by Livia Kohn
Filial concerns for the welfare of an ancestor were addressed through
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precisely the same means as were necessary to exorcise the enemies of the deceased—and the deceased her- or himself.
Indeed, one way in which Kuhn’s work may be more relevant to the history of Daoism concerns his idea that “paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than their competitors in solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute,” and, therefore, “those unwilling or unable to accommodate their work to [a prevailing paradigm] must proceed in isolation or attach themselves to some other group” (1970, 19, 23). The early Daoists, by proposing a bureaucratized version of the exorcistic ritual model that could be embraced as a means of providing for the welfare of one’s ancestors, might be understood as having developed such a new, more successful paradigm of practice. Daoists designed their rituals in part, perhaps, with a view toward supplanting those who were the Daoists’
ritual competitors on the local scene, in particular spirit-mediums and diviners, who were apt to have provided the primary ritual recourse for common people troubled by the consequences of death. The chief factor affected by the Daoist bureaucratization of popular ritual may have been not ritual structure, in the broadest sense, but ritual per-sonnel: bureaucratized religion is best handled by priestly bureaucrats, not by illiterate shamans or spirit-mediums.
Early Daoist ritualists appropriated the paradigm of the journey—
as guided by apotropaic escorts like the fangxiang, the mythic Chiyou, or the Celestial Monarch’s Envoy—and adapted it to the framework of the Daoist religion. That journey was then extended by replication: the old model of the funeral procession (and the preparations for it, like the bathing and clothing of the corpse) was duplicated in the form of the soul’s invisible journey from the tomb to transcendence. In insisting upon bureaucratic means to handle the problem of salvation, which previously had been dealt with (if at all) through sacrifice, as in the classical ancestral cult (in theory denied to commoners), Daoism simply emphasized the most bureaucratic aspects of an already bureaucratized mortuary tradition (one that had begun during the mid-Eastern Zhou12
and culminated with the grave-securing writs). The paradigm was old, but exorcism and bureaucracy had been made newly soteriological.
Notes
1. Concerning my use of “tomb ordinance” and related terminology for these artifacts, see Nickerson 1996, 134–141. As to the philological determinations that motivated text-critical and translation choices for the texts ad-
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duced in this study, the interested reader is again referred to Nickerson 1996, especially chs. 2–3.
2. The Yellow Monarch (Huangdi), according to Sarah Allan’s speculation, was the ruler of the Yellow Springs (Huangquan), the earliest recorded underworld destination for the dead in Shang mythology. See Allan 1991.
3. The notion of shamanism has inspired much debate in comparative religious and anthropological literature and in the study of early Chinese history. The present study largely circumvents this debate, resolution of which is not essential to its purposes. Considering the centrality—in depictions of Siberian shamans, in discussions of shamanism worldwide, and in portrayals of the ancient Chinese fangxiang, qitou, and their ilk—of animal masks and animal familiars, music, chanting, and dancing, and the recovery of wandering souls, it seems appropriate to term those Chinese figures shamans as well.
4. The Shuowen jiezi (9A.446B–47A) and its commentary by Duan Yucai (1735–1815) also confirm the identification of the griffon head and the fangxiang.
5. The attribution of the Zhengyi lun to Meng Jingyi is made in the Nanshi (6.75.1879). However, the content of the essay as represented by the Nanshi does not correspond with the text as preserved in the Daoist canon. It seems possible that the text as it appears in the Daozang was put together by a redactor with a particular object in mind, namely the demonstration of the consistency of the Celestial Master practice and the rituals of Lingbao.
6. The Celestial Elder is mentioned in several early sources of indetermi-nate date, and in the Shuoyuan of Liu Xiang (c. 79–6 b.c.e.), as a subordinate of and adviser to the Yellow Monarch (18.11a). The Celestial Elder was also reputed to have been particularly well versed in military affairs. Thus, as a subordinate of the Yellow Monarch, he fits the same pattern as the Envoy vis-
à-vis the Celestial Monarch of the grave-securing texts and, therefore, would seem quite an appropriate figure to proclaim tomb ordinances. Moreover, since he is the instructor of the Yellow Monarch, he bears an additional resemblance to Laozi, who was the Monarch’s preceptor according to the Huang-Lao school (see Seidel 1969)—and Laozi also issued commands to the earth spirits in excavated Daoist tomb ordinances (see Nickerson 1996, ch. 3).
7. In Daoism, these spirits become messengers “attached to talismans”: zhifu.
They play this role repeatedly in the modern Zhengyi rituals described by John Lagerwey (1987, 88, 127, 131, 226–227). However, these same zhifu also appear much earlier in the context of demonology and divination. See, for example, Qianfu lun 6.25.348, 358; Lunheng 3.24.1014–1015.
