 442, he became the first emperor in history to receive a Daoist initiation. In 445, after the discovery of arms in a Chang’an monastery, Shizu ordered the execution of all the monks of Chang’an and the destruction of all Buddhist images, and then the extension of the edict to the entire empire. A decree of 447 threatened with extermination any household that served the “foreign gods.” The persecution of Buddhism came to a halt after Shizu’s assassination in 452, but a number of precedents had been set: the first and perhaps most important was the attack on Buddhism as foreign, for this argument would resurface in every Buddho-Daoist confrontation thereafter, in the Northern Zhou, the Tang, the Song, and the Yuan. The second is that all successive emperors of the Northern Wei received a Daoist initiation, as would the next persecutor of Buddhism, Wudi of the Northern Zhou (r. 561–78).41

The Wei emperor Gaozong (r. 452–65) not only halted the persecution, he allowed the redeployment of Buddhism, albeit it under the control of a special office

38 James Ware, translator, “The Wei shu and the Sui shu on Taoism,” T’oung Pao (1932), pp. 215–50: p.

236. 39 For references, see my “Religion et politique pendant la période de Division,” Religion et société en Chine ancienne et médiévale (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2009). 40 Cited from Lagerwey, “The Old Lord’s Scripture for the Chanting of the Commandments,” Purposes, Means and Convictions in Taoism: A Berlin Symposium, edited by Florian Reiter (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag), pp. 29–56. 41 See Seidel, “Imperial Treasures and Taoist Sacraments,” and, on Zhou Wudi’s initiation, my Wu-shang pi-yao, somme taoïste du VIe siècle (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1981), p. 19.

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created to that effect. He ordered the sculpting of a statue of the Buddha that resembled him and, in 454, the same year he was initiated as a Daoist, the placement of five statues of the Buddha in a temple: one for each successive Wei emperor, himself included. He also launched the great Yungang sculpture project. It may be in reaction to state control of Buddhism that a critical text for the future of church-state relations was produced, the Sutra of the Humane King (Renwang jing 仁王經). According to this text, if the humane sovereign protects the Buddhist community and supports grandiose Buddhist rituals, he will in turn benefit from the protection of the state by the Buddha. But “the disciple who registers (the monks) or serves as an official is not my disciple.”42

In 493, when the Wei decided to move its capital to Luoyang, one of the emperor’s first acts was to build a new Daoist temple for the Veneration of Emptiness (Chongxusi 崇虛寺) in the southern suburb.

43

In South China, the high point of Buddhist involvement in government came under Wudi of the Liang (r. 502–49). He began by choosing the date of the Buddha’s birthday for his accession to the throne in the southern suburb of the capital. In 504, he put an end to ceremonies in honor of Laozi, publicly renounced his clan’s affiliation with Daoism, and announced his conversion to Buddhism, urging his officials to follow his example. In 517, Wudi decreed the abolition of blood sacrifice on the ancestral altar and had two altars for vegetarian offerings and two Buddhist temples built for his parents, staffed respectively with 1,000 monks and 400 nuns. (The traditional “small sacrifices” to the rivers and mountains were, however, excluded from the abolition of blood sacrifice, as were the people’s annual sacrifices of request and thanksgiving to the earth god.) In 519, having been ordained as a bodhisattva, Wudi tried to use this new role to acquire a greater degree of control over the Buddhist community. In 522, he restored the monastery dedicated to King Aśoka, presenting himself as the Indian king’s heir, even his reincarnation. He also persecuted Daoism, with the result that many Daoists fled from Maoshan 茅山 to the north, where they no doubt contributed to the massive use of southern scriptures in the Northern Zhou Daoist encyclopedia, the Wushang biyao 無上

密要.

The festivals of the Three Officers 三官 were celebrated there annually until 534, when the first emperor of the determinedly Buddhist Northern Qi abolished them. In the year 500, the Longmen cave sculptures were undertaken with imperial patronage. The emperor Shizong (r. 500–15), who “loved profoundly the principles of the Buddha,” had a vast Buddhist temple of Light (Jingmingsi 景明寺) constructed where every year the statues of all the Buddhist temples in the capital were gathered in order to participate in a procession on the Buddha’s birthday.

The emperor who ordered the compilation of this encyclopedia after a series of Buddho-Daoist debates was yet another Martial Emperor. In 567, he was initiated as a Daoist and received the memorial of a former monk, Wei Yuansong 衛元松, proposing

42 Charles Orzech, Politics and Transcendent Wisdom: The Scripture for Humane Kings in the Creation of Chinese Buddhism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), p. 115. 43 Cf. my “Religion et politique” (note 39 above), where I suggest the name chongxu, “veneration of emptiness,” derives from the Heavenly Master movement, in which it referred to the central place of meditation in each Daoist “diocese” (zhi 治).

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the establishment of a great church which would include everyone in the empire . . . In this universal church, there would no longer be any distinction between monks and lay persons. Let the temples of walls and moats become the temples and stupas, and let the lord of the Zhou be the Tathâgata. The cities will be the monks’ quarters, and harmonious husbands and wives the holy congregation.44

Wei was in effect proposing that state and church once again be one, as before the arrival of Buddhism.

From 569 to 574, Wudi organized a series of seven debates between the Three Teachings. One of the byproducts of these debates was a book by the Buddhist monk Dao’an 道安, called Discourse on the Two Religions (Erjiao lun 二教論). Making use once again of the distinction between body and soul, Dao’an says that Confucianism managed the material, Buddhism the spiritual worlds, and that Daoism was therefore superfluous. The chief Daoist counter-argument focused on Buddhism’s foreignness. Having opted for the Daoists, Wudi launched the second major persecution of Buddhism and turned Daoism into the state religion. When he conquered the Northern Qi in 578, he extended the interdiction of Buddhism to its territories: “The Buddhist books are a foreign system, of which this land has no need. I am not one of the five barbarians who do not know the meaning of respect. Buddhism is not an orthodox religion: that is why I abolish it.”45

But Wudi died soon after, and his successor, Xuandi 宣帝 (r. 578–80), legalized Buddhism anew. “The emperor then sat with the images of the Buddha and Yuanshi facing south.”

46

Yuanshi tianzun 元始天尊, Heavenly Worthy of the Primordial Beginning, was the supreme Daoist god introduced in the heavily Buddhist-influenced Lingbao scriptures 靈寶經 revealed in South China ca. 400. The end result of four centuries of debate and jockeying for power was thus an emperor who sat facing south flanked by the images of the high gods of the two religions no emperor could henceforth ignore.

Sui/Tang (581-907) and Song (960-1276) While the universal cakravartin king ideal clearly played a fundamental role in Sui ideology and practice, the first dynasty to unify all China in nearly four centuries also continued to support Daoist institutions and even use Daoist reign titles (Kaihuang 開皇). The Tang would continue the basic policy of equal treatment, but like all native dynasties from the Tang on, it would also have a clear bias in favor of Daoism. In the case of the Tang, the justification for this bias lay in a name: the House of Tang was surnamed Li 李, like the Most High Old Lord. This link was affirmed as early as 620, when the Louguan 樓觀 (Pavilion Hermitage), whose abbot Ji Hui (558–630) had taken sides with the Tang already in 617,

44 Kenneth Chen, Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 189. 45 Lagerwey, Wu-shang pi-yao, p. 17. 46Anna Seidel, “Imperial Treasures and Taoist Sacraments,” p. 365.

