Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  One of the specific features of Shang society was the emphasis on lineage in general and the royal lineage in particular. Kinship is never unimportant in early states, but the absolutism of royal rule often took precedence over lineage loyalty so that the importance of kinship relations was markedly reduced. It is quite possible that the preoccupation with lineage in Shang China was confined largely to the ruling class, and the royal lineage in particular, as in Hawaii. But the Shang emphasis on lineage left a permanent legacy for all later Chinese culture, of which the Confucian emphasis on kin relationships was an expression. Ancestor worship, so central in Shang cult, has continued at the domestic level to this day.

  The focus on the Chinese ruler was as strong as in any of the archaic cases, but the formulation of it differed significantly from Ancient Mesopotamia or Egypt. It has not been uncommon to refer to the Shang regime as a theocracy, but that does not mean that the king himself was considered divine, at least not in the sense that such was the case in Egypt or some other archaic societies. Ancestor worship was central in Shang religion, unlike the cases we have considered so far. The worship of ancestors and the understanding of them as indispensable intermediaries with high gods was, however, present in several other early states: the Yoruba of West Africa, and, in slightly varying ways, among the Aztecs, Mayas, and Inkas of the New Nowhere, however, was worship of the royal ancestors so central as in Shang China.

  References to gods are not missing in the oracle-bone texts, but they are not numerous and their significance is not entirely clear. Most important was Di (“the god” as we may call him, following our usage for ancient Egypt), also rarely Shang Di (“the god above”), whose power over weather, harvest, and war gave him the most extensive dominion of Shang deities. Significantly, however, Di was not worshipped directly, but rather through the royal ancestors as intermediaries. The actual nature of Di, and particularly the question of whether Di was a kind of primordial ancestor, is in dispute, but need not detain us. It is reasonably clear that the Shang did not view Di as a lineal ancestor-with their powerful concern for the royal lineage, if they had believed they were descendants of Di they would almost surely have said so. But with his lack of particular characteristics (at least as far as we know, not having myths from the Shang period), and the fact that his worship was indirect, he was perhaps similar to some of the otiose high gods known from other cultures. Because Di could intervene in battle for or against the Shang, he was surely not entirely otiose, and his Western Zhou successor, Tian (Heaven), was considerably more active. In addition to Di there were a number of nature deities, river and mountain gods, for example, a sun god who may have been conceived as multiple (ten suns being a calen drical unit), and various local deities as well. Though such deities did receive occasional sacrifice, their worship was not the main focus of the Shang cult as we know it from the oracle-bone inscriptions.

  At the center of the Shang cult was the worship of the Shang royal ancestors, who were considered to be powerful deities in their own right and also to have the capacity to intercede with Di in matters of great importance. Ancestors of other lineages were probably also conceived as continuing to intervene in earthly life, but their jurisdictions would have been limited to their descendants. Only the royal ancestors were seen as intervening in matters of concern to the realm as a whole and to the king in particular (for example, in matters of his health or whether his wife or consort would give birth to a son or daughter). But if the gods, including Di, were viewed largely impersonally, having little in the way of individual personality, such was also the case with the ancestors. They were classified by distance from the present (the more distant, the more powerful), and by whether they were direct ancestors (more important) or collaterals, that is, kings succeeded by nephews rather than by sons (less important), and, of course by whether they were male (more important) or female (less lineal mothers of kings were the only females mentioned). On the whole the cult was directed not to the parental generation, but began with the grandparental generation.

  Wu Ding is the rare case of a ruler whose conquests made him stand out from the ranks of the largely anonymous ancestors, and receive worship immediately after his death. Wu Ding’s own divination texts show a wide variety of recipients being asked many kinds of questions, but under his son, Zu Jia (ca. 1177-1158 BCE), a process of increasing routinization set in, in which the cult was organized in terms of a calendrical cycle, with each ancestor assigned to a particular day, and asked a limited number of Questions concerned the weather, the success of the harvest, the outcome of military expeditions, or simply will there be any calamity during the next period of time. The answers were determined by reading the cracks that appeared after the scapulas or turtle shells had been subjected to heat, and then the charges and replies were inscribed.

