This sequence of four courses will propose a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of Chinese cultural history conceived of as a succession of modes of rationality (philosophical, bureaucratic, and economic). The focus will be on the moments of paradigm shift from one mode of rationality to another. For each of these moments, cultural facts and artifacts—thought, literature, ritual—will be examined in relationship to changing social, political, and economic systems. The first two courses will cover the periods of the Warring States (481-256 BCE) and the Period of Division (220-589 CE), with a brief excursion into the Han (206 BCE-220 CE). The Warring States laid the social and cultural foundations for the emergence of the imperial mode of rationality; the Period of Division saw the Buddhist “conquest” of China and the emergence of a rationality defined by the opposition of the Three Teachings to shamanism, that is, of a clear contrast between elite and popular culture. The third and fourth courses will focus on the emergence of modern China in the Song-Yuan (960-1368) and of today’s China 1850 to the present. We will see how the modern attack on religion, redefined as "superstition", led not only to religious reform movements but also to a society in which science and the nation became the primary value systems promoted by the state. The courses are listed below: A Critical Cultural History of China - Early China I: Intellectual Change in the Warring States and Han (481 BCE-220 CE) A Critical Cultural History of China - Early China II: Religious Transformation in the Period of Division (220-589 CE) A Critical Cultural History of China - Modern China I: Religion and Thought in the Song, Jin, and Yuan (960-1368) A Critical Cultural History of China - Modern China II: Structuring Values (1850-2015)
M01.1.2 Background 2
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From the course by The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Intellectual Change in Early China: Warring States and Han
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The Chinese University of Hong Kong
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From the lesson
MODULE 01: Attack on Shamanism
This module explains why the intellectual elite attacked traditional religious practices like divination and shamanism.
Meet the Instructors
Prof. John LagerweyResearch Professor
Centre for China Studies
So what are we talking about?
What is the key paradigm shift in this period?
Well, I've already mentioned: the decline of the ancestors.
But who comes into the place of the ancestors?
We have what we can call the rise of a Heaven.
Heaven, <i>tian</i> 天, but this Heaven is not just the sky,
even though it's the sky as well.
It is also a moral and anthropomorphic entity.
What do I mean?
Well, for example, the word for the constellations
in the sky in Chinese is <i>tianwen</i> 天文,
that is to say literally "heavenly writings" or "heavenly patterns,"
and these constellations and knowledge about constellations and
about the regularity of the calendar year
and the development of the luni-solar calendar
will be one of the major characteristics of the intellectual change
that is going on during the Warring States
and will become central to the imperial religion of the Qin and the Han.
So, on the one hand, people are looking at the sky
as it is, noticed at night, not during the day.
It's the night sky that's most important
in Chinese imagination of the sky.
And then there emerges another term among the philosophers,
it's called <i>tiandao</i> 天道.
This term Dao 道 is going to follow us all the way through Chinese history.
It's one of the key terms.
I consider it to be the term
which is comparable to the word God in the West.
That is to say it occupies a central place:
if you don't have the word Dao,
you don't have Chinese culture
from the period of the Warring States on.
And so to put these two terms Tian and Dao
together in one term is perhaps one of the best,
most succinct summaries of the changes
that we're going to be talking about.
And then this Heaven, this regular calendrical cycle
that is understood better and better,
it becomes a model for the imperial Son of Heaven, <i>tianzi</i> 天子.
Again, Son of Heaven.
So here we can see the importance of the concept of Heaven to the emerging foundations,
intellectual foundations of the bureaucratic empire.
Okay? So: the Way of Heaven, its regularity, its laws become the model for the laws that
the Son of Heaven promulgates to govern his empire.
Okay, so: up till now it sounds like the human
the Son of Heaven is imitating nature, imitating the regularity of the sky, of the heavens.
But and this is where the moral and anthropomorphic character of Heaven comes into play,
all of the thinkers affirm in a most determined fashion
and all the way through the entire imperial period right down to 1911
that a "sincere" person—the Chinese term is <i>cheng</i> 誠,
a person with a <i>chengxin</i> 誠心, a sincere heart—he can "move" Heaven,
<i>gan</i> 感 and this term <i>gan</i> is an extremely important concept of the relationship
between Heaven above and here below us on earth.
So a person who is sincere, a person who is virtuous, he can move Heaven.
So what does this tell us?
In a nutshell, it tells us that the bureaucratic empire could not be built on ancestor worship.
Okay? So: that's one way to summarize the paradigm shift.
Decline of ancestors as the center of power, the focus of power,
and the most important rituals of the state [addressed] to a Heaven.
There is another aspect which is much less,
what shall I say, elevated than Heaven and it's a new kind of god.
Is it new? We don't know.
All we know is that before this we don't really have that term,
it appears in a text we'll be talking quite a bit about called the <i>Zuozhuan</i> 左傳,
the <i>Chronicles of Zuo</i> 左, a commentator on one of the
classics that we'll again be talking about in a moment.
It's called <i>ligui</i> 厲鬼, translated "pernicious ghost".
Why were they pernicious?
Well, because they had died before their time, and this
again is a key concept all through Chinese history
that a person has his normal life span. He is born and he should live to 50 years or 70 years.
Each person has his own predestined span of life,
and to die before that time has come is unjust, is unfair.
Okay? So: a person who dies of—he's murdered,
he commits suicide,
he dies in war or an epidemic or some kind of natural catastrophe.