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was given the name Zongsheng guan 宗聖觀, Hermitage of the Ancestral Saint, that is, the very Laozi who was said to have delivered himself of the Daode jing 道德經 at this site to the Guardian of the Pass, Yin Xi (he then went west to huahu 化胡).47 In the same year, the Old Lord made a series of appearances to the illiterate Ji Shanxing, on one occasion telling him: “Go tell Gaozu that I am the greatest of the immortals, Li Boyang, the imperial ancestor, the Old Lord. Near my temple in Bozhou, an old tree will flower as proof of what I am saying.”48

A decree of the emperor Taizong in 637 gave formal precedence to Daoism over Buddhism on the grounds the latter was a foreign religion, while Daoism derived from the nameless Origin of the universe, and Laozi was the origin of the imperial clan. When the monk Zhishi protested, he was whipped to death. In 678, Daoists were placed under the authority of the Bureau of Clan Affairs (Zongzhengsi 宗正司), while Buddhism remained under that of Religious Affairs (Chongxuansi 崇玄司), a part of the Foreign Affairs Bureau (Honglusi 弘盧寺). A debate in 696 on the Scripture of Foreign Conversion (Huahu jing 化胡經) concluded it was authentic, and that Buddhism therefore derived from Daoism, but a new discussion in 705 came to the opposite conclusion and an order was given to destroy the scripture and efface all paintings of this subject in Daoist temples and all portraits of Laozi in Buddhist temples.

In his final appearance in 622, the god promised he would send ten thousand “divine soldiers” (shenbing 神兵) to help the new dynasty destroy one Liu Heita, who had taken Luoyang.

The height of Daoist influence was reached under Xuanzong (r. 713–56). One factor was clearly the loss of taxes due to the creation of Buddhist chapels on the estates of the wealthy, especially graveside chapels, called Merit Halls (gongde yuan 功德院). In 714, 30,000 monks and nuns were forcibly returned to lay status. Edicts against proselytizing in villages and ordering the destruction of village chapels and small Buddhist shrines followed.49 Sima Chengzhen 司馬承貞 gave Xuanzong his first Daoist initiation in 721, Li Hanguang 李含光 his second in 748. Like his grandfather in 666 during the fengshan sacrifices of legitimacy, Xuanzong went in person to Laozi’s temple in Bozhou on his way back from Taishan in 725. He also created a festival for the god’s birthday. After discussions at the court on the Laozi, the emperor’s commentary on the text was engraved in stone in 732.50 It contains such statements as this: “The great man is the prince who is in possession of the Dao”; “The compassion of the saint is universal because it is impartial.”51

47 Huahu may be translated as “conversion of/into the foreigner.” When understood in the sense of “into,” it refers to the idea that Laozi, after revealing the Daode jing, went west and “turned into” the Buddha. For obvious reasons, this became one of the most contentious notions in the history of Buddho-Daoist relations.

The next year, state examination questions based on the Laozi replaced questions on the Confucian classics, and it was decreed that each house in the realm should have a copy of the Daoist scripture (as well as of the Scripture of Filial Piety, Xiaojing 孝經). In 738, Xuanzong ordered that every district select one Buddhist

48 Charles David Benn, “Taoism as Ideology in the Reign of Emperor Hsüan-tsung (712–55)” (University of Michigan microfilm, 1983), p. 30. 49 Stanley Weinstein, Buddhism under the T’ang (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 51–2. 50 The ultimate model for this act was the engraving of the five Confucian classics on stone in the year AD 175. 51 Benn, “Taoism as Ideology,” pp. 154, 174.

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and one Daoist temple to be called Kaiyuan 開元 (there were 331 of each!) and transfer the celebration of his birthday to these temples. Imperial dreams of Laozi in the years 740 and 741 led to the unearthing of a statue of Laozi near Pavilion Hermitage — imperial confirmation that this was indeed the subject of Xuanzong’s dream — creation of a new temple to house it, and distribution of painted copies throughout the empire. The name of this new Daoist temple in Chang’an was Palace of Great Clarity (Taiqinggong 太清宮), and in it the statue of the emperor was placed next to that of Laozi. By the end of his reign, the rites in the Palace of Great Clarity were classed as superior to those of the ancestral temple (Taimiao 太廟) and the southern suburb (nanjiao 南郊). A decree dated 743, promulgated after an imperial sacrifice to Laozi, explains Xuanzong’s vision of Daoism:

Those who wish to safeguard mankind must revere the Great Way. Those who have successfully maintained the Mandate have steadfastly relied on their illustrious predecessors. They have venerated especially the Great Sage, Emperor of the Mystic Origin. His Way illumines the Great Ultimate. He sprang forth before the origin during chaos . . . From the establishment of Our dynasty to the present time he has repeatedly conferred good fortune on us and many times graced Us with the appearance of his true image.52

Nor were traditional state cults to the mountains forgotten in Xuanzong’s drive to turn Daoism into a universal state religion. Already in 725, at Sima Chengzhen’s behest, the emperor had added to the worship of the gods of the Five Peaks 五嶽 that of Daoist Perfected (zhenren 真人). In 732, Daoists were selected for the temples of the Five Peaks and two other cults, notably that of the Messenger of the Nine Heavens (Jiutian shizhe 九天使者), who had appeared to Xuanzong in a dream. Wu Daozi 吳道子 was commissioned to paint the subject of the emperor’s dream for hanging in the Temple of the Nine Heavens. (The same painter did murals of the conversion of the foreigners for a Daoist temple near Luoyang.) In 748, a series of Daoist altars (tan 壇) was created on 46 mountains with caves, where the ritual “throwing the dragons and slips” (tou longjian 投龍簡) was performed. Each cave-heaven (dongtian 洞天) was supported by the tax payments of 30 households. Rarely favored outright, Buddhism was nonetheless able to resist attempts to make monks bow before their parents and the emperor. It also contributed significantly to the legitimization of the Tang ruling house. A decree in 629 ordered all monks in Chang’an to recite the Scripture of the Humane King fourteen days in every month. In the same year, Taizong (r. 629–49) ordered the building of seven monasteries, each on a battle site, so that monks could offer constant prayers for the repose of the soldiers who had died. At the end of his life, Taizong’s admiration for Xuanzong led him even to declare Buddhism superior to Daoism and Confucianism and to ordain 18,500 new monks. In 659, Gaozong (r. 649–83) ordered that an image of King Aśoka “with Gaozu’s own features” be installed in the Famensi 法門寺, a popular center of pilgrimage because

52 Ibid., p. 240.

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it had the Buddha finger bone relic.53 In 744, Xuanzong ordered all Kaiyuan monasteries “to install images of the Buddha in the likeness of the emperor.”54 Amoghavajra (Bukong 不空) used Tantric rites to consecrate Suzong (r. 756–62) Universal Monarch.55 When the Tibetans threatened Chang’an, Bukong asked to do a new translation of the Humane King scripture, which promises protection from invasion to rulers who do not seek to control monks.56 In 772, after obtaining an order to create Wenshu 文殊 chapels in every monastery in the empire, Bukong told Daizong (r. 762–79) he was “the fulfillment of a prophecy by Sakyamuni that true Buddhism will ultimately flourish in China, ruled by a sage emperor.”57

The third state suppression of Buddhism coincided with the reign of Wuzong (r. 840–6), who was initiated as a Daoist soon after his accession to the throne. It is worth noting that his chief minister, Li Deyu 李德育, when he was governor of Zhexi 浙西 in 823, had closed 2000 “illegal sites of worship” (yinsi 淫祀) and “mountain cloisters” (shanfang 山房).

58 Wuzong did not suppress just Buddhism: 2000 Nestorian and Zoroastrian priests were also laicized. “Li Deyu responded with a memorial lauding Wuzong for having put an end to a scourge which had wrought havoc since the Han.”59

The Huang Chao rebellion (878–84) during Xizong’s reign (r. 873–88) is said to have been predicted in a tale written by the Daoist Du Guangting 杜光庭 (850–933), but so was its happy conclusion, when the child emperor Xizong would come as an “incarnation of Laozi . . . to save the empire.”

