Religious life in the Qing period was especially rich and varied, owing in no small measure to the multiculturalism of the Manchus. Probably at no other time since the Mongol Yuan dynasty had China’s rulers evinced such a wide-open and tolerant attitude toward religion. To be sure, the Qing emperors would brook no challenge to their political authority, but as long as religious activities offered no tangible threat, they could be tolerated and perhaps also patronized. This was true even of Islam, which, at least in theory, held adherents to a loyalty above the emperor. We have seen in chapter 2 that Manchu shamanism played a significant role in Banner life at all levels, particularly after Nurhaci’s creation of shamanic state rituals. So did patronage of Tibetan Buddhism, also on Nurhaci’s initiative. After the conquest of China, his successors expanded their religious reach, not unlike the early emperors of the Ming dynasty, who sought at once to bolster their religious authority and to exert control over the preexisting religious establishment.
Evelyn Rawski has discussed at length the various forms of religious activity engaged in by the Manchus, from imperially sponsored state shamanism and patronage of Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism, to “private rituals” within the Qing Inner Court, which combined “shamanic, Daoist, Chinese Buddhist, Tibetan Buddhist, and popular religious traditions.” These three forms of worship had different but related purposes. In Rawski’s apt formulation: “If sacrifices at the state altars were about rulership, and Qing religious patronage was about politics, the private rituals were about the court as a household, a family writ large.”1
The most distinctive form of Manchu religious practice was shamanism—in particular, sacrifices to Heaven (Manchu: dergi abkai han, lit. “Highest Heaven Khan”). This type of worship was based on Jin and Yuan dynasty precedents, although Han Chinese influences found their way into the rituals as they evolved over time. The main ceremony focused on a tangzi (see chapter 2). In Shenyang the tangzi was located to the east of the imperial palace, while in Bejing it was located to the southeast. The participants in these shamanic state rituals were Manchu imperial princes and various high-ranking Manchu civil and military functionaries. The shamanic performances themselves were orchestrated by the Office of Shamanism (Shenfang), a division of the Imperial Household Department. This office employed 183 shamans—all of them women—who performed their rituals daily, in addition to participating in periodic calendrical performances that involved dancing, singing, and animal sacrifices. These female shamans were all selected from the wives of high officials of the Aisin Gioro clan.2
Qing patronage of Tibetan Buddhism proceeded from different motives. The Tibetan idea of “reincarnate lineages” enabled the Manchu rulers, like the Mongols before them, to claim not only to be “emanations” of a particular Buddhist deity, but also to be the reincarnations of a great leader from the past, such as the Mongol warrior and Chinese emperor Qubilai Khan. By this means the Qing emperors were able to bring the peoples of Northeast and Inner Asia more fully and comfortably into their multicultural empire. It bears repeating, however, that Manchu patronage of the Dge lugs pa (or “Yellow Hat”) sect was a matter of genuine religious commitment as well as practical imperial politics. This is clear from the ritual schedules of the Qing rulers, which included a great many Buddhist devotions that took place within the towering walls of the Forbidden City.3
In China Proper, elite and popular religious beliefs and practices intertwined to produce a vast, multicolored fabric of institutional and individual worship. A French sinologist, Henri Maspero, once described Chinese religion as encompassing “an unheard-of swarm of gods and spirits of every kind, an innumerable rabble.” But Maurice Freedman, a British anthropologist, saw order behind the chaos. He asserted that “all religious argument and ritual differentiation [in China] were conducted within a common language of basic conceptions, symbols, and ritual forms.” In response, a number of more recent China scholars have reiterated some version of Maspero’s position. David Johnson, for example, maintains that, “any unities among Chinese religious practices would be so abstract as to be meaningless.”4
In an effort to reconcile these two seemingly antithetical views, James Watson has argued that Chinese religion allowed for “a high degree of variation within an overall structure of unity.” According to Watson,
The Chinese cultural system . . . allowed for what outsiders might perceive to be chaotic local diversity. The domain of ritual, in particular, gave great scope to regional and subethnic cultural displays. The system was so flexible that those who called themselves Chinese could have their cake and eat it too: They could participate in a unified culture yet at the same time celebrate their local or regional distinctiveness.”5
But the question of whether these ritual displays have ever reflected the high degree of cultural unity that Watson claims remains an open one, subject to intense debate.6
In considering issues of unity and diversity, we should bear in mind that there have also been significant transformations in religious practices in China over time. At the top, for example, state ceremonies, including both Manchu shamanistic rituals and Chinese-style official sacrifices, changed in accordance with the shifting attitudes and political priorities of individual emperors.7 The same was true with respect to imperial policy not only toward established religions such as Chinese Buddhism and Religious Daoism, but also less entrenched belief systems, including Tibetan Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.8 At the same time, the outlook and actions of foreign religious leaders—whether Chinese Muslim begs (local chieftains) in the northwest, the Dalai Lama in Lhasa, or the pope in Rome—often played a crucial role in the formation of imperial attitudes toward religion. We have seen, for instance, that the early Qing emperors were prepared to tolerate Western Christianity until papal interference made the Confucian rites a political issue (chapter 2).
At various local levels of organization, from massive “macroregions” to individual towns and villages, changing political, social, and economic conditions naturally affected the development of ritual forms and popular religious practices. For instance, gentry efforts to bolster their declining position through support of local lineage structures during the Ming-Qing transition had important implications for the conduct of Buddhist funerary rites in different parts of the country. Similarly, but with different effects, social changes, together with shifts in both popular piety and official religious policy, influenced (adversely) the longstanding Ma Yuan cult later on in the Qing period.9
Historical circumstances also affected the writing of religious texts. Cynthia Brokaw has shown, for instance, how the content of “morality books,” and the conditions of authorship of such works, changed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in response to new elite concerns, such as the regulation and even containment of social mobility. She describes shifts in religious ideology that “roughly followed the major developments in contemporary elite interests” during the Ming-Qing transition and into the eighteenth century; and although her study does not extend into the late Qing era, it seems evident that religion and intellectual life continued to follow intersecting routes. We find, for instance, that the unsettled state of China’s domestic and foreign affairs during the nineteenth century gave rise to a burst of interest in “literati Buddhism”—championed by a number of leading statecraft and New Text scholars, including Gong Zizhen, Wei Yuan, and Kang Youwei.10
But for all this undeniable diversity over space and time, Freedman and Watson still have a point. There was indeed a “common language” in Chinese religious life, which included vocabularies laced with yinyang formulations and their equivalents, the widespread use of bureaucratic metaphors and models (including ritual fields), common forms of worship (bowing, the use of incense, and the burning of prayers), the widespread employment of written charms, shared symbolism (notably the auspicious color red), philosophical eclecticism, and much more.