8. The origin of these novel soteriological concepts is a distinct and difficult question. The belief in “otherworldly immortality,” that is, “transcendence” or xian-hood—as opposed to a state of “no death” ( busi) that was merely the prolongation of worldly longevity—may have first appeared in the late fourth century b.c.e. (see Yü 1965, 91). The notion of a celestial transcendence —of tianxian, such as those who “ascended to heaven in broad day-light,” versus dixian, immortals who remained on earth—also emerged early, perhaps in the second century b.c.e. It was, however, only explicitly enunci-ated later, in the Eastern Han or early in the Six Dynasties period (Needham 1974, 104–111). Whether it was under the influence of Buddhism or simply
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as a result of internal development that the concept of “otherworldly immortality,” which had become increasingly seen as dependent on moral behavior, fused with the juridical morality of the grave-securing writs is a question that cannot be fully resolved here, although a further possible motivation will be suggested later.
9. The tomb may always have been the only dwelling place for the dead in the case of commoners, to whom ancestral worship and its temples and shrines were in theory denied. Moreover, the same may have been the case for members of the educated Han elite, even those who embraced dualistic notions of the hun and po souls. See Seidel 1982, 107; Wu 1988, 96–100. This interpretation is, of course, consistent as well with my reading (following Bokenkamp 1989) of the “Summons of the Soul” and other sources concerning the rite of soul recalling, which views that ritual largely as a post-mortem procedure intended to guide the soul into the tomb.
10. Chiyou is best known as the enemy of the Yellow Monarch who met the monarch’s accession with armed opposition. However, the relationship between the two is more complex than simply that of vanquished and victor: Chiyou is elsewhere named as a servant or escort of the Yellow Monarch ( Hanfeizi 3.44.). More significantly, Chiyou was associated closely with the fangxiang ( Wenxuan 2.19a [46A]; see Knechtges 1982, 217). Finally, Anna Seidel has linked Chiyou to the Envoy of the Celestial Monarch (Seidel 1987a, 34–37).
11. The links with travel ritual are also strengthened by the fact that certain of the spirits addressed in Daoist tomb ordinances were as much spirits of roads as of tombs. For example, one passage in the Wushang biyao of 574
(25.6a8–10), quoting a Sanhuang text, mentions “Hostel Chiefs and Boundary Patrollers of the Crisscrossing Paths.” Hostel Chiefs appear numerous times in tomb ordinance texts, and Boundary Patrollers on the Paths are invoked in a Han grave-securing writ (Ikeda 1981, 271, no. 3).
12. For traditions of mortuary bureaucratization prior to the grave-securing writ
s, see Falkenhausen 1994; Harper 1994; and Nickerson 1996, ch. 2.
Bibliography
Allan, Sarah. 1991. The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art, and Cosmos in Early China.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Bodde, Derk. 1975. Festivals in Classical China. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bokenkamp, Stephen R. 1989. “Death and Ascent in Ling-pao Taoism.” Taoist Resources 1.2:1–20.
Boltz, William G. 1979. “Philological Footnotes to the Han New Year Rites.”
Journal of the American Oriental Society 99:423–439.
Cedzich, Ursula-Angelika. 1987. “Das Ritual der Himmelsmeister im Spiegel früher Quellen: Übersetzung und Untersuchung des liturgischen Materials im dritten chüan des Teng-chen yin-chüeh.” Ph.D. diss., Julius-Maximilians-Universität, Würzburg, Germany.
———. 1993. “Ghosts and Demons, Law and Order: Grave Quelling Texts and Early Daoist Liturgy.” Taoist Resources 4.2:23–35.
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Davis, Edward. 2001. Society and the Supernatural in Song China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Falkenhausen, Lothar von. 1994. “Sources of Taoism: Reflections on Archaeological Indicators of Religious Change in Eastern Zhou China.” Taoist Resources 5.2:1–12.
Granet, Marcel. 1926. Danses et légendes de la Chine ancienne 2 vols. Paris: F. Alcan.
Harper, Donald. 1978. “The Han Cosmic Board ( Shih).” Early China 4:1–10.
———. 1982. “The Wu Shih Erh Ping Fang: Translation and Prolegomena.”
Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley.
———. 1985. “A Chinese Demonography of the Third Century b.c.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 45:459–498.
———. 1987. “Wang Yen-shou’s Nightmare Poem.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47:239–283.
———. 1994. “Resurrection in Warring States Popular Religion.” Taoist Resources 5.2:13–28.
———. 1998. Early Chinese Medical Literature: The Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts. London: Kegan Paul.
Hertz, Robert. 1960. “A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death.” In Death and the Right Hand. Trans. by Rodney and Claudia Needham. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.
Ikeda On. 1981. “Chugoku rekidai boken ryakko.” Toyobunka kenkyujo kiyo 86:193–278.
Kiang Chao-yuan. 1937. Le voyage dans la Chine ancienne, considéré principale-ment sous son aspect magique et religieux. Trans. by Fan Jen. Shanghai: Kelly
& Walsh.