60 As Verellen shows, Du’s book, the Lidai chongdao ji 歷代崇道記 (Veneration of the Way through the Ages), in which Chinese history becomes the salvation history of Laozi’s successive appearances from the Zhou down to the reign of Xizong, was primarily designed to justify the Tang restoration that took place after the Huang Chao revolt. Du would go on to provide similar liturgical services for the Kingdom of Shu: the ordination of Wang Yan (r. 918–25), the second emperor; “the institution of an official cult of Daoist saints and immortals purportedly belonging to the ruling family’s Wang lineage”; and the compilation of “a record of the kingdom’s ‘sacred geography’.”61

Confucianism, likewise, continued to play its part in legitimation. Here is how Howard Wechsler summarizes the role of Confucian rites in the Tang:

They depended less on the ancestral temple rites and on the power of lineal ancestors to legitimate their authority, and more on the suburban altar rites and the power of an all-embracing universal Heavenly deity, Haotian shangdi, who

53 Weinstein, Buddhism under the T’ang, p. 37. 54 Ibid., p. 54. 55 Ibid., p. 58 56 Ibid., p. 78. 57 Ibid., p. 82; cf. p. 178: “Your Majesty has received the mandate of the Buddha to serve as King of the Dharma fawang; it is Your Majesty who satisfies the aspirations of the people and holds the secret seal of Puxian.” 58 Ibid., p. 118. 59 Ibid., p. 134. 60 Franciscus Verellen, “A Forgotten T’ang Restoration: The Taoist Dispensation after Huang Ch’ao,” Asia Major Third Series 7.1 (1994), p. 114. 61 Franciscus Verellen, “Liturgy and Sovereignty: The Role of Taoist Ritual in the Foundation of the Shu Kingdom (907–9–25), Asia Major Third Series 2.1 (1989), p. 74.

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belonged not to one family only but to all the empire. Along with the emphasis on tianxia weigong 天下為公 62 came a reduction in the secrecy that had formerly characterized certain rituals, such as the Feng and Shan sacrifices, which now became more public. New reliance on Haotian shangdi at the expense of other deities intensified the ruler’s identification with all-powerful Heaven and enhanced his standing as the one man and so improved cosmological grounds for an enhanced absolutism.63

In the Han, writes Wechsler, accession to the throne of a new emperor took place before the interment of his predecessor, with the ceremony taking place in the temple of the founder or, after 86 BC, in front of the deceased emperor’s coffin. Even then, a visit had to be paid to the founding ancestor’s temple to report the accession (yemiao 謁廟). From the Cao-Wei dynasty on, it became the rule that founding emperors sacrifice in person to Heaven to announce their accession, in imitation of Guangwudi. The founder of the Tang accepted the throne in the Taiji Hall 太極殿 and sent chief officials to offer the burnt sacrifice of announcement to Heaven in the southern suburbs. Fifteen days later, he sent the tablets of four of his ancestors to the ancestral temple, but made no announcement to them. Wechsler concludes that,

From this it can be inferred that the power of the ancestors to legitimate political authority, symbolized by the yeh-miao rite, had been replaced in the early T’ang by a more direct and therefore more powerful device that did away with the need for ancestors to serve as intermediaries between Heaven and the emperor — the suburban altar rites.64

During the Tang, although the systems of both Wang Su and Zheng Xuan were practiced at one time or another, it was the unitary system of Wang that was adopted in the imperial ritual codes of 658 and then the Kaiyuan era. Henceforth, only the “spirit throne” of Haotian shangdi was set out on the north end of the round altar, facing south, with a seat for Gaozu, the dynastic founder, on the east side, facing west. As Wechsler says, “The condition of one supreme deity in Heaven was congruent with that of one supreme autocrat on earth.”65 The same Haotian shangdi “emerged as the dominant sacrificial object at the altar rites and also at the Mingtang.”66

Finally, the temples dedicated to Confucius created in every district by Taizong in 630 also contained schools.

62 The phrase comes from the Book of Rites (Liji): “When the Great Way was practiced the world was shared by all alike tianxia wei gong. The worthy and the able were promoted to office and men practiced good faith and lived in affection. Therefore they did not regard as parents only their own parents, or as sons only their own sons . . . Now the Great Way has become hid and the world is the possession of private families tianxia wei jia. Each regards his parents as only his own parents, as sons only his own sons; goods and labor are employed for selfish ends”; cited in Howard Wechsler, Offerings of Jade and Silk: Ritual and Symbol in the Legitimation of the T’ang Dynasty (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 82. 63 Ibid., p. x. 64 Ibid., p. 101. 65 Ibid., p. 122. 66 Ibid., p. 211.

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While the Song have been far less studied than the Tang with regard to religion and politics, it seems fairly clear that, in finding for themselves a Daoist ancestor in the person of the Yellow Thearch, the Song followed the Tang model. The pattern of patronage is also very similar, insofar as it was in both dynasties not the founder but one of his immediate successors and then the last emperor before the mid-dynasty disaster who were the most ardent supporters of Daoism, Taizong and Xuanzong in the Tang, Zhenzong (r. 998–1023) and Huizong (r. 1101–26) in the Song. Like Xuanzong, both Song patrons of Daoism also wrote commentaries of the Laozi. Finally, an illiterate called Zhang Shouzhen 張守真 played the same role at the very beginning of the Song that Ji Shanxing had at the start of the Tang, serving as the conduit for the message of a god who, after the celebration of a Jiao at the court, “confirms his role as protector of the dynasty and announces the death of Taizu at the same time he vaunts the merits of Taizong. The following night, Taizu died suddenly and was immediately replaced on the throne by his younger brother.”67

Zhang Shouzhen also became the conduit for a whole new system of Daoist offerings and the introduction of the worship of the Four Saints 四聖, one of whom, Zhenwu 真武, the True Warrior, was to become Daoism’s most important god. Like Tang Xuanzong, who had changed the reign title to Tianbao 天寶, Heavenly Treasure, after the unearthing of a legitimizing talisman, so too Zhenzong, in the year 1008, when he discovered a “heavenly letter” tianshu 天書 suspended in the air, changed the reign title to Dazhong xiangfu 大中祥符, Auspicious Talisman of the Great Center. The following year, he decreed the foundation of Tianqing (Heavenly Felicity) Daoist temples 天慶觀 in every prefecture and county. In 1012 Zhenzong dreamt of a messenger from the Jade Emperor 玉皇 who told him he had “earlier ordered your ancestor, Zhao so-and-so, to give you the heavenly letter. He is about to manifest himself to you again. Honor him as the Tang honored Xuanyuan shangdi 玄元上帝 (Laozi).”

68

Virtually from the time he ascended the throne, Huizong was in regular correspondence with the 25th patriarch of Maoshan, Liu Hunkang 劉混康 (1035–1108). In 1106, Huizong had a dream in which he ascended to heaven and was received by the Jade Emperor. On his way out, he saw a man in black riding a black buffalo. This engendered a search for Daoist masters and, in 1108, the presentation by Liu of Lin Lingsu 林靈素 (1076?–1120), in whom Huizong recognized the buffalo-rider of his dream. The previous year, Huizong had already decreed the ritual precedence of Daoism over Buddhism. An edict of 1111 eliminated 1500 “illicit cult sites” (yinsi) in the capital, and another decree in 1117 prohibited male and female “shamans” (wuxi 巫覡). After

A few days later, the god appeared again in his dream and explained he was the Yellow Thearch and founder of the Zhao (imperial) lineage in one of his incarnations. Zhenzong went on to compile a Daoist canon and then the famous Yunji qiqian 雲笈七籤 (Seven Slips of the Cloud Satchel).