Arthur Wolf has written: “Assessed in terms of its long-range impact on the people, . . . [the Chinese government] appears to have been one of the most potent governments ever known, for it created a religion in its own image. Its firm grip on the popular imagination may be one reason the imperial government survived so long despite its failings.” There is much to commend this view. To a remarkable extent, the organization of traditional Chinese religion mirrored the fundamental assumptions of Chinese bureaucratic behavior. This was true not only of official state ceremonies and sacrifices, as might well be expected, but also of institutional Buddhism, Religious Daoism, and even popular religion. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Manchus were as quick to adopt the basic religious rituals of the Ming dynasty as they were to adopt Ming administrative institutions and practices. At the same time, however, they modified some of these rituals, institutions, and practices to suit their own evolving political needs.11
The Qing government, like its Ming predecessor, periodically promoted and demoted various gods within its own supernatural bureaucratic establishment, called on Buddhist and Daoist clergy to say prayers and perform sacrifices as religious agents of the state, appropriated deities from the vast pantheon of popular religion into the structure of official religion, and canonized former mortals who were either exemplars of orthodox values or whose acknowledged supernatural powers made them potentially valuable to the state. Stephen Feuchtwang has identified a kind of dialectic operating in Chinese religious life in which
officials adopted deities from popular religion and bureaucratized them, while the [common] people worshipped gods that were like magic officials or that were magic official deities. Gods that in popular religion were fluid, whose identities flowed into one another, whose functions were potentially universal, and who were magic in their ability to metamorphose and to fuse man and nature in themselves, were in the official religion standardized and classed, minute distinctions and the separation of rites and cults keeping them apart.12
Qing official religion recognized three main levels of state sacrifice, aside from the exclusively Manchu shamanistic observances undertaken by the Imperial Household Department: (1) great sacrifices (dasi), (2) middle sacrifices (zhongsi), and (3) common sacrifices (qunsi or xiaosi). At each administrative level, designated officials performed elaborate ceremonies in accordance with longstanding ritual prescriptions. Divinations and deliberations involving the Imperial Bureau of Astronomy, the Board of Rites, the Court of Sacrificial Worship, and sometimes the emperor himself yielded auspicious dates for such ceremonies. A similar process resulted in the selection of auspicious and inauspicious days for the official Qing calendar, which was distributed to civil and military officials at the capital and in the provinces. The officials involved in state sacrifices also received guidance in the form of special ceremonial handbooks.
State worship at the various levels generally required ritual bathing, fasting, prostrations, prayers, and thanksgiving offerings of incense, lighted candles, precious objects, fruits, and food and wine together with music and ritual posturing. These activities were believed to purify the mind and body and to please the gods. Women did not participate in state worship with one exception: the sacrifice to the Goddess of Sericulture, Leizu (aka Canshen, the Silkworm Spirit), conducted by the reigning empress herself. According to the Qing Collected Statutes, official religious ceremonies had several specific purposes. Some deities were worshipped for the simple purpose of expressing gratitude and veneration; others for the beneficial or protective influences the deities were supposed to exert; still others for their outstanding civil virtues and/or military services. Some spirits were worshipped for fear that they would bring calamities to the people if not suitably appeased.
But behind these rather specific purposes lay more general considerations. One of these was to exemplify the cosmic order and to affirm the emperor’s place within it. Another was to reinforce status distinctions and thus protect the social order. Yet another was to undergird the prestige and political authority of the state. Official religious ceremonies—undertaken by secular bureaucrats rather than a separate priestly class—were thus seen as powerful instruments of ideological control. The preface to one ceremonial handbook of the nineteenth century well illustrates the mixture of motives surrounding official religious practice: “Incense and vessels . . . [that is, ritual sacrifices] can control the gods and spirits. Jade, silk, bells and drums can reveal the rites and music. . . . Awe of virtue and the passing on of merit [through worship] civilize the people and form customs.”13 Official religion, in other words, manipulated both the gods and the people. Some officials downplayed the spiritual aspects of the rituals they performed, but they performed them nonetheless.
The most awe inspiring of the great sacrifices was the emperor’s personal worship of Heaven, which took place during the winter solstice and on New Year’s Day (from 1742 on). In the words of the Record of Ritual, “The sacrifice to Heaven [lit. Di or Shangdi] is the highest expression of reverence.” As with most other Chinese ceremonies, great symbolic emphasis was placed on color, form, number, position, music, and sacrificial objects. The color of the jade and silk offerings to Heaven was blue-green, the altar was circular (yang) in shape, and the associated number was nine (also yang). Appropriately, nine pieces of music were played at the sacrifice. The emperor faced north, reversing his usual orientation. Contemporary accounts of the elaborate ritual—preceded by a dramatic imperial procession from the Forbidden City to the Temple of Heaven complex the night before—describe a solemn spectacle of awesome splendor.14 Attended by an entourage of imperial princes, high officials, and other state functionaries, and flanked by the spirit tablets of his ancestors and various deities of nature, the emperor paid his respects to the tablet of Heaven with prayers and offerings—all accompanied by hymns, instrumental music, and ritual posturing undertaken by literally hundreds of performers.
The great sacrifice to Earth, also undertaken personally by the emperor, and similar in most respects to the sacrifice to Heaven, took place at a square (yin) altar during the summer solstice. In this ceremony, the jade and silk offerings were yellow, eight musical pieces were played, and the emperor faced south. Although the sacrifices to Heaven and Earth reflect an obvious yinyang symbolism, the use of the number three in the construction of the altars and in various aspects of imperial ritual, together with the importance attached to the emperor’s worship of his ancestors and other notables at the Great Temple (Taimiao), indicates the symbolic unity of the three powers (sancai): Heaven, Earth, and Man. Another important great sacrifice at Beijing was to the Spirits of Land and Grain (Sheji). Here, too, the symbolism of number and color played a significant role; the number was five, and the colors were those associated with the five agents (wuxing).
Middle-level sacrifices at the capital included those for local spirits of Land and Grain; the Sun; the Moon; the spirits of Wind, Rain, Thunder, Clouds, Mountains, and Rivers; the emperors of previous dynasties; the patron deity of agriculture (Xiannong); and various sages, meritorious officials, wise men, and virtuous women. Confucius was worshipped at this middle level until 1907, when his ceremonies were elevated to the first level of great sacrifices. Provincial-level middle sacrifices included all of the spirits noted above with the exception of previous emperors and naturalistic deities. Sacrifices to Confucius and other virtuous and wise individuals took place in Temples of Civil Virtue (Wenmiao), also referred to as school temples.