  If the existing king was not divine, he was proleptically so, for he would, after his death, become an ancestor whose power would only increase with each successive generation. As Wheatley puts it, “the ruling monarch was a member of a lineage which coexisted ontologically on earth and in the heavens above, and he was a pivotal figure in all ritual procedures.“125 Divination and sacrifice, even if carried out by others, were always performed in the name of the king, who alone was the intermediary between the earthly and the divine realms. It is in this connection that the Shang king referred to himself as “I, the one man” (yuyi ren). But if the ancestors were impersonal, so, in a sense, was the king. Keightley quotes David Schaberg as saying of Shang and Zhou kings, “There was no provision in Chinese ritual language for naming a living king; until he received a posthumous title, the word for him [wang] was the word for all kings, and he was indistinguishable, at least on the level of language and ideals, from that generalized role.“126 It was, then, the ritual role of the king that was decisive, not his personality. And however mysterious the high god Di may be to us, there was a unique relation between the god and the king. As Keightley tells us, “What distinguished both Di and the king was that, at least in the limited world of the divination inscriptions, Di focused his attention on no other living individual and his activities. Welcome or unwelcome though this attention may have been, it cannot have failed to enhance the king’s status in the religious and political hierarchy.“127

  But if the king’s authority was enhanced by his special role with respect to Di and the ancestors, Keightley also points out that the king’s power was limited by “a network of spiritual obligations and attentions,” such that “the king was no despot, free to act as he pleased.” Indeed, the pressures on the king and the king alone that led to his use of the phrase “I, the one man,” might well, Keightley suggests, have meant, “I, the lone Keightley characterizes the consequences of the king’s embeddedness in a ritual-social order as follows: “The wishes of these various Powersparticularly those of the ancestors, whose jurisdictions appear to have been arranged more systematically and comprehensibly than those of Di or the Nature Powers-may have served as a kind of unwritten constitutionalism, just as later Confucian traditions may have limited the options available to an

  If the Shang king was no despot, neither was he in any sense a democrat. As with other archaic societies, the distinction between ruler and ruled was stark. Keightley points out that although in the Chinese Neolithic there is little evidence of human sacrifice, in the Shang dynasty, “the burial of mutilated and beheaded human victims, and the ritual slaughter of dozens of captives, became a regular part of man’s spiritual, and political, Some Shang elite tombs were of enormous size and had complex structures as well as splendid furnishings,‘3’ all of which had to be created by dependent labor of some sort. On the basis of our scanty evidence we do not know if there was a sense of obligation on the part of the king for the welfare of the common people, such as we will encounter in the Zhou dynasty, but the divination concerns as expressed in the oracle bones have more to do with the welfare of the ruling elite than that of society as a whole.

  The Shang dyn
asty presided over a realm of significant if shifting size in the Yellow River Valley of North Central China in the last centuries of the Second Millennium BCE. New regions for agriculture were opened up and population grew; cities were built and the arts cultivated, particularly the art of bronze casting, a most sophisticated technology. Our chief visual knowledge of Shang culture comes from bronze vessels of exquisite beauty that have survived in significant number. Whether this rich but imperfectly known civilization saw the beginning of the moral concerns that would be central to all subsequent Chinese culture, we cannot presently say.

  At least in later memory, the Zhou conquest of the Shang began with what we can only call a moral explosion whose echoes can still be heard. According to records of uncertain date, the early Zhou kings, Wen (r. 1099- 1050 BCE) and Wu (r. 1049/45-1043 BCE), justified their effort to replace the Shang with a new doctrine, expounded with particular clarity by King Wu’s brother, the Duke of Zhou (Zhou Gong), the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven (Tian ming). As we have seen, the high god Di did, on occasion, predict success for the enemies of the Shang king, but there is no indication that such action was considered punishment for the king’s faults. The Zhou continued on occasion to use the term Di or Shang Di (Shang here means “above,” and is not the same graph as the one for the Shang dynasty) for the high god, but much more frequently referred to him as Tian (Heaven), a term not used in that sense in the Shang inscriptions. 132 The Zhou viewed Heaven as intensely concerned with the moral quality of human beings, kings in particular.