67 Michel Soymié, “Recherches historiques et sociologiques sur le culte de Zhenwu,” Annuaire de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études, IVe Section (1975), p. 962. Taizu, the founder, reigned 960-76, Taizong 976-98. 68 Michel Soymié, “La politique religieuse des empereurs Zhenzong et Renzong des Song,” Annuaire de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études, IVe Section (1977), p. 1030.

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having learned in a séance that he was himself a divinity from Shenxiao 神霄, Divine Empyrean, the highest of the Nine Heavens, he ordered in early 1117 the creation of a network of Shenxiao “palaces” (gong 宮) throughout the realm. Where Daoist temples did not yet exist, Buddhist temples were confiscated for the purpose, and so within 18 months the entire network was complete. An 1117 edict explained Huizong felt he had “a mission of saving China from the foreign religion and returning it to the correct way.”69

A stele of Huizong’s commentary on the Laozi was to be given to each Shenxiao temple, all of which had central altars with images of the deity Lin Lingsu had identified as the emperor’s divine persona: “They manifested to visitors, especially scholar-officials who were required by imperial order to pay their respects, the divinity of their current emperor.”

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Each temple was also to house a Humane Aid Pavilion with Daoist masters of “symbol-water” (fushui 符水) to engage in healing. A foundation stele explained why Huizong wished to create this network:

By embodying the Dao, one can come close to the spirits; by employing it, one can assist Heaven and Earth; by extending it, one can bring order to the realm and the country . . . This Dao is something people definitely have, but they have strayed from it for so long that they must be taught about it before it will flourish. Thus I wish to reform the habits of this late age and return to the pure customs of great antiquity.71

Another vital feature of the Song is the gradual emergence of a popular pantheon composed of gods recognized by the state.72 According to Patricia Ebrey and Peter Gregory, this is the result of a move away from suppression to “strategies of appropriation.”73 Valerie Hansen links it as well to the “the rise of organized lineages” more invested in local society than national politics. The government responded with “ever more comprehensive policies to recognize the achievements of local gods.”74

The increase in title-granting began in 1070, writes Hansen. A 1095 petition to draw up a register of sacrifices for each prefecture was approved. Titles of two, four, and six characters were given, and then, from 1129 on, of eight. As enshrined in the law code of 1195–1200, this is how the system worked:

The prefects should report and guarantee to the fiscal intendants the claims of all the temples and Buddhist and Daoist practitioners of each circuit who have

69 Patricia Ebrey, “Huizong’s Stone Inscriptions,” in Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics edited by Patricia Ebrey and Maggie Bickford (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 257. 70 Shin-yi Chao, “Huizong and the Divine Empyrean Palace Temple Network,” in Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics, p. 349. 71 Ebrey, “Huizong’s Stone Inscriptions,” p. 254. 72 This issue being intimately linked to the history of Daoist ritual, we will treat the subject more thoroughly in the next chapter. 73 Patricia Ebrey and Peter Gregory, “The Religious and Historical Landscape,” in Religion and Society in T’ang and Sung China edited by Patricia Ebrey and Peter Gregory (Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press, 1993), p. 28. 74 Valerie Hansen, Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127–1276 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 8–9.

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performed miracles in response to prayers and who should be given titles and plaques. The fiscal intendant will send an official from a neighboring prefecture to check the claim personally. Then he will send another official who is not involved to double check the claim. When these checks are completed, he will report the actual situation to the emperor.75

The fiscal intendant’s report then went to the Imperial Secretariat, who forwarded it to the Board of Rites. If approved, it went back to the Secretariat for a provisional title, back to the Board for approval, and then again to the Secretariat to draft the title-granting edict and a “full documentary report.”76

In a context of increasing commercialization and of the development of merchant guilds and a national market, some of the local gods emerged as regional and even national gods. Not only do Buddhist and Daoist gods — Guanyin, Zhenwu — get taken up into the popular pantheon, so too do deified Buddhists and Daoists such as Dingguang 定光 in Tingzhou 汀州 (Fujian) or Wen Qiong 溫瓊 in Wenzhou 溫州 (Zhejiang).

Insofar as the process cannot but remind us of the way the medieval Catholic church vetted candidates for sainthood, it also reminds us that, in China, the real church was the state. That is, in spite of the emergence of the institutional religions of Buddhism and Daoism — referred to above as social organizations that in some sense rivaled the state — the underlying and far more ancient tradition that identified church and state, religion and politics, remained dominant.

77 According to Hansen, “the dramatic increase in extra-local cults excited great controversy throughout the Southern Song” because, to cite the Zuozhuan 左傳, “The making of offerings should not transgress the boundaries of one’s own fief.”78

A particularly interesting example of the process is Wenchang 文昌, who went from local snake god in northern Sichuan to become the national god of literature and the examinations in the Yuan. According to Terry Kleeman, “it was the power of ongoing revelation that drove the cult’s expansion.”

79 Produced by spirit writing in 1181, 1194, and 1267, the Book of Transformations (Huashu 化書) translated by Kleeman portrays Wenchang “as a Daoist deity within the unitary pantheon of the Chinese religious world”; the book’s theme is “the spiritual development of the god.”80

75 Ibid., p. 91.

Kleeman shows the book to combine Confucian family and lineage values, Daoist cosmology and spiritual bureaucracy, and Buddhist karma. Perhaps the most interesting moment occurs when the Divine Lord — still one incarnation away from becoming the god of examinations — goes to Kongdong mountain and there witnesses a procession of the gods that took three days to go by. It was in fact Laozi, on his way west to “convert the foreigners.” When Laozi passed,

76 Ibid., p. 92. 77 On Dingguang, see my “Dingguang Gufo: Oral and Written Sources in the Study of a Saint,” Cultes des sites, cultes des saints, Franciscus Verellen, ed., Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 10 (1998), pp. 77–129; on Wen Qiong, see Paul Katz, Demon Hordes and Burning Boats: the Cult of Marshal Wen in Late Imperial Chekiang (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). 78 Hansen, Changing Gods, pp. 128, 130. 79 Terry Kleeman, “The Expansion of the Wen-ch’ang Cult,” in Religion and Society in T’ang and Sung China, edited by Patricia Ebrey and Peter Gregory (Honolulu: Hawai’i University Press), p. 59. 80 Terry Kleeman, A God’s Own Tale: The Book of Transformations of Wenchang, the Divine Lord of Zitong (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1994), pp. 26, 28.

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I saluted him from my place among the ranks of earth spirits under the direction of the Western Marchmount西嶽. The Western Marchmount had commanded all the terrestrial spirits to pay obeisance to Laozi81 and accompany him for ten days’ journey. He takes the chance to describe his time in Shu; says Laozi: “In the functioning of the Great Way all under Heaven works for the common good”82 . . . (Laozi then orders his assistant Xu Jia 徐甲 to give the Divine Lord an elixir): “From now on you will possess the five magic powers, and will be incomparably more powerful than your former self. The Central Plain is in disorder, and I am very weary of it. Now I am going to enter the Western Regions in order to carry on transformation xing hua 行化. Three years later, when the religion of the Western Regions is flourishing, it will come to China. You should believe in this religion.”83

Toward the end of the god’s story, he does indeed achieve Buddhist “liberation” and take refuge in the Buddha, so Kleeman is clearly right in referring here to an “irenical attitude toward Buddhism.” But how do we explain this? How could the once and future rival of Buddhism envisage granting it pride of place with such equanimity? Edward Davis gives us one possible explanation: At the same time that Buddhism had come to have a “monopoly on death,” there was a “creative confrontation and accommodation between Daoism and local cults or village religion . . . The new gods are martial, humanized, historicized deities, unlike cosmology centered powers earlier.”84 Davis goes on to suggest that Prasenjit Duara’s “cultural nexus” is in fact “more specifically a religious nexus,” one in which the military, exorcistic nature of the gods, rituals, and festivals “has not been adequately recognized or explored”:85