Common sacrifices, conducted at every capital city from Beijing down to the county level, included ceremonies dedicated primarily to local protective deities, the most common of which were the so-called God of War (Guandi), the God of Literature (Wenchang), the Three Sovereigns (Sanhuang), the Fire God (Huoshen), the Dragon God (Longshen), and the City God (Cheng-huang). Common sacrifices also were undertaken for the unworshipped dead (li), whose wandering spirits were presumed to be a potential threat to the community unless placated. Significantly, these “neglected spirits” were supposed to report any immoral or illegal activities to the City God, who would in turn relay this information to his Qing bureaucratic counterpart at the appropriate level for official investigation and punishment.
According to the Qing Collected Statutes, the deities in official religion operated in a hierarchy that exactly paralleled the administrative structure of the empire. County-level cults were subdivisions of prefectural-level cults and so on up to the imperial capital. Tablets of local spirits such as those of Land and Grain were inscribed not only with their names, but also with bureaucratic designations appropriate to their respective administrative levels. Some received imperially bestowed titles of nobility or other marks of distinction.
Of all the deities in the official pantheon, the City God occupied a position of particular importance at the county level. As a rule, each newly appointed magistrate, before assuming his official duties, secluded himself in the local City God temple overnight, reporting to the local deity and offering a sacrifice, which usually included an oath that he would be honest and upright. “If I govern disrespectfully,” read one such sacrificial oath, “am crafty, avaricious, get my colleagues in trouble, or oppress the people, may you send down retribution upon me for three years.” Other similar oaths asked for assistance in administration and for the power to fortify personal virtue.15
As the otherworldly equivalent of the county magistrate, the City God not only had responsibility for all the spirits of the local dead (including the unworshipped dead), but he was also expected to cooperate with his bureaucratic counterpart in bringing peace and prosperity to his county. The following inscription on a late Ming stele expresses this charge unambiguously:
Chenghuang temples are universally established, from the national capital to the prefectures and counties. While it is the magistrates who rule in the world of light [yang], it is the gods who govern in the world of shadows [yin]. There is close cooperation between the two authorities. When Emperor Taizu of the Ming dynasty conferred titles on the City Gods throughout the empire [in 1370], there were ranks of emperors, princes, dukes, lords and marquises. . . . The god’s power is effective everywhere, rewarding the good with blessing and punishing the evil with calamity, . . . thus extending great benefit to man. Man prays to him for good harvests and for the avoidance of floods, droughts and pestilence.16
When trouble came, magistrates sought relief from the City God in the same spirit, as in this impassioned appeal during the early Qing:
O City God, both of us have duties to perform in this county: resisting disasters that may occur, offering protection in times of trouble, such things are part of the City God’s spiritual realm and are part of the official’s responsibilities. This year, while the workers were out in the fields but the grain had not matured, the eggs that had been laid by last year’s locusts hatched out in the soil, causing almost half the wheat crops in the countryside to suffer this affliction. . . . The people could not repel this calamity, so they appealed to the officials for help. The officials could not repel this calamity for the people, so they [now] pray to the City God.17
The prayer ends with the suggestion that because the City God anticipates the needs of the people and officials and because he sympathizes with them, could he not, then, transmit the prayers of the people and the officials to Heaven in the form of a petition? Like any other administrator, the City God could be appealed to by equals and inferiors, just as he could appeal to (or in fact be commanded by) a bureaucratic superior.
The bureaucratic character of the City God found expression not only in his administrative responsibilities and his role as a transmitter of messages to higher supernatural authorities; it was also reflected in his physical image and surroundings. Although represented by a tablet at the open altars of official religious ceremonies, the City God was represented by an image when worshipped in his own temple. The temple itself was modeled closely along the lines of a magistrate’s yamen, and the image of the City God was dressed in official robes and usually flanked by fierce-looking secretaries and yamen runners. Furthermore, the position of City God was almost invariably occupied by the spirit of a deceased former official, appointed by the emperor for a limited term, usually three years, in regular bureaucratic fashion. As a general rule, the lower the deity in the spiritual hierarchy of official religion, the more “human” it was assumed to be.
Spirits such as the City God were considered powerful but not omnipotent; they had specific spheres of administrative responsibility, and like their human counterparts, they were neither infallible nor incorruptible. They could be “bribed” by mortals and punished by their superiors in either the regular or the supernatural hierarchy. It was also commonly believed that spiritual officials such as the City God had their own families, including parents, wives, concubines, and children. As with most other major religious traditions (with the exception, perhaps, of Manchu shamanism), Chinese religion in its various orthodox forms tended to reinforce traditional gender roles and distinctions.18
The City God cult represented a kind of symbolic meeting point between official religion and popular religion. Official worship of the deity involved solemn, dignified ceremonies in which only officials and degree holders could participate. These activities helped legitimize the state in the eyes of the common people and preserved local status distinctions. But popular worship of the City God had no such purpose and involved no such explicit distinctions. Individuals prayed to him for any and all kinds of favors (especially good health), and the ceremonies for the City God on his “birthday” and during his thrice-yearly tours of the city were among the largest, most impressive, and most widely observed public activities in traditional Chinese community life. On these occasions, the City God temple and its environs bustled with all kinds of activity: markets; theatrical performances; the selling of food; huge crowds; the noise of firecrackers, gongs, and drums; and the burning of incense. Most of these features were not to be found in the austere rituals of official religion.
It is tempting, and I think at least partially justified, to consider certain deities associated with popular religion—notably local Lords of the Earth (Tudi gong)—as supernatural subcounty administrators. Just as town or village leaders and baojia or lijiia headmen supervised subcounty administrative units but were ultimately answerable to county magistrates, so in the supernatural sub-bureaucracy local Lords of the Earth oversaw discrete administrative areas but were ultimately responsible to City Gods. Like regular subcounty administrators, these Lords of the Earth served localities rather than kinship groups, and although the vast majority of them were not based on decimal units, there is evidence to suggest that at least in some cases the subcounty spiritual world could be organized along the same lines and designed for the same purposes as baojia. A gazetteer for the market town of Foshan in Guangdong states, for example:
Every one hundred households constitute a neighborhood [li]. In each neighborhood is established an altar for the gods of land and grain, where annual sacrifices are offered in the spring and fall, with the head of the neighborhood officiating. . . . Before the feast that follows the sacrifice, one person reads a written oath: “All persons in this neighborhood agree to observe the rituals, and the strong refrain from oppressing the weak. . . . Those who fail to observe the common agreement, and those committing rape, robbery, falsification, and other misdemeanors will be excluded from this organization.”19
This oath, and the sacrifice that followed, established a concrete link between the neighborhood social and moral order and the local spiritual establishment, illustrating the use of spiritual sanctions to enforce secular norms.