  King Wen, who was the first Zhou ruler to take the title king (wang) even though he was from the Shang point of view a rebel, was viewed in the Zhou tradition as a model of ethical behavior (wen means, roughly, “culture’), whereas the last Shang king was viewed as morally depraved. King Wu (wu means, roughly, “military”) completed the conquest of the Shang, a conquest consolidated by his son, King Cheng, for whom, due to his youth, King Wu’s brother, the Duke of Zhou, acted as regent in the first seven years of his reign. King Wu and the Duke of Zhou were also viewed by later generations as paragons of morality. A Heaven deeply concerned with human morality could and did transfer the Mandate (ming) from one dynasty to another if the ruler of the previous dynasty became too degenerate. The Zhou doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven was extended back before the Shang dynasty, which, the Zhou ideologists claimed, had itself been given the Mandate of Heaven due to the moral faults of the last rulers of the Xia dynasty, about which we know nothing from Shang inscriptions themselves. Although effective in legitimating the newly installed Zhou dynasty, the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven proved a two-edged sword, as it could be turned against the Zhou themselves, and against every succeeding ruling house throughout Chinese history. One of the Major Odes of the Shi or Book of Songs begins with the following stanza:

  The ode continues with a series of invectives attributed to King Wen describing the crimes of the Shang, and ending by invoking the deserved end of the preceding Xia dynasty as well, yet the Ode affirms the conditional nature of royal rule, which could not help but apply to the Zhou themselves.

  In most respects, the transition from Shang to Zhou shows a great deal of continuity. The early Zhou kings conquered a larger area than that over which the Shang had ruled, but lacked the capacity to rule most of it directly. Members of the royal lineage, brothers and nephews of kings, for example, were given subject domains. In some instances existing local rulers were recognized as subject to the Zhou court; in particular the descendants of the Shang ruling house were established in what became the state of Song. This arrangement has frequently been referred to as feudalism, though Wheatley has the same reservations about this term as in the case of the Shang, and prefers to consider the Zhou regime as patrimonial, with benefices established for royal relatives. Feudalism, argues Wheatley, drawing from European history, requires some kind of contract between lord and vassal, missing in Zhou as in Shang.134

  Herrlee Creel, however, argues for the usefulness of the term “feudalism,” properly understood, for the Zhou period. He offers his own, somewhat minimalist, definition: “Feudalism is a system of government in which a ruler personally delegates limited sovereignty over portions of his territory to vassals.“135 But, in fact, his analysis is very close to that of Wheatley. According to Creel, the Zhou claimed they were creating a centralized administration, that their “vassals” were not autonomous, but subject to the royal will, and that the Zhou court taxed, administered justice, and in theory, though not often in practice, removed vassals from their domains, especially in the early years when there were strong monarchs.136 This is not far from what Wheatley means by a patrimonial regime that gives benefices to subordinates. What Creel wants to stress is that the later idealization of the early Zhou kings was not entirely misplaced. As he says, “it was no part of the intention of the early kings to establish a realm of which they were not in full control. They had not conquered `all under heaven’ merely for the sake of giving it away.“137 Their failure to establish, except relatively briefly, a centralized regime was due to the lack of techniques of control to do so, not, at least in the eyes of later thinkers, to lack of intention. It was their putative intention that lived on, though it would not be again realized until 221 BCE.

