So now we're going to step back

and look a little bit at the early Chinese pantheon.

So once again coming from this book,

and the article on which we're going to rely on the most is by Robert Eno.

The name of this article is "Shang State Religion."

It's just that "Shang State Religion."

Okay, but we'll then talk also about Martin Kern under the Western Zhou,

he talks about bronze inscriptions, the Shijing 詩經, that's the Book of Songs,

the Shangshu 尚書, the Book of Documents: "The Evolution of the Ancestral Sacrifice During the Western Zhou."

So those two articles, Robert Eno, Martin Kern,

and a third article by Kominami Ichirô

called "Rituals for the Earth" about the earth god,

whom we'll see is also extremely important to

the definition of space as it was during the royal period.

Okay? So: we're going to start as I've already mentioned with the reign of Wuding 武丁.

And this is in fact the only reign for which we actually have information about the pantheon.

He had an extremely rich pantheon, and after Wuding

it becomes very mechanical, just the ancestors

and a wholly, almost totally ritualized program

that mechanically was carried out.

So it's only for this one period that we have sufficient information that we can

even talk about the gods of the Shang period, the first royal historical period.

The pantheon Wuding sacrificed to, says Robert Eno,

was "unquestionably dominated by the lineal ancestors, distant and near."

So the very recently dead and then ones who died a long long time ago

and who fade sort of into myth history, maybe not even historical characters.

Okay? So: "unquestionably dominated by lineal ancestors."

Now we have to add something about that.

There's a rite call bin 賓.

Bin means to have a guest.

So today you go to a big meeting and if you're big nose then you're guibin 貴賓 frequently, okay?

So: the idea of bin and receiving, hosting.

And there's not a lot of evidence about this,

but some evidence seems to suggest that the only people, "people,"

ancestors who could communicate with Di, the highest god, by having him to a banquet as it were, bin him,

were the most distant ancestors, those ones way back in mythological time.

So there was like a direct conduit going from the near ancestors to the distant ancestors to Di.

Okay? So: political, in other words, you have political power because you have the right ancestors.

End of story.

You don't have those ancestors, well, then you don't have political power.

So here we see in the Shang dynasty that political power was totally determined, totally dependent on

being able to sacrifice to your ancestors,

and of course this is going to pose a problem as soon as we change dynasties.

We'll talk about that in a moment.

Okay, so: in addition to the ancestors, this pantheon had

what we can call "nature" gods, namely River and Mountain.

Just not rivers and mountains.

We assume that the term yue 嶽, for example, "mountain," referred to one specific mountain,

not all the mountains, and "river" probably referred to the Huanghe 黃河, but it's just called he 河.

But, there's also Di.

Lots of discussions about the actual nature of Di,

whether there really is a high god, whether there are multiple gods.

There are even some ancestors who are called Di.

But, in my personal view, I think that we can see him as a high god

and there's one key fact that makes it plausible to think about him that way.

Why? Because he was the only god who could ling 令.

Just as in society only the king can ling, only this god Di can ling.

Ling is to give orders:

that's sovereignty,

that's power,

that's authority.

Okay? There was another fact:

he was not sacrificed to. So you could have this bin

kind of relationship of guesting or hosting him

but no sacrifices were made to Di, in spite of the fact that he had really extensive powers.

He had the power over warfare and victory,

over weather and harvest, and even over the fate of the capital city.

Okay, so: there, in a nutshell, is the pantheon under this

one long lasting reign of Wuding under the Shang dynasty.

Now, we move to the Western Zhou.

The dates, 1045 to 771 BC.

We'll see later why that 771 BC constitutes an important break

in the history of the Zhou dynasty, the second royal dynasty.

The most important thing is to say that Di is replaced by Tian.

So this clearly anthropomorphic god Di is replaced by Tian,

whom we've already said is sort of anthropomorphic and sort of not.

In any case, it's just the physical sky,

especially the physical sky at night, but this then leads to the first

appearance in Chinese written records of a couple of key concepts.