The responsibilities of local Lords of the Earth, whether they were in charge of city wards, towns, villages, or subunits of these divisions, included “policing” the spirits of that area and reporting to the City God on human activities within the scope of their jurisdiction. The Lord of the Earth’s human charges, for their part, appealed to him for protection and blessings, and dutifully conveyed to him information regarding recent births, marriages, deaths, and other important events. Not surprisingly, Lords of the Earth were often distinguished by status within the larger community, some being regarded as designated representatives of others.
In pursuing the idea of an analogy between Qing sociopolitical institutions and the supernatural order, it may not be too farfetched to suggest that certain deities stood in relation to the local City God as the gentry class in Chinese society stood to the bureaucracy. Arthur Wolf points out, for example, that in modern Taiwan, where many traditional religious practices still persist, ritual specialists and close observers of temple affairs commonly distinguish two types of deities: officials (shi), notably the City God and the Lord of the Earth, and wise persons (fu), a category represented in the Sanxia area of the Taibei basin by several deities, including the Holy Mother in Heaven (Tianshang shengmu), also known by her imperially bestowed title Tianhou (Consort of Heaven) and her popular name Mazu, which means “grandmother.”20 While the comparison is not perfect, it suggests a kind of status similarity between low-ranking deities in official religion, such as the City God, and unofficial deities who performed important social roles. And just as capable gentry members might eventually find positions in the regular bureaucracy, so might wise persons in the supernatural social order become adopted into the official pantheon. The Holy Mother in Heaven was so worshipped in Qing times.
County magistrates often found it necessary to worship a wide range of both official and “unofficial” deities. According to the Qing legal code, a magistrate could be punished with eighty strokes of bamboo for sacrificing to a deity not included in the dynasty’s book of official sacrifices; but when calamity struck, the local populace often demanded that the county magistrate offer sacrifices to any god who might be of assistance. Wang Huizu, an insightful eighteenth-century scholar-official, informs us that during his tenure as a Qing magistrate, concerned residents of his county once brought more than twenty images to his yamen, demanding that he pray to them for rain. He refused on the grounds that worship of these gods was unorthodox, but he maintains that his refusal might have led to a disturbance had he not already won the people’s confidence.21
Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke’s cleverly titled book Dry Spells: State Rainmaking and Local Governance in Late Imperial China (2009) suggests that Wang’s refusal to propitiate “unorthodox” gods was more the exception than the rule. In fact, he argues, rainmaking rituals were as much a part of a local official’s responsibility during times of drought as the management of state-run granaries was in periods of famine (see chapter 3). But whereas the bureaucratic mechanisms of the Qing state introduced a significant amount of standardization in matters such as grain distribution, it could do little to unify rainmaking practices. In Snyder-Reinke’s words, rainmaking rituals that were some two thousand years in the making “predated the founding of the Qing dynasty and, in many ways, superseded its authority.” The result was a proliferation of strategies designed to propitiate the gods and placate the people that ranged from community fasting and official prayers to decidedly unorthodox rituals such as “throwing tiger bones into dragon holes, burying frogs, collecting snakes, and constructing dragons out of clay.”22 Officials were even known to exhume bodies believed to be responsible for absorbing moisture from an area.
In short, at every turn Qing officials were drawn into a supernatural world for which their classical Confucian training offered little concrete guidance. Recall the inscription in the temple of the Consort of Heaven at Foshan that I cited in the introduction to this book:
When administrative orders from the national and local capitals attain their objectives, and when there is the Way of Man to provide effective principles and discipline, it is not necessary that spirits and gods play an impressive and prominent role [in government]. But when [such orders and the Way of Man] fail to effect justice, spirits and gods will be brought to light.
It appears that in many cases, there was simply not enough perceived justice in the world of Qing bureaucrats to keep the spirits and gods at bay. In fact, as Paul Katz argues persuasively, religion actually played a significant role in shaping certain features of the Chinese legal system.23
As a general rule, a god’s bureaucratic position, or at least his or her relationship to officials within the natural or supernatural hierarchy, meant more to most Chinese than any sectarian identification he or she might possess. But sectarian identifications were not insignificant, especially in the realm of nonofficial institutional religion. Before turning to the syncretism of Chinese popular religion, let us examine briefly the major features of “orthodox” Buddhism and Religious Daoism during the Qing.