Knapp, Keith. 1998. “The Religious Vision of the Third Century Writer and Recluse Huangfu Mi.” Paper presented at the conference “Society, Culture, and Religion in Medieval and Early Modern China: In Celebration of David Johnson’s Sixtieth Birthday.” University of California, Berkeley.
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Kobayashi Taichiro. 1946. “Hoso kueki ko.” Shinagaku 11:401–447.
Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Seidel, Anna. 1969. La divinisation de Lao tseu dans le taoïsme des Han. Paris: Publications de l’Ecole Francaise d’ Extrême Orient.
———. 1982. “Tokens of Immortality in Han Graves.” Numen 29:79–114.
———. 1987a. “Traces of Han Religion.” In Dokyo to shukyo bunka, 21–57.
Festschrift for Akizuki Kan’ei. Tokyo: Hirakawa.
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Part II
Texts and Symbols
4
Traditional Taxonomies and
Revealed Texts in the Han
Mark Csikszentmihàlyi
The subject of this chapter is the limitation imposed by the use of traditional taxonomies on the writing of the early history of Daoism. As a preface to this discussion, it is worth briefly exploring another area in which the restrictiveness of these taxonomies has clearly been demonstrated. Recent archaeological discoveries in China, in particular the finds at Mawangdui and Guodian, have catalyzed the reevaluation of traditional categories used to describe late Warring States and Qin-Han thought. The discovery of the texts originally identified as the Huangdi sijing (Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor) has led to widespread speculation about the nature of the category Huang-Lao, a term usually rendered in English as the “Yellow Emperor and Laozi,”
first used around 100 b.c.e. by Sima Qian in the Shiji (Historical Records; see Kondo 1997). The discovery of versions of the Wuxing pian (Essay on the Five Kinds of Action) at both sites provides an opportunity to refine our understanding of the Zi Si and Mengzi strain of the early Ru tradition, first mentioned as a distinct category in the third century b.c.e. text Xunzi (Writings of Master Xun; see Pang 1980). These are only two of the many texts that have given intellectual historians an opportunity to put old wine back into old bottles—
that is, to pour textual content that had long been missing into containers bearing labels that have been preserved. At times, these labels have been applied without analyzing how such newly excavated texts are related to received categories. Specifically, the practice of reading a text labeled “Huang-Lao” as the product of a tradition that is different from the Ru tradition assumes these labels had distinct sociological meanings when the texts were composed and that these meanings were mutually exclusive.1
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I will question this assumption in the first part of this chapter by adopting a skeptical approach to the received taxonomies and by attempting to draw a set of analytical distinctions that the use of these taxonomies obscures. Based on these distinctions, I will propose a new map of Warring States and Qin-Han textual production, one that is based on differing sociological conditions of production rather than on received taxonomies. Finally, I will use this map to locate continuities between self-cultivation practices used by divination and medical specialists in the Han and some of the practices of early Daoist communities.
One of the criteria that will be central to this examination is the means by which authority is as
cribed to a text. In particular, attention will focus on a category of text characterized not by its link to a worthy minister or famous sage of the past, but by its revealed nature or its quality of incipience in natural patterns. There has been a longstanding controversy over the degree to which Warring States texts like the Laozi are connected with the foundational Daoist movements of the late Han, what is still sometimes misleadingly referred to as the relation between “philosophical” and “religious” Daoism. This chapter argues that the latter movements must not be studied in isolation from their antecedents but suggests that the Laozi is not the right place to start. By attempting to establish a continuity between second-century Daoist communities and their precursors in the semi-official and private academies of the Han, I will outline a genealogy connecting late Warring States self-cultivation practices, Han medical and divination traditions, and early Daoist communities.
The Sociology of Early Chinese Traditions
Any sociological approach to religious traditions must begin by acknowledging the important pioneering effort of Max Weber to develop a typology of such traditions in general and to describe Chinese traditions in particular. Weber’s treatment of Confucianism and Daoism in The Religions of China (1951) has been justly criticized for its ahis-torical approach to China. Authors such as Bryan S. Turner have rightly pointed out the problems inherent in Weber’s assumption of the timeless and continuous qualities of the “East” (1981, 277–278).2
Weber’s sociology posits the existence of several types of religious founder, but these ideal types are for the most part based on Indo-European models. The application of this typology, in The Sociology of Religion (1963), was the occasion for Weber’s pronouncement that Con-
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fucius was an “academic teaching philosopher” and not a “prophet”
(1963, 53).3 Since Weber saw early Confucianism not as the routiniza-tion of the charisma of a sage leader but, instead, as a diffusion of other aspects of Chinese society, he did not see it as the same kind of phenomenon as some Western religious movements. An example of a very different picture is Asano Yuichi’s recent portrait of Confucius as a charismatic founder figure in the Weberian sense, one who had the implicit goal of setting up a new social order to succeed the Zhou (1997, 17).