We've already introduced one is tianzi, Son of Heaven,

but even more important for our story is the introduction

and the earliest reference we have to it's about fifty years into the dynasty, 998 BCE

tianming 天命 in a bronze inscription,

Heavenly Mandate, means that this dynasty has

the mandate, the legitimacy, to rule—it has been approved by Heaven:

not approved by Di, approved by Heaven,

and this concept, in my opinion, continues to function today.

Even though we've long since left the imperial period,

over almost, over 100 years now,

but that idea of political legitimacy, the idea of the Heavenly Mandate

remains very very powerful.

So, dynastic time in this royal period is still about ancestor worship,

because the ancestor worship continues under the Zhou.

But there's what is called a ritual revolution

that occurs right around the mid-9th century and the rituals that were very closed,

almost no public at all, became much more public, and so display becomes a part.

So these famous bronze bells, and bronze, sets of bronzes, bronze sacrificial vessels,

for example, that we can see from this period, are generally thought to be related to these changes.

They're not just ritual vessels.

They're also there on display to show the power and the wealth of the person who possesses them.

Okay? So: ritual, even royal ritual, becomes semi-public.

It's about historical memory, that is to say remembering the conquest,

how Zhou conquered the Shang,

and emergent notions of moral legitimacy, precisely the Heavenly Mandate.

And what we can say is that these things,

the semi-public character of ritual, the role of historical memory, celebrating the conquest,

and these emergent notions of moral legitimacy

are like the first signs of what we called, just a moment ago, the Confucian "humanism."

Now, we're going to look at another feature of this space in the Zhou period

and the Zhou period is summarized in this text that we've already referred to a number of times,

the Zhouli 周禮, the Rites of Zhou, and it gives us a description of how royal space is built up.

So once again we're talking about space.

We just talked about dynastic time.

Now we’ll talk about dynastic space.

She 社:

The term that later on gives the term， the modern term shehui 社會.

But, the term shehui in fact is found very early on in Chinese history.

Why? Because she refers to the earth god.

Now, we call it the tudigong 土地公, and he often has a tudipo 土地婆, he has a wife.

Okay? But back in the early time, he's just a male god, even though he's associated with the earth.

He is the god of earth.

We should actually say of territory.

And here's where the article of Kominami Ichirô becomes

important and this is what he says: "Shang expansion"

—so each time that they expanded,

we showed a map a moment ago, this is the Shang dynasty,

but note that the Shang dynasty was also continuously

fighting wars, continuously changing in size, okay?

So: "Shang expansion was expressed religiously by the

transfer to each new frontier post of the earth god altar

—and of the tablets of the ancestors, but only after the creation of the altar."

Now, first of all, he refers to the tablets of the ancestors and you go to any ancestral hall in

China still today and if they haven't all been destroyed or haven't been remade,

you'll see that there are no images of the ancestors.

Ancestors' pictures or portraits can be hung up during

the new year celebrations, traditionally they were,

but they were supposed to be represented only by what's

called in Chinese shenzhupai 神主牌, a wooden tablet,

on which is just inscribed their name, and on the back the dates of birth and death, okay?

So: these wooden tablets were already there in the Zhou dynasty but he's saying—

so the Shang conquers a new place

and the first thing it has to do is to take a piece of earth, a piece of earth from the shetan 社壇,

that is to say from the open altar where the she, the earth god was worshipped, take a piece of that,

a clod of that earth and transfer it to the new territory

and this is a way of saying this territory now is a part of our territory.

So it's about territorial expansion signified by transferring the sacrifice to their earth god,

their god of territory to this newly conquered space

and then and only then, are the ancestor tablets added to the altar.

So this is very important to see that the expansion

is about space, about territory and that means that the earth god

is primary to this practice of warfare and colonial expansion.

We'll come back to that in a moment.

Now, there is a phrase that first appears —and in a moment we'll see why—

that first appears in the Laozi, in which royal power

—because we're still under the Zhou—

is described in the following way:

Royal power, the person who occupies that central space,

is nanmian erzuo 南面而坐, he is "seated facing south."

That's over that way,

facing south.

Now, everybody knows that the right hand is stronger than the left hand,

and left handers and southpaws are often in many societies seen even as sinister somehow.

In fact the word sinister in English comes from Latin sinistra, which refers to everything negative.

Okay? And the right hand, the hand of power and might, and so on.