On the one hand there is the sage — the Daoist priest, the Gentleman of the Dao, the incarnation of the classical ru 儒 — who concentrates in his person, through a regimen of ritual meditation and ethical ascesis, the cosmic principle, the one. On the other hand, there is the spirit-medium who embodies in himself, through a demanding regime of trance and martial prowess, the magical power of a god. In one, the quotidian is transformed into a space of the absolute that will identify the community with the values of centrality and harmony; in the other, the quotidian is transformed into a space of conditioned power that will identify the community with the limits of that power, with defensible boundaries. In one we have texts (wen 文), in the other we have weapons (wu 武).86

81 The god of the western sacred mountain is here clearly seen as chief of all the gods in his territory, exactly the role played by the god of Central Mountain in the story of Kou Qianzhi: as administered territory, Daoist territory is conceptually identical to that of the central government. 82 This is a quotation from the Book of Rites. 83 Kleeman, A God’s Own Tale, p. 210. 84 Edward Davis, Society and the Supernatural in Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), p. 239. 85 Ibid., pp. 285, 293. 86 Ibid., p. 308.

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While, as we shall see, the development of Daoist domination of the martial owes much to Tantrism, Buddhism, in part because of its virtual monopoly on rites for the dead, had long since come to be identified with texts and the civil administration. Song to Ming (1368-1644): Zhenwu and Wudangshan Zhenwu, the Perfect Warrior, is in a sense the martial counterpart of Wenchang. Curiously, he is not of local but of cosmological origin, for he emerges in the early Song as an anthropomorphic manifestation of Xuanwu 玄武, the heraldic animal of the north already portrayed on Han mirrors. In the early Song, he is but one of the Four Saints 四聖 and not even the most important one: it is not Zhenwu, called Yousheng 佑聖, Assistant of the Saint, but Yisheng 翊聖, Helper of the Saint (i.e. the emperor) who is the subject of a famous hagiography by Wang Qinruo 王欽若.87

It was nonetheless in the course of the Song dynasty that the worship of Zhenwu spread throughout the empire. A scripture in the Daoist canon, also known from a 1099 inscription, the Yuanshi tianzun shuo beifang Zhenwu miaojing 元始天尊說北方真武妙

經 (The Heavenly Worthy of Primordial Beginning Utters the Marvelous Scripture of the Perfect Warrior of the North) tells how Zhenwu, after 42 years of self-cultivation on Wudangshan 武當山 (a mountain in northwest Hubei), ascends to heaven, is enfeoffed by the Jade Emperor, and then sent back to earth at the head of soldiers of the five thunders to quell the demons who were wreaking havoc on earth.

88 Because of his exorcistic powers, Zhenwu came to play a prominent role in Daoist therapeutic rites and, as such, was regularly afforded a separate hall in Daoist abbeys. These halls, in turn, became the “focus of large-scale community festivals according to Hong Mai.”89

Hong Mai 洪邁 (1123–1202) includes a story of him in his Yijianzhi 夷堅志, where we see Hong’s own father upbraiding a ghost who has possessed a concubine:

I worship Zhenwu, because he is efficacious, and also have images of Buddha, the earth and stove gods. How dare you come here?” Ghost: “The Buddha is a benevolent deity who does not concern himself with such trivial matters; every night Zhenwu unbinds his hair, grasps his sword, and flies from the roof. I carefully avoid him, that’s all.90

Zhenwu, adds Davis, “was the god par excellence of village spirit-mediums wu and, in a very concrete sense, he was their alter-ego.”91

The process begins in the Northern Song when, according to Shin-yi Chao, no fewer than five emperors — Zhenzong, Renzong, Shenzong (r. 1067–87), Huizong, and Qinzong (r. 1126–27) — “bestowed honorific titles on either Zhenwu himself or on a

He was to become, as well, the alter ego of the emperor.

87 Yisheng baode zhuan (Taoist canon no. 1285); see my Taoist Ritual, pp. 257–8. 88 My summary is based on a forthcoming manuscript by Shin-yi Chao, “A God in Transition: Zhenwu Worship from Song to Ming (960–1644).” 89 Davis, Society and the Supernatural, p. 104. 90 Hansen, Changing Gods, p. 30. 91 Davis, Society and the Supernatural, p. 104.

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temple dedicated to him or both.” The Southern Song emperor Xiaozong (r. 1162–89), in turn, “converted his princely mansion in Hangzhou into a Zhenwu temple, the majestic Yousheng guan 佑聖觀.”92

The celebration in this Abbey of the Assistant of the Saint of Zhenwu’s birthday on the third day of the third month was one of Hangzhou’s biggest annual festivals. According to the Mengliang lu 夢梁錄 (ca. 1275) by Wu Zimu 吳自牧, this abbey was located right in front of the imperial palace, and the emperor commissioned a Jiao there on Zhenwu’s birthday. At noon, the temple’s Daoists would worship Zhenwu, “performing heavenly music before his throne”:

People came in droves to burn incense in the courtyard of the temple. All Daoist temples did Jiao to pray for the prosperity of the state and the peace of the people. The various army forts and civil offices also engaged in worship, forming religious societies 社會 to prepare floats 臺閣 to welcome the god on his parade route, along which spectators thronged. While the well-to-do put on their own Jiao in order to pray for grace, the poor offered water and presented flowers. There is no place in the empire that worships the Saint with as much fervor as Hangzhou.

The next step in the god’s ascension begins in the year 1269, with the appearance of a tortoise in the river near the Upper Capital — the future Beijing — that the Yuan were in the process of building. Interpreted as a manifestation of the god Zhenwu, several high officials wrote celebrations of the event and the subsequent founding of a Zhenwu temple.93 In 1273, Khubilai Khan (r. 1260–95) ordered the fifth patriarch of the Daoist Great One school to place a seat for Zhenwu in the new Zhaoyinggong 照應宮 (Palace of Luminous Responses).94

Little attention has been paid to the context of these events. It is well known that Genghis Khan had given all power over both Buddhists and Daoists to the Quanzhen 全真 (Complete Perfection) Daoist Qiu Chuji 丘處機 (1148–1227) and that Daoist abuse of their power had led to Buddhist counterattacks whose end result was the burning, in the year 1281, of the Daoist canon and of all books in any way related to the conversion of the foreigners theme. Just before that, however, in 1276, Khubilai Khan had invited the 36th Heavenly Master, Zhang Zongyan 張宗演 (1244–91), to the capital. When he returned to Longhushan龍虎山, Zhang left his disciple, Zhang Liusun 張留孫 (1248–1322), behind. He was named head of the Xuanjiao玄教 or Teaching of the Mysteries, that is, Daoism, in 1278, and all subsequent heads of the Xuanjiao, including Zhang

And in 1291, the Daoist Liu Daoming 劉道明 compiled the first monograph on the Wudangshan, the Wudangshan zongzhen ji 武當山總真集 (Record of the Perfected of Wudangshan).

92 Shin-yi Chao, “A God in Transition,” Chapter 2. 93 Writing in 1312, Zhao Mengfu (1254–1352) explicitly linked these events to the Heavenly Mandate: “The rise of the Yuan began in the north. The energy of the north being in the ascendance, the god of the north sent down prophetic signs: thus did Heaven announce (the dynastic change).” See John Lagerwey, “The Pilgrimage to Wu-tang Shan,” in Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China, edited by Susan Naquin and Chün-fang Yü (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 298. 94 Curiously, this is the same name as that given by Zhenzong to the Daoist temple built in 1017 to house the “celestial document” discovered in 1008; cf. Davis, Society and the Supernatural, p. 95.