Of the two liturgical teachings, Buddhism had by far the greater intellectual appeal, as well as a greater institutional visibility and a larger number of both clerics and identifiable lay adherents. Although Religious Daoism enjoyed substantial imperial patronage in the late Ming period, it suffered some discrimination at the hands of the Qing emperors, who, as we have seen in chapter 2, were ardent advocates of Tibetan Buddhism in addition to traditional Chinese Buddhism. Under the aggressive patronage of the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors, a total of thirty-two Tibetan Buddhist temples were renovated or built in Beijing, and, in other parts of the empire, dozens of Chinese Buddhist monasteries were converted into Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. In 1744 the princely residence of the Yongzheng emperor became a Lamaist temple—the Yonghe gong—which served as a teaching center for the “Yellow Sect” of Tibetan Buddhism in Beijing. From the eighteenth century into the mid-nineteenth, it housed between five hundred and six hundred Manchu, Mongol, and Tibetan monks.24
The Qing emperors also built eleven Lamaist temples in Chengde, and developed a large Tibetan Buddhist complex at the pilgrimage site of Wutai Mountain in Shanxi province. Most importantly, at least from the standpoint of their Inner Asian administrative strategy, the Manchus established more than one thousand monasteries and temples in Mongolia, Xinjiang, and other areas on the Chinese periphery. These religious sites became “the de facto centralized state institution” of a decentralized nomadic society. According to some estimates, more than 30 percent of the males in Mongolia during the Qianlong reign were lamas living in monasteries. Significantly, seven of the largest and most powerful of these monasteries were designated as Banner units, distinct from the “secular” Banners who were garrisoned in various parts of Inner Asia. The heads of these monasteries, known as jasagh da lama, wielded both administrative and judicial power in the fashion of their secular counterparts.25
Qing control of the inherited Buddhist (and Daoist) establishment in China Proper (some 80,000 monasteries and temples at the beginning of the dynasty) was a matter of adopting and adapting Ming mechanisms of oversight, and, as indicated in chapter 4, these control mechanisms were on the whole quite effective. Moreover, Buddhism had already made compromises with the Chinese state. One illustration of its successful adaptation to the political environment in Ming-Qing times was the frequent use of names such as the Monastery for Honoring Loyalty [to the State] (Baozhong si) or the Monastery for the Protection of the State (Huguo si). Another illustration—particularly striking in view of the kinship-renouncing doctrine of Buddhism—was the designation Monastery for the Glorification of Filial Piety (Guangxiao si). Lay Buddhism, meanwhile, proved remarkably adaptable to the Chinese social and intellectual environment. It flourished during the Qing dynasty precisely because, in Kristin Yü Greenblatt’s words, it “did not demand a radical break from the social system in which it existed.” It was, she maintains, “more activist than contemplative, more moralistic than theological, more world affirming than world rejecting.”26
Although the Qing government continually worried about the seditious potential of heterodox religious sects (see below), it was relatively unconcerned with the intellectual attractiveness of Buddhist philosophy and theology. To be sure, officially endorsed neo-Confucian works such as Reflections on Things at Hand emphasized that “a student should forthwith get as far away from Buddhist doctrines as from licentious songs and beautiful women. Otherwise they will infiltrate him.”27 But most Qing scholars did not reject Confucianism in favor of Buddhism, especially in their active years. Only in old age, or in times of severe social unrest and uncertainty, did significant numbers of intellectuals gravitate wholeheartedly toward Buddhist doctrines.
It is true that the well-known scholar Peng Shaosheng (1740–1796) abandoned a promising Confucian career in his late twenties, during the heyday of the Qing empire, to become a lay monk. Although he lived in a hotbed of anti-Buddhist kaozheng scholarship and had passed the jinshi degree before he was twenty, Peng grew ever more attracted to Buddhism, and became a disciple of the renowned cleric Shiding (1712–1778). Eventually he earned a reputation as the foremost Qing scholar in popularizing Buddhism among the laity. Yet Peng was interested not in establishing Buddhism at the expense of Confucianism, but rather in reconciling the two. As Richard Shek puts the matter, Peng dressed the Confucian sages in Buddhist garb, “portraying them as bodhisattvas with a message of salvation.”28
Other Qing scholars found it possible to accommodate Buddhist ideas by viewing them in a Confucian light. Zhang Xuecheng, for example, advanced the rather common (and psychologically satisfying) argument that the origins of Buddhism could be found in the teachings of the Yijing. Further, he maintained that Buddhist mythology should not be taken lightly simply because it failed to make literal sense. “The Buddhists’ description of Buddha as sixteen feet high with richly adorned, golden colored body, and their strange imaginings that no one has ever seen—the splendors of heaven, the torments of hell, the heavenly goddess scattering flowers, yakshas covered with hair—these things the Confucians criticize as absurd.” But Zhang insisted that the Buddhists were simply presenting their teachings symbolically, just as the Yijing did in discussing things such as “dragons with dark and yellow blood.” In the end, Zhang asserted, the best Buddhist writing came close to being “superior to that of the [Confucían] philosophers.”29
A more down-to-earth illustration of the effort to interpret Buddhist concepts in a Confucian fashion appears in the following excerpt from a set of late Qing clan rules:
The Buddhists say that if you want to know about previous lives, look at the sufferings of this life. If you want to know about the next life, look at what is being done in this life. This is an excellent statement. However, what the Buddhists refer to as previous lives and the lives to come stems from their theory of rebirth and transmigration of souls. I think what has happened before yesterday—the father and the ancestors—are really the previous lives, and that what will happen after today—the sons and the grandsons—are really the lives to come.30
In this view, at least, Buddhism and Confucianism were but two sides of the same coin of ethical conduct.
What, then, were the basic ideas of Buddhism? Buddhist teachings began with the Four Noble Truths: (1) life is painful (unsatisfactory), an endless cycle of births and deaths in a transient, sorrowful world; (2) the origin of pain and sorrow is selfish desire; (3) the elimination of pain and sorrow comes with the elimination of selfish desire; and (4) the elimination of selfish desire comes with following the Eightfold Noble Path. Buddhism thus shared with both Confucianism and Daoism an abiding concern with the reduction of harmful desires.31
The Eightfold Noble Path led from correct views to correct attitudes, correct speech, correct conduct, correct occupation, correct effort, correct perception and consciousness (alertness or self-examination), and correct concentration (meditation). By following Buddhist teachings as set forth in the huge corpus known as the Tripitaka (Chinese: Sanzang [Three repositories]) and derivative works, adherents could acquire the moral and mental discipline required to achieve Enlightenment. For the most part, Buddhist morality was based on concrete social values such as love, charity, courage, forbearance, and self-control, as well as respect for all living things; but Buddhist mental discipline was designed to demonstrate that in the end, all conceptions and distinctions were meaningless.
Buddhist Enlightenment implied a kind of transcendent understanding that permitted the perception of Ultimate Reality behind the “veil of illusion” (that is, the false idea that a permanent or “essential” ego exists). When this perception occurs, “the ties of false sensory discrimination and of the passions (greed, envy, etc.) are broken, so that we are no longer carried along in the stream of phenomenal existence.” This stream of existence and continual flux, known popularly as the wheel of life and death, was based on the idea of karmic retribution (Chinese: yeyin or yinguo). Karma literally means “act,” but the concept includes both thoughts and deeds and implies causality. According to Buddhist doctrine (vastly simplified), the accumulated karma of each sentient being in the present as well as past existences determines the future existence of that being. Rebirths are believed to take place on several different planes (divine, human, animal, insect, etc.) depending on the net balance of “good” and “bad” karma (that is, good or bad thoughts and deeds).
Enlightenment, then, brought a state of oneness with Ultimate Reality (Sanskrit: paramamārtha-satya; Chinese: zhenti), a break in the painful and sorrowful chain of causation that drives the everyday world of “conventional reality” (Sanskrit: samvrti-satya; Chinese: suti). In Sanskrit this state was termed Nirvana (Chinese: Niepan), which literally means “extinction.” Likened to the blowing out of a flame or the merging of a drop of water in an endless sea, the state (or one might say non-state) of Nirvana was originally considered to be “incomprehensible, indescribable, inconceivable, unutterable.” In the popular mind, however, it became equated with the idea of a heavenly repose. This was particularly the point of view encouraged by Mahayana Buddhism, a school of Indian Buddhism that developed in reaction to the austere and rather exclusive school known as Theravada, the Way of the Elders (pejoratively referred to as Hinayana, the “Lesser Vehicle,” by Mahayanists).