But it's been very early on observed that in China the right hand is not yang 陽.

It's not the power of the male, as opposed to the female, as it would be in the West.

The yang is on the left and the yin is on the right.

Why? Well, think about it.

Think about the maps that you've looked at all your life. When I was a kid,

we used to talk about going "up north" or going "down south".

That's because that's where they were on our maps.

But, on Chinese traditional maps, it's exactly upside down.

It's up south and down north.

Why is it up south? Because the map is an ideal space that refers to that

ideal subject, who is the king, who is nanmian erzuo, he's seated facing south.

Now, when you're seated facing south, then the east will be

on your left, and the right—the west—will be on your right,

and so this will be the place of the rising sun, and this will be the place of the setting sun.

This will be the place of new life.

This will be the place of death.

And that's exactly how the space is described.

The architectural space described by the Zhouli is

that in the middle you have the palace, the gong 宮 of the king,

so once again he's in the middle.

On his left hand side, you have the miao 廟, temple.

What is a temple?

It's a character like that, which is like a roof and a house

and underneath you have the character chao 朝

which means the dawn, the coming dawn and who lives in this miao? Well, it's the taizi 太子.

It's the future king.

What's he doing there? Well, he's being educated.

He's being prepared to become king or duke or whatever it is.

How is he being educated?

Well, for one, for sure, he's doing the rituals, he's doing all the rituals,

he's learning to occupy by playing his ritual role that we just described:

sacrifices to the ancestors, sacrifices to the rivers and mountains, and so on.

Okay? So: and on the right hand side then, you have the she, the earth god.

Why? Well, this is the place that when the Shang or the Zhou were going to set out to go to war,

to conquer new territory, or to defend their territory,

this is where the sovereign would go and harangue his troops

so the she at that point is totally associated with death, with warfare, and with conquest.

Okay?

Right hand side is yin, the left hand side is yang.

And so in this period—we're talking more about this—we see

the emergence of a systematic rationalization of all of the givens to imagine a world

in which there's the overarching Dao and the Dao then,

it splits into the yin and yang Qi, yin and yang energies. And, the yang energies

are light and go up to form the heavens

and the yin energies are heavy and go down, settle down to form the earth.

And so now what we're seeing here is not necessarily

how things were actually done though archaeological digs seemed to confirm this.

It's very difficult to know exactly which portion of what has been dug up,

really was a temple, really was the earth god, tan 壇, open air altar, and so on.

But in any case, what we see in this systematization is that the basic poles of power

which will later be called the wen 文 and the wu 武,

that is to say the civil and the military officials who are across from the emperor when he holds court,

they're being classified, hierarchized as yin and yang, life and death.

Okay, so: now we're moving on to the Eastern Zhou,

the second half of the Zhou dynasty, which begins in 771 BCE.

What happened? The Zhou were driven out of their ancestral homeland and the whole story shifts east.

Hundreds of small states with blood ties to the Zhou are swallowed up

by ever larger states and that several of which, on the periphery, had no such ties.

The sacrifice to the Zhou ancestor,

which we've now seen was the very linchpin of the entire system,

ceased to have any political meaning.

It's useless from the point of view of politics.

Qin, that will eventually found the first empire,

saw itself as descended from the Great Yu, a mythical hero who tamed the Chinese flood.

And we have the emergence of the three great sages of Chinese antiquity: Yao, Shun, and Yu,

who become models of virtue—political and moral virtue— that ruled because of their merit.

Okay? And Yao then transmitted the throne not to his son but to Shun,

and Shun transmitted it to Yu, because each of them had achieved merit.

So the idea not of a blood transmission—a dynasty based on blood transmission—but on merit.

Okay? So: the rise in importance of merit are in the whole conception of political and social space.

But then, a rupture in this myth history:

Yu's son Qi 啟 becomes king after him

and this then is the foundation of this prehistorical dynasty,

if it ever existed—like I say we cannot prove it.

Certainly, there was something before the Shang dynasty.

We have a long long period of prehistory in China, so there's no problem.

And there were undoubtedly states,

but in any case, the myth history that is written many many many centuries later

then is that this first dynasty was before the Shang was called the Xia 夏,

but I insist we're in the prehistory.