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Liusun’s disciple, the famous Wu Quanjie 吳全節 (1269–1346), who celebrated a Jiao 醮 for Chengzu’s (r. 1295–1307) accession to the throne, were also linked to the Heavenly Masters. The head of the Xuanjiao was in effect an ambassador “of the Celestial Masters at the Mongol court.”95

Here we must backtrack a moment: although there are episodic references to Heavenly Masters after Zhang Lu, Huizong was the first emperor after Cao Pi to have shown any interest in them (he gave titles to the 29th and 30th Heavenly Masters).

In other words, when the famous book burning took place, the Mongols had in fact already shifted their allegiance to Heavenly Master Daoism.

96 The Emperor Lizong (r. 1225–64) gave control of the three core Daoist mountains (Maoshan, Longhushan, and Gezaoshan 葛皂山) to the 35th Heavenly Master, and “this control was enhanced in the Yuan when the 36th Celestial Master and his descendants were recognized as the ‘masters of Daoism south of the Yangzi’.”97 In the Southern Song capital of Hangzhou according to the entry in the Mengliang lu on the Duanwu festival, people hung up the image of the Heavenly Master over their doors, meaning he had come to be a signifier of exorcism. It is in this context we must understand the 1276 visit and subsequent closeness of ties between the Mongols, the Heavenly Masters, and Wudangshan. Liu Daoming’s work is one instance of those ties. A second is the visit by Zhang Liusun to Wudangshan in 1280 and of Wu Quanjie in 1304, the same year Chengzu canonized the Perfect Warrior as Xuantian shangdi 玄天上帝 (Supreme Thearch of Dark Heaven). A third is the invitation in 1312 of Zhang Shouqing 張守清, a Daoist who had been engaged in major building projects on Wudangshan since 1284, to the capital, where he successfully prayed for rain to end a drought.98

It was this god, in whom the Yuan were so heavily invested, who was now destined to become the divine guarantor of the Ming Heavenly Mandate. The founder, Taizu 太祖 (r. 1368–99), as soon as he arrived in Nanjing, had a temple built to Zhenwu.

Finally, there is the annual Offering celebrated on Wudangshan at Renzong’s (r. 1312–20) behest on the god’s birthday — which was also his own — and the same emperor’s gift of titles to Zhenwu’s parents and master in 1314.

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95 Pierre-Henry de Bruyn, “Wudang shan: The Origins of a Major Center of Modern Taoism,” in Religion and Society in Chinese History, vol. 2, Taoism and Local Religion in Modern China, edited by John Lagerwey (Hong Kong: École française d’Extrême-Orient, Chinese University Press, 2004), p. 564.

In 1390, when the 43rd Heavenly Master requested the restoration of Longhushan, Zhenwu was given special honors. Above all, Taizu’s usurping son, the third emperor, Chengzu 成祖 (r. 1403–24), attributed his victory over Huidi 惠帝 (r. 1399–1403) to the Perfect Warrior’s help and, as an expression of his gratitude, covered Wudangshan with Daoist abbeys marking the sites of Zhenwu’s path to transcendence. He also built a temple for Zhenwu in the extreme north of the Forbidden City in the new capital of Beijing — the only original building still standing in the City. As late as 1600,

96 Chao, “Huizong and the Divine Empyrean Palace,” p. 327. 97 Davis, p. 45. 98 This paragraph is derived from de Bruyn, “Wu-dang Shan: The Origins of a Major Center,” pp. 563–7. 99 In the list of official temples in the Ming capitals of Beijing and Nanjing in the Da Ming huidian (Collected Statutes of the Great Ming), 93.1a–3a, the temple to Zhenwu is listed first in both cases, and it is stated explicitly for the Beijing temple that, “whenever a major event occurs, he must be informed” 國有大

事則告.

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a Hanlin academician, Liu Chenglian, in his inscription for a shrine on Wudangshan, continued to recall these foundational events:

The Dark Emperor’s cult is spread throughout the empire, but Wudang is its center. There can be no question but that the Emperor invisibly aided the Ming in securing the empire in the Yongle period, and it is therefore appropriate that his ritual rank be superior to that of all other gods . . . Each of the five elements has its virtue, but the greatest of the imperial virtues is that of water. In our times cult officials are most careful in their worship of the Dark Emperor. That is why Wudang is called the Great Peak: it soars high above the Five Peaks. Surely this is no accident! Surely this is no accident!100

After Chengzu, each successive emperor, upon ascending the throne, sent a “sacrificial writ” (jiwen祭文) to announce his accession to the Perfect Warrior.101

Clearly, the Heavenly Mandate of the Ming depended on this alter ego of the emperor, the Supreme Thearch of Dark Heaven.

Late Imperial China If Chengzu and his god occupy a special place in the history of Chinese religion in the Ming, it seems to me fair to say his ultimate influence is comparable to that of neither the Ming founder nor Shizu (r. 1522–67). Taizu may be said to have created modern Chinese religion by decreeing the creation of earth god altars 社壇 in every li 里 and of city god temples 城隍廟 in every county and prefecture. Henceforth, the bureaucratic outlines of the empires in this world and the underworld were identical. Already in the Song, according to Davis, earth gods had begun to be transferred into city god temples.102 Modern Daoist ritual manuscripts that invite the gods in descending order invariably invite, at the end of the list, after the Daoist high gods and the stellar gods of the Han, the city god and then the earth gods. Occasionally, they will insert named local gods at the end of these lists, and even, at the very end, their host’s ancestors. Daoist ritual, in other words, at least as far as local society is concerned, simply espoused the hierarchy of the gods decreed by Taizu — unless it be the other way round: that Taizu espoused that of the Daoists. Probably the most accurate way of saying it would be that Taizu gave imperial system and recognition to the divine hierarchy Daoism had practiced at least since Kou Qianzhi, who in his “revealed” text simply assumed what had always been the case, namely, the centrality of the various “provincial, prefectural, and county true officials of the earth.”103

To put it another way, Taizu enshrined in his religious policy a hierarchical and territorial definition of China and, in so doing, made administrative and religious China

Likewise, the fact that villagers in Fujian today still readily explain that the earth god is the equivalent of the local Party Secretary and the county-level city god of the Secretary of the county, suggests Taizu was simply turning long-standing sociological reality into policy.

100 Lagerwey, “The Pilgrimage to Wu-tang Shan,” p. 302. 101 On this little known but absolutely critical detail, see my “The Pilgrimage,” p. 326, n. 2. 102 Davis, Society and the Supernatural, p. 82. 103 For details, see Chapter 2.

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once again identical; state = church. In this state-church, church officials were subject to state officials, but the latter were subject to the church’s gods, as can be seen by the fact that, just as the emperor on ascending the throne had to send a sacrificial writ to his alter ego Zhenwu, so did each county magistrate have to report to duty to the city god. Indeed, according to the Veritable Records of Taizu (Taizu shilu 太祖實錄), when the magistrate came to take up office, he was to fast outside the city for three days while “the shrines and temples of all the gods and spirits to whom he was obliged to sacrifice were being cleaned and the offerings prepared for the ritual of announcement . . . At dawn on the fourth day, the local elders led him into the city to pay a visit to all shrines.”104

If I speak of Shizu in the same breath as Taizu, it is because this “most Daoist of the Ming emperors”

Here we see how little the religious ideology and practice of government had changed since the compilation of the Classic of Mountains.