Because of this "injustice" that leads him to die,
it makes them unfit for the regular sacrifices of the ancestor cult.
In other words, they can't really be ancestors and so they come back to haunt.
They come back to haunt people and what they demand is sacrifice
that they can't have in the regular ancestor cult, so they come back to demand
justice in the form of sacrifices and as a result they very frequently come to be
local territorial gods of a far more volatile and powerful kind than the earth god.
In a moment, we'll talk about the earth god.
Okay, so this is another change: Heaven on the one hand, [on the other] these earth gods,
these underground gods, who come back from the dead,
from death, to haunt, <i>zuosui</i> 作祟 is called, okay?
The next big change is we see the emergence of an intellectual class.
It's the <i>shi</i> 士 class, which in fact was the lowest class
in the royal [aristocracy] period of China,
but they become the rising class,
the future literati of China, and in a way we could say
that Confucius or Kong Qiu 孔丘 as he's called in Chinese,
is representative of the very first Chinese "intellectuals."
So let me just give you his dates, 551 to 479 BCE,
that is to say just at the very end of the first half of the Eastern Zhou,
just before the Warring States that is the focus, the primary focus of this lecture.
So, who are these intellectuals? Especially those who
are affiliated somehow with the line of Confucius.
First of all, they're defenders of traditional values.
You want to get rid of all these rituals that are addressed to the ancestors
that are of no interests anymore, because they're
not relevant to the present political situation?
No: these rituals, as we will see, can be retained and used to train the person,
to train him to have right attitudes, okay?
So: we have the interiorization of these traditional values
that before were expressed in outer rituals but
now must be interiorized by these intellectuals.
To interiorize means to also humanize,
it's no longer about the ancestors out there.
It's about my values, values of sincerity, values of reverence
that you learn by doing the rituals.
So that's why many people speak of a kind of new humanism,
a humanism that characterizes Confucianism in particular,
from the very beginning, a humanism which is based on education.
These are literate people.
They're people who're eventually going to edit
—it's always said that Confucius himself edited the <i>Book of Songs</i>,
he edited the Five Classics.
Be that as it may, we'll see the emergence of a series of books—five or six,
becomes eventually thirteen—called <i>jing</i> 經 during this period. And by the year 175 CE, common era—
in other words, at the very end of the Han dynasty—
they'll actually be engraved in stone for the first time.
This will be China's first canon, okay?
So: it's based on literacy and education.
It's based on ritual practice that we just talked about and moral amelioration.
Again, by doing these rituals, by practicing these rituals, by learning to be a musician also,
playing the lute, you train yourself to be a virtuous person,
or what they call a <i>junzi</i> 君子, a gentleman, it's usually translated,
Okay? So: a humanism based on education, ritual practice, and moral amelioration.
And so they—these intellectuals, these first intellectuals of Chinese history—
they drive the processes that we're talking about of rationalization,
creating a much more comprehensive, rational system for understanding the world
and the human place in the world,
how to create order out of disorder and so on.
They drive the processes of rationalization, interiorization, and secularization.
Okay, so: that's everything that changes.
Now before we finish this background to the story of the Warring States,
I want to talk about one thing that doesn't change and that's cost.
Because we like to talk about religion,
and we talk about belief in this and belief in that, but it costs a lot of money.
Just think of any temple in China, think of any cathedral in Europe,
and think how much money that cost and if it costs that much money and the society
was ready to cough up all of that money in order to produce those buildings
and then to do the rituals that were done in those buildings,
to pay for the priests and the musicians and all of the animals that are slaughtered,
well, it's what I call an investment.
They're investing in something.
What are they investing in?
They're investing in the values, the values that they feel are key to structuring,
to ordering themselves as individuals, their families and the state, society.
Okay? So: we always have to think about cost.
So let's start with a Zhou oracle bone which says the following:
"Shall we sacrifice one hundred Qiang people."
Qiang people is a nomadic enemy tribe.
"One hundred Qiang people."
We're talking about a sacrifice,
so they're asking, given this situation, should we sacrifice one hundred prisoners of war.
"And one hundred sets of sheep and pigs."
Sacrifice to whom?
"To the High King Tang 湯, the Great Ancestors Jia and Ding, and Grandfather Yi."
So you can see here the sacrifices were addressed to ancestors.
Why? Because in the Shang royal situation,
the ancestors were the only ones who had access to the highest god, Di.
We'll come back to that in a moment, but here we see how central ancestors,
sacrifices to the ancestors are to the religious activity
and sacrificial investment of the Shang for the maintenance of their political power.
And then—I'm now quoting from an article by Roel Sterckx,
which is precisely on the economy and he's now here talking about the Zhou dynasty
in a much later text and this is what he says:
"The centrality of the sacrificial economy emerges in the task descriptions of
the main office in the department of Heaven, the grand steward.
Sacrifices rank first among the statutes he implements in towns
and dependencies assigned to dukes, ministers and grandees."
So this whole feudal system with its hierarchy,
as soon as you are enfeoffed, you have your fief,
you have to start with preparing to do the sacrifices.
In other words, the government was inseparable from religious sacrifice.
That's we have to see: church and state are totally confounded.
There is no dividing line between them.
So, "furthermore, sacrifices are the first among measurements used to
determine the state's expenses, and sacrificial provisions ranked first
among nine types of tributary goods to be collected by the feudal state."
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