Although the Mahayana school considered itself to be the Greater Vehicle (Chinese: Dasheng or Dacheng) of Buddhist truth, it could tolerate other belief systems, including Theravada, as “lesser truths,” valid in some sense but ultimately inferior. This relativistic emphasis, a matter of expedience, made allowance for different levels of understanding both within Mahayana Buddhism and outside of its wide doctrinal sphere. Emphasizing salvation by faith and good works, Mahayana was more compassionate and other-oriented than Theravada. It involved more ritual and had a more elaborate metaphysics. Mahayana posited a universe consisting of an infinite number of spheres or realms going through an infinite number of cosmic periods. Within these realms were a myriad of heavens, hells, and assorted deities (all manifestations of the Buddha spirit or nature), which could be more easily comprehended by the common people. Nirvana was beyond all this. Given Mahayana Buddhism’s eclectic spirit, ritualism, and polytheism, it is hardly surprising that it took firm root in China and peripheral areas such as Tibet, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.
There were four main Mahayanist schools in late imperial China: the Tiantai or Lotus (Fahua) School; the Huayan (lit. Flowery Splendor) School; the Pure Land School (Jingtu); and the Chan or Meditation School, known commonly as Zen, the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese character chan (meditation).32 Indicative of both the syncretic capacity of traditional Chinese thought and the accommodating outlook of Mahayana Buddhism, the Chinese had a common saying: “The Tiantai and Huayan Schools for [metaphysical] doctrine and the Jingtu and Chan Schools for practice.”33 The scriptural common denominator of these and most other Chinese Buddhist schools was the so-called Lotus Sutra (Miaofa lianhua jing), a fascinating dramatic work blending elements of philosophy, theology, pageantry, and popular fable. In the fashion of the Yijing, the ideas of the Lotus Sutra were presented not in abstract terms but in concrete images and living symbols.
The Tiantai School, which called the Lotus Sutra its own but could claim no real monopoly on it, distinguished three levels of “truth,” each of which centered on the idea of dharmas (Chinese: fa), or psychosomatic “elements of existence.” One level was the Truth of Emptiness—the idea that all dharmas are empty because they have no independent nature of their own. Another level was that of Temporary Truth, or “relative reality,” in which dharmas had a temporary and dependent existence. In this realm, there were ten types of manifest existence, ranging from deities such as Buddhas (“enlightened ones”) and bodhisattvas (“enlightened ones” who have postponed Nirvana to help others achieve Enlightenment) down to humans, beasts, and insects. The third level of truth was the Truth of the Mean—that dharmas are both empty and temporary, that the only reality was the Mind of Pure Nature, of which all phenomena were merely transient manifestations.
The Huayan School represented the highest development of Buddhist metaphysics in China. Its central cosmological notion was that all things are “coexistent, interwoven, interrelated, interpenetrating, [and] mutually inclusive.” This view was basically in accordance with the outlook of Tiantai Buddhism and was also congenial with the organic character of Chinese philosophy as a whole. In fact, the Huayan School contributed substantially to the development of neo-Confucian metaphysics in the Song period. According to Huayan theory, each dharma possesses six characteristics in three complementary pairs: (1) universality and speciality, (2) similarity and difference, and (3) integration and disintegration. In yinyang fashion, each opposing characteristic implied the other. As explained in the famous Chinese Buddhist analogy of the Golden Lion,
The lion represents the character of universality. The five sense organs, being various and different, represent the character of speciality. The fact that they all arise from one single cause represents the character of similarity. The fact that its eyes, ears, and so forth do not exceed their bounds represents the character of difference. Since the combination of the various organs becomes the lion, this is the character of integration. And as each of the several organs remain in its own position, this is the character of disintegration.34
Yet finally, when feelings have been eliminated and “true substance” revealed, everything becomes an undifferentiated whole. No longer does a distinction exist between subject and object: the deceptive “self-nature” (zixing) of things in the conventional world yields to a recognition that there is in the end no self-nature. To quote again from the Jinshizi zhang (Essay on the golden lion),
When we look [clearly] at the lion and the gold, the two characters both perish and afflictions resulting from passions will no longer be produced. Although beauty and ugliness are displayed before the eye, the mind is as calm as the sea. Erroneous thoughts all cease, and there are no compulsions. One gets out of bondage and is free from hindrances, and forever cuts off the course of suffering. This is called entry into Nirvana.
Chan Buddhism had much interest in Enlightenment, but little concern with metaphysical speculation. Chan was a distinctively Chinese brand of Buddhism, which had great appeal to artists and intellectuals—in part, no doubt, because of its strong affinities with philosophical Daoism. Chan Buddhism stressed the “Buddha-nature” within one’s own mind and regarded the regular Buddhist apparatus of scriptures, offerings, recitation of the Buddha’s name, and so forth as unnecessary. Instead, it favored an intuitive approach to Enlightenment. This emphasis on a direct apprehension of Ultimate Reality through meditation can be found in Confucian terms in the thought of the great Ming scholar Wang Yangming (see chapters 1 and 6), whose intellectual enemies considered him “a Buddhist in disguise.”
Meditation appealed to virtually all members of the Chinese leisured class—Confucians, Daoists, and Buddhists alike. But Chan Buddhism normally required the discipline of a Chan master—which, as Beata Grant points out, could be a woman. The role of the master was not primarily to instruct in academic fashion, but rather to prepare the mind of the disciple to intuit Ultimate Reality. Various means were employed, notably physical shock—such as shouting or beatings—and the use of puzzling sayings, stories, or conversations known as gong’an (Japanese: koan; lit. “public cases”). The most famous gong’an is no doubt “Listen to the sound of one hand [clapping].” Sayings of this sort were designed to jar the mind loose from its conventional moorings, to bring a recognition that Ultimate Reality cannot be conceptualized or articulated. Such techniques set the stage for fruitful meditation.35
Although the basic goal of Chan was direct intuition of the Buddha-mind, meditation could also involve deliberations of intellect. Enlightenment might come instantly or gradually. In general, the so-called Southern School of Chan Buddhism emphasized the former approach; the Northern School, the latter. Paradoxically, in late imperial times the “wordless doctrine” of Chan gave rise to an extensive literature, with commentaries and subcommentaries explaining the cryptic sayings of past Chan masters in equally cryptic terms. During the Qing, this rather academic and somewhat fossilized form of Chan still enjoyed some influence, but in many cases it functioned more as an intellectual game of the Chinese elite than as a serious quest for Enlightenment.