105 is the emperor who finally gave to the commoners the right to have ancestors. He, that is, completed the “ritual revolution” for which neo-Confucians had been clamoring since Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033–1107), that the rites might, henceforth and in contravention of the famous proscription of the Book of Rites, “go down to the commoners.” As Chang Jianhua has most ably shown, the extension of the right to found lineage halls to commoners is linked to the Great Rites Controversy大禮議 and, in particular, to the 1536 memorial of Xia Yan 夏言, urging the emperor to “extend the favor” (tui en 推恩) by allowing commoners to worship their “founding ancestors” (shizu 始祖).106

Here is how David Faure describes the implications of this sea change:

First, it has been possible to pinpoint quite precisely the period in which transformation took place to the Jiajing period, say from the 1520s to the 1550s. Second, this argument makes the role of ritual in linking local society and the state central in this transformation. Third, it relates this transformation also to monetization in the market, especially insofar as taxation changed from corvée service and collection in kind to standardized rates and collection in money. Fourth, incorporation via the ritual process tied the lineage closely with the growth of business and the pooling of capital for investment purposes. Fifth, implied in all this, despite the central role of the city in imperial administration, imperial ideology sought to relate the state to rural society and peripheralized the cities.107

104 Mark Meulenbeld, “Civilized Demons: Ming Thunder Gods from Ritual to Literature (PhD thesis, Princeton University, 2007), p. 185, citing the Taizu shilu 170.2586. Meulenbeld goes on to quote a local monograph that says the magistrate would read a “sacrificial writ” in each of these temples. 105 De Bruyn, “Wu-dang Shan: The Origins of a Major Center of Modern Taoism,” (above, n. 95), p. 573. 106 Chang Jianhua, Mingdai zongzu yanjiu (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 2005), p. 14. The Great Rites Controversy refers to Shizu’s adamant refusal to consider himself as the adopted son of the previous emperor and make his ancestral sacrifice as Son of Heaven to this emperor rather than to his biological father. “Extending the favor” means, then, that like the emperor, commoners would have the right to worship their forebears. 107 David Faure, Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 13–4.

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This change also explains why Westerners and Chinese alike misconstrued Chinese society for centuries:

The lineage villages built around their ancestral halls that Maurice Freedman wrote about were few and far between in the early Ming era. Had Freedman visited the Pearl River Delta in that period, he would have seen the remnants of the Buddhist monasteries that had served as focal points of local organization in an earlier age . . . The administrative transformation of county government and the ritual reforms that ushered in the family temple together promoted the lineage society that lasted from the sixteenth century until the nineteenth.108

For a Chinese version of Freedman’s misunderstanding we may simply refer to the title of the book by Francis Hsü, Under the Ancestor’s Shadow: Hsü, like many Confucians before him, thought worship of the ancestors was the defining feature of Chinese religion and society, a kind of Chinese “essence.”

The reality, Faure is saying, is that ancestor worship was central to all classes of Chinese society only for the last four centuries of the empire. In the context of lineages which functioned increasingly like corporations, especially in the south, Confucian retooling of Chinese society achieved a real measure of success and, in so doing, contributed mightily to the impression received by Westerners — who were active in China in precisely this period — that Buddhism and Daoism were degenerate, and that China was “Confucian,” on the levels of both the state and local society. My own studies of locally collected “lineage registers” (zupu 族譜) in Fujian confirms that it is in the Ming, especially the mid-Ming, that this mode of lineage construction and organization of ancestor worship came into its own.109 To come back to Shizu, if Pierre-Henry de Bruyn refers to him as “the most Daoist of emperors,” it is because he was second only to Chengzu in the construction projects he undertook on Wudangshan. De Bruyn links this, astutely, to the threat posed by the Mongol Altan-qayan, “who promoted a renewal of the Buddhist sect of the yellow caps whose principal god was . . . Mahâkâla.”110

Like the Mongols before them, the Manchus subscribed, as a matter of dynastic policy, to a Tibetan form of Tantric Buddhism. Their investment in this religion is still visible in Beijing today in the Yonghe Palace 雍和宮 and, above all, in the extraordinary buildings on Wutaishan 五台山. But no more than the Yuan did the Qing emperors

One of Shizu’s most remarkable constructions on Wudangshan was the entry gate (shanmen 山門) at the foot of the mountain, marking the entry into sacred territory. On it he had inscribed the phrase zhi shi Xuanyue 治世玄嶽, “Dark Peak which governs the world” — confirmation of the intimate relationship between the Mountain, its Warrior, and the Mandate.

108 Ibid., p. 14. 109 See my “Notes on the Symbolic Life of a Hakka Village,” Minjian xinyang yu Zhongguo wenhua guoji yantao hui lunwen ji (Taipei: Hanxue yanjiu zhongxin, 1994), vol. 2, pp. 733–62, and “The Li Lineage of Hukeng,” Di’er jie kejia xue guoji yantao hui lunwen ji, edited by Lau Yee Cheung (Hong Kong: Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1995), pp. 101–68. 110 De Bruyn, “Wu-dang Shan,” p. 573. Earlier, p. 568, de Bruyn had suggested that, during the Yuan, “behind their gods Mahâkâla and Zhenwu the Buddhist and Taoist religious communities were engaged in a major struggle for influence and power in the north of China.”

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ignore the “indigenous higher religion.” If, today, throughout China, the vast majority of Quanzhen 全真 monks claim affiliation with the Longmen school龍門派, it is, as Monica Esposito has shown, because of Qing policy. Her deconstruction of the Longmen lineage reveals that the claim took root in the late Ming, when anti-Manchu literati joined the Quanzhen school just as their predecessors had done at the end of the Song. Then, no doubt because the Ming had preferred the Zhengyi school associated with mounts Longhu and Wudang, the early Qing emperors turned instead to the Quanzhen “for conveying public ordinations. The motor of the court-approved reorganization of Daoist discipline was a Longmen master, Wang Changyue” 王常月 (d. 1680), who was appointed abbot of the White Cloud Abbey (Baiyun guan 白雲觀) in Beijing in the year 1656.111

By means of an invented lineage tracing the Longmen school back to Qiu Chuji, the Quanzhen patriarch whose tomb is inside the Baiyun guan, the new group linked itself directly to “the prestigious position which the Quanzhen school had enjoyed at the beginning of the Yuan dynasty”: the Ming and its policies favorable to the Zhengyi 正一 school became an historical parenthesis. What is perhaps most intriguing about this newly invented Daoist lineage is that it was built on the Chan model, showing once again how improbable it is to talk about one of China’s “higher religions” without talking about the other — or rather, others, for the very notion of patriarchal lineage, of course, derives from the third of China’s higher religions, Confucianism.

I will conclude by citing in extenso a previously published summary of an article by Richard von Glahn112

:

Von Glahn’s article on the Taihu basin confirms the importance of the role played by Buddhist monks in local society. Already in the Northern Song, there was a Buddhist monastery in the local market town. Under the Yuan, a new marketplace was created by the newly dominant Pu family, “which set up four brokerage houses to conduct trade in silk goods. Pu Jian (1262–1312) donated his own home to establish the Fushan Monastery in 1309 . . . Many of the great landowning families in the region during this time were devoted patrons of lay Buddhist movements . . . [The Pu) were conspicuously favorable toward the Buddhist faith.” At the beginning of the Ming, the Pu clan “became a principle target of Zhu Yuanzhang’s campaign to uproot and dispossess the delta’s great families . . . The Fushan Monastery lost its official recognition and tax exemption privileges.” When the town of Puyuan’s fortunes finally recovered in the second half of the sixteenth century, the local elite had turned to ancestor hall building. “These same families also founded small Guanyin chapels, primarily for devotional use by kinswomen. In the town of Puyuan there were numerous ‘family convents’ jia’an

111 Monica Esposito, “The Longmen School and its Controversial History during the Qing Dynasty,” in Religion and Society in Chinese History, vol. 2, Taoism and Local Religion in Modern China edited by John Lagerwey (Hong Kong: Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, Chinese University Press, 2004), p. 622. According to Esposito, the Ming steles that she has consulted depict a Baiyun guan linked not to the Quanzhen but to the Zhengyi school. 112 From my “Introduction” to Religion and Society in Chinese History, pp. xxiv–xxv, presentation of Richard von Glahn, “The Sociology of Religion in the Lake T’ai-hu Basin,” in vol. 2, Taoism and Local Religion in Modern China, pp. 773–815.