And so the dynasty is defined as a transmission by blood from father to son.

But these new sage kings, they're worshiped at the level of the state.

But on the level of the locality, of the local society, there were these territorial gods.

And the first collection of all of these territorial gods is called

the Shanhaijing 山海經 or Classic of Mountains and Seas.

And in this particular text, we have what are called hybrid gods,

that is to say gods who are maybe have a human body and a dragon head or a bird head.

Okay? They're not humans, they're not animals, they're not the ligui, the unfortunate dead.

They are these hybrid gods and the Shanhaijing is very

interesting because it is a whole series of itineraries.

Incidentally, it's attributed to Yu.

It's supposedly when Yu was doing his travels around

the empire to zhishui 治水, to put an end to the flood,

that he wrote down all of the information that we can read in the Shanhaijing.

I should add as well that Shanhaijing describes a later version, the one we have today,

but the earliest text of the Shanhaijing, is generally agreed to be the first five chapters.

Why five? East, North, South, West, Center.

The five directions.

In the five directions and in each of the five directions,

there are itineraries that go to all of the sacred mountains on that territory

and every mountain is in turn associated with the rivers that flow out from this mountain.

So here we see that it should in fact,

the early parts should be called the Shanheijing 山河經.

In other words, we find back that early pantheon

with those two nature gods of Mountain and River.

And this is now characteristic of every character

—not just of the Shang territory as a whole—

but of every local territory, it has its shan 山 and its he 河 and this is what defines territory.

This is what defines a locality.

It has its mountains which hold it in place, zhen 鎮

and it has its flowing rivers that of course bring life.

Okay? And all of these will be later incorporated into very complex systems

for the study and analysis of space that we call fengshui 風水, literally wind and water,

okay?— which is all about the relative positioning of the hills and mountains and the rivers.

Okay so now, every place, every itinerary for the five directions

has a whole series of mountains and rivers

and each mountain, each river has its gods.

So the text will first tell us, above all, all of the minerals

that are found on this mountain—what you can mine there

—the animals, the plants, flora and fauna.

So it gives like a “scientific” description of the physical elements that

—and finally it tells us who the god of this mountain was and what he likes.

So what does this tell us? Well, this tells us that by the time that this

Shanhaijing was being compiled, probably in the 3rd and 4th century BCE,

to be Son of Heaven, part of the job description was knowing who the local gods were

and what to give them so that they would pay attention when you came to visit.

Okay? So: we start to see then this contrast between

state, elite religion turned towards the ancestors,

turned toward Heaven, and the local society which is

built up around these earth gods, these local gods,

these gods in particular of the mountains.

So now let's jump to the imperial period and the early Western Han.

The Western Han lasted from 206 BC to 9 AD

and there's a very famous passage

in the Memoirs of the Grand Historian Sima Qian 司馬遷, in which he says as follows,

"After peace had been restored to the empire, Gaozu 高祖,"

the founding emperor of the Han,

"appointed various officials for sacrifice and invocation in Chang'an 長安,"

the capital, "as well as women shamans.

The shamans from the region of Liang worshipped such

deities as Heaven and Earth, the earth god of Heaven,

the waters of Heaven, within the Chamber, and in the Hall.

Those from the region of Jin worshipped such gods as the Five Emperors,

the lord of the east, the lord in the clouds, the director of destiny,"

and so forth and so on.

And I've given you just the first two, about eight or nine states are listed

and each of them has its own local gods.

So what we see here is that in spite of the attack on shamanism

—we haven't yet talked about all the arguments against shamans—

we can see that under the empire,

they're still there and they're still important to the practice of the state religion.

So he has to invite these local shamans who understand the local gods

that we just talked about in the Shanhaijing

so that they know what and whom to sacrifice to and how to do it.

Apart from that, these local gods,

there were domestic gods and these included precisely

"the dead without posterity, the door, the stove."

So, still today, the menshen 門神, the door gods; zaojun 灶君, the stove god.

These are already referred to in these early texts.

"For the lowest ranking aristocrats and commoners,

he created one sacrifice, either the door or the stove."

So here we see too the hierarchy of sacrifices.