The most popular school of Chinese Buddhism in Qing times was the Pure Land School. On the whole, this eclectic teaching avoided both the intense mental discipline of Chan and the scriptural and doctrinal emphasis of Tiantai and Huayan.36 The central focus of the Pure Land School was on salvation through faith and good works. The reward was rebirth in the Western Paradise, also known as the World of Supreme Bliss, presided over by Amitabha (Chinese: Amituo Fo)—the “Buddha of Immeasurable Radiance.” Chinese descriptions of this beautiful, enchanting, and serene land are as enticing as the descriptions of the bureaucratic purgatory known as the Courts of Judgment (Diyu) are terrifying. These “courts” are sometimes described as “hells” because the “soul” of the departed is subject to various tortures before being reborn, depending on the sins committed in the previous life (for instance, lack of filial piety and/or lack of respect for elders).37
In the view of Pure Land adherents, faith might be expressed by the mere repetition of Amitabha’s name, while good works included conventional Buddhist virtues as well as the avoidance of the so-called ten evils—murder, stealing, adultery, lying, duplicity, slander, foul language, lust, anger, and false views. In the popular conception, faith in Amitabha not only offered the hope of salvation, but also protection from evil spirits, wild beasts, fire, bandits, and other threats on earth. Amitabha’s principal agent, the female bodhisattva Guanyin (originally a male deity, Avalokitesvara, the “Lord Who Looks Down”), proved especially popular in China as a source of protection and blessings (including fertility) for women. Significantly, the late Qing Empress Dowager Cixi actively promoted an image of herself as an avatar of Guanyin—even going to the extent of being photographed at the imperial court in her own version of the goddesses’ attire.38
Other major deities in the vast Chinese Buddhist pantheon included Yaoshi Fo (the God of Medicine, identified with Bhaisajyaguru), Mile Fo (Sanskrit: Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future), Wenshu (Sanskrit: Manjusri, a bodhisattva), Puxian (Sanskrit: Samantabhadra, also a bodhisattva), and Yanwang (Sanskrit: Yama, Judge and King of Hell [that is, the Courts of Judgment]). These, however, represented only a fraction of the Buddhas, bodhisattvas, arhats (Chinese: lohan; disciples of Buddha), and other deities who operated in the limitless Mahayana universes.39
It is worthy of note that in Qing times, a number of monasteries carried on the joint practice of Chan and Pure Land Buddhism. This usually meant that these establishments had both a meditation hall and a hall for reciting the Buddha’s name. But monasteries might also permit a special form of joint practice in one hall. Holmes Welch explains: “In both sects the goal was to reduce attachment to ego. The Pure Land method of ‘no stirrings in the whole mind’ (yixin buluan) did not differ essentially from the Chan method of ‘meditating to the point of perfect concentration’ (chanding).” The eminent Chan abbot Xuyun (1840–1959) is said to have remarked, “All the Buddhas in every universe, past, present, and future, preach the same dharma [here meaning ‘doctrine’]. There is no real difference between the methods advocated by Sakyamuni [the historic Buddha] and Amitabha.” For this reason, Xuyun advised some of his disciples who would have found Chan meditation too difficult to recite the Buddha’s name instead.40
Before moving to a discussion of Religious Daoism, a few words about Dge lugs pa (“Yellow Hat”) Buddhism are in order. As indicated previously, all major sects of Tibetan Buddhism were based on Mahayana beliefs. The Dge lugs pa sect, which developed in Tibet during the fifteenth century, focused in particular on Mādhyamika or “Middle Doctrine” teachings.41 Philosophically speaking, the goal of this school was to reconcile notions of “conventional reality” and “ultimate reality” by denying, in a highly developed and sophisticated metaphysics, any meaningful distinction between them. In other words, to adherents of this particular sect the phenomena of the world were neither ultimately existent nor conventionally non-existent.42
In practice, Tibetan Buddhism involved not only the worship of deities in shrines, but also the use of esoteric Vajrayāna (Tantric) rituals. These exercises, which involved meditation and deity-visualization techniques, were designed to allow adherents to gain access to cosmic powers, and to achieve mental and physical transformation, thus providing a route to Nirvana beyond Mahayana and Theravada.43 Under Qing imperial sponsorship, elements of Mongol and Chinese religious practice were added to Tibetan Buddhism over time; thus, for instance, the Chinese God of War (the deified historical hero known as Guan Yu) came to be added to Tibetan Buddhist altars during the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns.44
As is well known, Religious Daoism owed much to institutional Buddhism. Wing-tsit Chan goes so far as to describe it as “a wholesale imitation of Buddhism, notably in its clergy, temples, images, ceremonies and canon.” But despite Religious Daoism’s profound cultural debt to Buddhism, it was not simply a pale reflection of the “sinicized” Indian import. Not only did formal Daoist ritual and symbolism differ significantly from that of institutional Buddhism, but the major thrust of Daoist religion ran counter to the conventional Buddhist emphasis on reincarnation. For all the diversity of Religious Daoist beliefs and practices, the aim was not primarily to break the chain of causation through the elimination of consciousness, but rather to achieve a special kind of transcendence, manifest in the ability to know and manipulate the supernatural environment. Although Religious Daoism shared with philosophical Daoism an organic view of man and the universe, the goal of Religious Daoist ritual and personal regimen (meditative, dietary, pharmacological, gymnastic, and sexual) was not merely to find one’s niche in the cosmic order, but to acquire a form of cosmic power. Religious Daoism offered more than psychic release; it held the promise of longevity, invulnerability, and perhaps immortality.45
Two main schools of Religious Daoism flourished in late imperial times: the so-called Northern School, or Quanzhen (Complete Reality) Sect, and the Southern School, or Zhengyi (True Unity) Sect. The Complete Reality Sect arose during the Song dynasty in response to Chan Buddhism. Like devotees of Chan, members of this Northern School preferred the rigors of monastic discipline. Theirs was a life of celibacy, vegetarianism, and abstention from alcoholic drinks. The spiritual headquarters of the Complete Reality sect were located in Beijing, at the White Cloud Monastery. The True Unity Sect, which traced its spiritual origins to the late Han period, had its headquarters in Longhu (“Dragon-tiger”) Mountain, Jiangxi province. The hereditary Heavenly Master (Tianshi) of this Southern School, sometimes erroneously termed the Daoist “Pope,” had considerable religious authority in late Ming and early Qing times, but his power was considerably curtailed thereafter. Nonetheless, the True Unity Sect enjoyed what amounted to “liturgical hegemony” among the various schools of Religious Daoism in late imperial times, and continued to receive a measure of support from the Qing court until the mid-nineteenth century.46
True Unity adherents lived a very different life from that of their spiritual brethren in the Complete Reality Sect. True Unity priests were married, they lived at home among the people, they were not subject to monastic discipline (except by choice), and they were allowed to eat meat and drink alcoholic beverages, except during special fasts. They relied primarily on charms and magic rather than diet for self-preservation, and their principal function in traditional Chinese society was to sell charms, tell fortunes, and perform various religious ceremonies for the popular masses (see next section). As the True Unity Sect declined under the Manchus, the Complete Reality Sect experienced something of a revival, and it remains the dominant tradition of Daoism in China to this day.47
Religious Daoism, like Buddhism, had a wide variety of subsects that were at least tangentially related to one or another of the major schools. Despite some liturgical and ritual differences, most Religious Daoists embraced the same basic ideas. These were distilled from the huge Daoist canon known as the Daozang (Repository of the Dao)—the Daoist counterpart to the Buddhist Tripitaka (Sanzang). Among the most commonly recited official scriptures in this vast and varied corpus were the Yuhuang jing (Jade Emperor’s classic) and the Sanguan jing (Three Officials’ classic), both of which were used in Complete Reality and True Unity devotions. Although most of the scriptural, scholastic, and historical writings in the Daozang dealt with matters such as religious doctrine, liturgy, charms, magic, hymns, and lore, the collection also included the works of the great classical Daoist philosophers.