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家庵 established by rich families [who] endowed the convents with lands, and the nuns tended mulberry orchards and silkworms to provide for their living expenses.” Insofar as this, in a nutshell, was typical of the trends throughout west-central Fujian as well, one suspects it was empire-wide.113

But these are not the only long-term trends von Glahn discusses. The same Pu Jian who had founded the Fushan si also founded a Daoist abbey dedicated to Zhenwu and a Temple of the Eastern Peak 東嶽廟.114 It was these temples that were at the heart of the major local festivals that, by the late Ming, “had come to define the social identity of Puyuan’s townfolk.” The most popular gods, however, were none of the above. That role devolved on a series of intensely local “sovereign and tutelary” deities called Zongguan 總管 (commandant), Wusheng 五聖 (Five Saints), and Fierce General Liu 劉猛將軍, as well as a goddess called Taijun, “who gave aid in childbirth and the nurturing of children.”115 The Wusheng were “a subset of the Wutong 五通,” whose “malevolent nature inspired fear more than adoration.”116 Nearly every village in the Taihu basin had a small shrine for the Wusheng at the village entrance, and “peasants hung images of Wusheng in many places — in the home, in the still, and in the pens where cattle, pigs, and chickens were kept — to ward off ghosts and demons.”117

113 See my “Patterns of Religion in West-Central Fujian: The Local Monograph Record,” Minsu quyi 129 (2001), pp. 43–236. 114 Again this corresponds to patterns in west-central Fujian, where the earliest recorded Zhenwu temple dates to 1177 and the earliest Dongyue miao to ca. 1127: see the article cited in the previous note, pp. 57 and 59. Von Glahn recalls that Song Zhenzong ordered a Dongyue Temple be built in every administrative capital throughout the empire; “The inhabitants of many of the Yangzi Delta’s market towns sought to embellish their town’s stature by building ‘detached palaces’ (xinggong 行宮) dedicated to Dongyue.” In the Da Ming huidian list of Beijing’s imperially-sponsored temples, that of the Eastern Peak comes right after that of Zhenwu and before that of the Capital City God Temple 都城隍廟 (93.1a–b). On the usually Daoist character of this temple, see my Taoist Ritual, p. 72. 115 In much of southeastern China, this position is occupied by Chen Jinggu, in much of north China by Bixia yuanjun. Cf. my “Patterns of Religion,” especially the table of gods (pp. 104–6) and the commentary (p. 107): “These tables show once again just how local local religion is.” 116 Von Glahn adds that “the capricious character of the god evoked popular anxieties about the evanescence of wealth . . . The abiding idea that the accumulation of wealth invites eventual disaster because it depletes the individual’s balance of merit in the Celestial Treasury necessitated the expenditure of spirit money to replenish this spent balance.” The “balance of merit,” as well as its acquisition and ritual transfer, are all to be understood in the context of fundamental notions of justice such as those explored by Paul Katz: see his Divine Justice: Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture (London & New York, 2009). On the Wutong in western Fujian, see Zhang Hongxiang’s article (in Chinese), “A Survey of Temple Festivals in Tingzhou,” in Temple Festivals and Village Culture in Minxi, volume 4 of the “Traditional Hakka Society Series,” ed. Yang Yanjie, pp. 80–113, especially pp. 110–3, where we learn that the Seven Maidens and Wutong having been sculpted from the same camphor tree, Wutong must “return to his wives’ home” for a twelve-day visit during his festival. 117 Again, this is standard practice in western Fujian as well, where it is not images so much as “symbols” (fu 符) dedicated by Daoists during annual rites addressed to the local earth god which are placed in the animal pens. See my “Culte et lignage dans la Chine rurale,” in La société civile face à l’État dans les traditions chinoise, japonaise, coréenne et vietnamienne, edited by Léon Vandermeersch (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1994), pp. 293–300. On the role of the shrine at the village entrance, no doubt its shuikou 水口 or “water exit,” see below, Chapter 4.

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Concluding Remarks At the end of the Chinese imperial period, thus, we have a highly complex, articulated society, in which the state continues to play the role of referee and local society remains obdurately local, at least in terms of the identity of its gods and the organization of its religious life around the gods and, now, the ancestors. The importance of the ancestors should, it seems to me, be played down: not only were they more or less important in different parts of China, depending on the size and function of local lineages, but they were never prayed to for anything important.118 Ancestors may indeed have cast a long shadow over families and individuals, but no one feared them anymore as they had in the Six Dynasties,119

From first to last, what really counts in the definition of Chinese society, whether at the top or at the bottom, are the gods and the ghosts, the forces of order and disorder. In politics as in religion, the roles of these two basic categories of being are not infrequently inverted, and the ghost becomes a god, or the bandit an emperor, or vice versa. The ultimate decision was made by the Son of Heaven, a part of whose definition it had always been to separate the wheat from the chaff, the useful from the dangerous. To take up our refrain once again: the state was the church in China, and no other church ever succeeded in supplanting this church-state.

and certainly no one prayed to them anymore as the Shang emperors once had. This decline in the power of the ancestors is perhaps most palpable on the imperial level, when the Ming, unlike the Tang and the Song, chose a supreme deity to which it had no family relationship. And then Shizu made imperial ancestor sacrifices as much a personal matter as a matter of state.

But that is perhaps, by now, a rather banal conclusion. Let us say things differently: there were two religions in China, that of the state-church and that of local society. And, to make a slightly jocular paraphrase, “local society proposes, the state disposes.” The state plays God, but it can do so only because local society is a god-producing machine whose prodigious inventiveness still today keeps the state hopping: 政府有政策，地方有對策 (“For every government policy there is a local riposte”). This is not to say the state has no impact on the final product. It very emphatically does, for no religious movement in China becomes major without government recognition and support. From the Shang ancestors to the Longmen sect, this is a constant feature of Chinese religious history: it is dominated by political decisions.120

118 See the citation of Arthur Wolf, “Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors,” in the Introduction, note 20.

Insofar as these decisions, in turn, are determined by strategic choices related to a need for legitimacy, and insofar as legitimacy, under the empire, was immediately related to a claim to universality, the pressure on religious movements to certify their own legitimacy and demonstrate their own universality was intense if they wished so much as to survive. Whether it be invented lineages, claims of divine revelation, complex patterns of mimesis (such as the Daoist bureaucracy), or vast syntheses of the sanjiao heyi 三教合一 or

119 See Stephen Bokenkamp, Ancestors and Anxiety: Daoism and the Birth of Rebirth in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). It should also be underscored here that, as in the Shang, it was usually the recently dead who were feared. Moreover, the anxiety about the dead, especially the unfortunate dead — and the rituals this anxiety engendered — hardly fit the standard notion of “ancestor worship.” 120 Cf. de Bruyn’s conclusion, p. 574: “The study of the evolution of Zhenwu’s worship through three dynasties shows clearly how much political authority in China can influence the theological understanding and position of a god in the Chinese pantheon.”

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symbolic alchemy neidan 內丹 variety — these may all, at one time or another, be used by religious movements in order to attract or keep imperial favor.

But, in the end, the responses of local societies throughout China to changing political, economic, and intellectual circumstances strike me as more creative and more logically coherent than those of the state. That is, we get a more accurate picture of Chinese history and “mentalities” from the study of local religion than from the study of national political history. And we cannot make sense of the latter without understanding the former.