  Though the beginnings of patrimonial bureaucracy were present in the Zhou royal court, as they had been in the Shang court, as well as in the newly established subject states, neither Shang nor Zhou were effectively centralized: the process of decentralization of the Zhou kingdom that became complete in the Warring States period (481-221 BCE) had set in early on. For convenience, the Western Zhou period is said to end with the fall of the Western Zhou capital in 771 BCE and the reduction of the Zhou court to political impotence thereafter. The transition from archaic to axial, which is the primary concern of this book, was taking place between the end of Western Zhou and the establishment of the centralized empire by the Qin in 221 BCE. We need not draw any sharp line in this period of 550 years, but, as we shall see in a later chapter, it may be convenient to take the life of Confucius (551-479 BCE) as a turning point.118

  Unfortunately, it is very difficult to date the texts that purport to come from the period between the Zhou conquest and the lifetime of Confucius, so we can only conjecturally trace the development of thought in that period. Two of the most important bodies of texts that Confucius himself referred to with respect, and so at least parts of which must precede him, are the Book of Documents (sometimes referred to as the Shujing-I will refer to this as the Shu) and the Book of Songs (sometimes referred to as the Shijing-I will refer to this as the Shi). The Shu purports to contain speeches and dialogues from the early years of the Zhou conquest, some of which, if they may not be the actual words of the alleged speakers, are nonetheless almost certainly of Western Zhou date and even early in that period.139 It is in the “Da gao” (“Great proclamation”) chapter, attributed to King Cheng, that we find the first mention of the Mandate of Heaven, and in the “Shao gao” (“Proclamation of Shao Gong”) that we first find reference to the emperor as Son of Heaven (Tianzi). The latter passage is worth quoting:

  August Heaven, the Lord on High, has changed his eldest son and this great state Yin’s [Yin was the term the Zhou sometimes used to refer to the Shang] mandate. It is the king who has received the mandate.140

  In this passage we can see how the Zhou absorbed the Shang high god Di into their primary reference to Heaven, and how the emperor is not only the son, but the “eldest son,” of Heaven.

  Shaughnessy holds that two of these early chapters of the Shu contain an argument on the nature of government between Zhou Gong (The Duke of Zhou) and his half-brother Shao Gong, also referred to as the Grand Protector Shi. Zhou Gong, perhaps protecting himself from the accusation of usurping power during his regency for young King Cheng, argues in the “Jun Shi” (“Lord Shi,” that is, Shao Gong, in this case the addressee of Zhou Gong’s speech) that the Mandate of Heaven is given to the Zhou people
in general and that virtuous kings (he cites Shang kings as well as Kings Wen and Wu as precedents) have always relied on meritorious ministers for successful rule. Shao Gong, replying in the “Shao gao,” argues, as noted above, that the mandate was given to the king and that he alone can rule. As Shaughnessy notes, this argument would continue throughout Chinese history, with Confucius and his followers taking the part of Zhou Gong, and royal absolutists the part of Shao Gong.141

  What is of interest here is how far these early chapters of the Shu anticipate later, perhaps axial, developments. There is no doubt, though the argument must await a later chapter, that for Confucius the idea of Heaven and its Mandate did have axial implications. I think it can be argued, however, that in the early days of the Western Zhou the axial implications were incipient at best. What was at stake was an intra-elite argument about the legitimacy of one royal lineage, that of the Zhou, replacing another royal lineage, that of the Shang, at the highest level of authority, in the face of centuries of predominance of the Shang house. All the actors in this drama were members of royal families and the archaic idea that it is only the ruler who can mediate between the high god and the people was not in question. Even the dispute between Zhou Gong and Shao Gong in its original form was only about the relative power of members of the ruling family. It would be hundreds of years later, with Confucius and his successors, that early Zhou terminology would be used to formulate a much more generalized conception of the relation between the divine and the human. Cho-yun Hsu and Katheryn M. Linduff have put it well when they write, “The Zhou contribution provided the cornerstone for their own political legitimacy, but it opened the course for the long Chinese tradition of humanism and rationalism and may be thought of as the first step toward a Jaspersian