You're supposed to be only able

—if you're just a commoner—to only sacrifice to your stove god or to your door god,

but not to all of these, even these territorial gods,

because these territorial gods are associated with power and the exercise of power.

But here what's even more interesting is that in this text we have the commentators over the ages

and in particular one from the very end of the Han dynasty called Zheng Xuan 鄭玄

who lived from 130 to 200 Common Era, and he says that these

lowest gods that would go out of the door and of the stove,

are "minor gods," little guys, "who dwell among the people."

Doing what? "In charge of watching for small faults and making reports on them."

And this shows us that these local guards who are protector gods are also spies.

Spies for you could say the whole bureaucracy.

Not the earthly bureaucracy of the emperor, but the bureaucracy

underneath, in the underworld, in the netherworld,

that is ultimately governed by, on high, by the Shangdi 上帝 on high,

but they're in charge of watching for small faults.

That's of course exactly what the zaojun 灶君 does all through Chinese history,

so on the 24th, on the 23rd of the 12th month,

the zaojun, the stove god, is going to go off to Heaven,

so we smear his mouth with sweet things and ask him to make a good report,

a sweet report on us up to Heaven, to the Jade Emperor as he's then called Yuhuang 玉皇.

So already then we see that is the function of these local gods: they protect, but they also spy.

Okay? Now we've got another kind of god that we've already referred to and that is these vicious gods,

these pernicious gods and there's a story in the Zuozhuan which goes as follows.

There's first one Guangu, who is this invocator, the one who speaks.

He's a minister in the state of Song, a small state in the eastern part of China.

His job is to take care of the unfortunate dead, all of these ligui, and then the story: Bao is the young lord of Song.

You'll see how young he is.

So here's the story: "Once a man wearing a red garment"—especially in Daoism I find this extremely intriguing,

because Daoists traditionally wear red garments,

so we have perhaps a kind of continuity but anyway

—so "once a man wearing a red garment appeared from the temple bearing a club and said, 'Guangu (the invocator), what does this mean?

The sacramental jades and circlets do not fulfill the proper standard,

the offerings of wine and millet are impure,

the sacrificial animals are not fat and flawless

as they should be and the ceremonies appropriate to the

four seasons are not performed at the right times!

Is this your doing'," you the invocator, the ritualist, "'or is it Bao's'," the lord, the sovereign?

Guangu stupidly answers, 'Bao is an infant, still in swaddling clothes.

What does he know of such matters? I am in charge, and it's all my doing!'

Then the man dressed in red raised his club and struck Guangu, who fell dead on the altar.

At that time there was not one of the Song attendants

who did not see what happened and no one in distant regions who did not hear about it.

It was recorded in the Spring and Autumn Annals of the state of Song,

and the feudal lords handed down the story, saying, 'All who fail to conduct sacrifices with the proper respect and circumspection will incur

the punishment of the ghosts and spirits with just such rapidity'!"

So now we've seen you might say the underbelly, the negative side of this religion requiring constant care

to make sure that the appropriate sacrifices were done

so that these negative spirits not just made a bad report on you but could actually cause your death.

Okay? Now one commentator says that this man dressed in red was the wu

so the other part of the pair of the invocator and the shaman.

And who is a wu? He says he was somebody who "knew how to welcome the gods," jieshen 接神.

"Spirits of the unfortunate dead descended into his body,"

lishen 厲神, the unfortunate dead spirits, jiang yu qi shen 降於其身.

So they come down into his body. Now what does that mean? Well, this is the standard term for possession,

so he is possessed: the wu as a possessed, possessed by a god or a spirit, negative or positive,

"and he uttered reproaches to the invocator and then beat him to death."

Okay? So: this is how this particular dramatic incident taking place at the court,

in the temple of the court has been described.

In subsequent Chinese history, religious history, possession by the gods

is predominately possession by ligui, these unfortunate dead, who are also called yuanhun 冤魂, that is to say vengeful souls.

They want revenge, they're souls with a grudge, and they want divine justice.

Okay, so: now we've got a little idea of this already very complex pantheon of gods

and spirits—positive and negative—that are going to

be attacked by the intellectuals during these periods.

M01.2.2 The Early Chinese Pantheon

Intellectual Change in Early China: Warring States and Han

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