The world view of the Religious Daoists as expressed in the Daozang was based in a much more explicit way than that of the Buddhists on notions of yinyang/five-agents cosmogony and cosmology. According to one well-known formulation, derived from the Daode jing and clearly an inspiration for neo-Confucian cosmological ideas, the nameless, unmoved Prime Mover (Dao) gives birth to the One (Taiji, the Supreme Ultimate; or Huntun, Primordial Chaos). This One, in turn, gives birth to the Two (the yang force), and the Two gives birth to the Three (the yin force). These three forces are personified in Religious Daoism by the so-called Three Pure Ones (Sanqing): (1) the Primordial Heavenly Worthy, symbol of life-giving primordial breath (qi); (2) the Lingbao Heavenly Worthy, symbolizing the spirit (shen) of human beings; and (3) the Daode Heavenly Worthy, symbol of the “vital essence” (jing) in people. The Three Pure Ones generate the five agents (personified in the Five Rulers of traditional Chinese mythology); and from these come the myriad things of nature.
A knowledge of yinyang, five-agents, and Yijing symbolism is essential to an understanding of Daoist “alchemy,” which aimed not at changing base metals into gold as in the West, but at producing physical benefits, such as strength and longevity. Since the Religious Daoists viewed the human body as a microcosm of the universe, both their meditative “internal alchemy” (neidan)—which included breathing exercises, sexual activity, and other forms of physical self-cultivation—and their “external alchemy” (waidan)—which involved the use of chemicals, drugs, and herbal medicines—were based on yinyang, five-agents, trigram, and hexagram correlations. So, in fact, was traditional Chinese medicine. Doctors and Daoists alike sought to achieve a harmonious balance of these cosmological influences within the body, and both assumed an integral relationship between the parts of the body and the whole. The basic principles and purposes of alchemy and acupuncture were thus essentially the same (see also chapter 10).
One of the most famous exponents of Daoist alchemy in the Qing period was Liu Yiming (1734–1821), an adherent of the Complete Reality sect and an eleventh-generation master of the Longmen (Dragon Gate) lineage. Liu had studied the Confucian classics when he was young, but he turned toward Daoism after a succession of serious illnesses, and eventually became not only a renowned master of Daoist alchemy, but also an expert in Chinese medicine. Liu was a prolific scholar whose highly regarded writings included a Daoist interpretation of the Yijing titled Zhouyi chanzhen (Elucidating the truth of the Zhou Changes; 1796). He also wrote a highly influential book on Daoist internal alchemy, the Xiuzhen houbian (Further discriminations in cultivating reality; 1798), which has been ably translated by Fabrizio Pregadio.48 This latter work provides an excellent introduction to Daoist moral and meditative practice, framed as a series of questions and answers involving Liu and a disciple. Despite his self-image and reputation as a Daoist, Liu sought to unify the Three Teachings, using the Doctrine of the Mean (see chapter 6) as a foundational text. In his mind, unification was expressed in Confucianism primarily by the idea of centrality and commonality (zhongyong; “the mean”); in Buddhism by the notion of the “One Vehicle” (Yicheng); and in Daoism by the idea of the “Golden Elixir” (Jindan).
As was the case with Mahayana Buddhism, the value system of Religious Daoism reflected heavy Confucian influence. Indeed, all orthodox religious sects in China, and a good number of countercultural groups as well, admired the Confucian virtues of loyalty, faithfulness, integrity, duty, and filial piety. The curriculum in Buddhist and Daoist monasteries often included works from the classical canon, and Confucian values found their way to the popular masses in the form of vernacular religious tracts such as shanshu (“morality books”) and baojuan (“precious scrolls”). Wilt Idema has translated two such tracts from the nineteenth century, both of which take as their focus the life of Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy. The introduction to this excellent translation highlights the similarities and differences between the longer of the two Chinese works and the lives of female saints in medieval Europe.49
In keeping with its obsessive interest in longevity, but inspired by the Buddhist idea of karmic retribution, Religious Daoism developed an accounting system of merits (gong) and demerits (guo) that rewarded good behavior with extended life and subtracted years for evil deeds. By Ming-Qing times this system, which esteemed Confucian virtues but also took into account Buddhist concern for all living creatures, became deeply embedded in Religious Daoist thought and practice. Like the Buddhists, the Daoists worshipped a vast number of protective deities, including not only the Three Pure Ones and the Five Rulers, but also such popular gods and genies as the Jade Emperor (Yuhuang), the God of Literature (Wenchang), the Royal Mother of the West (Xiwang mu), the Eight Immortals (Baxian), and a host of spirits associated with stars and other natural objects, as well as historical figures and even parts of the body.
These Daoist gods—like those of Buddhism and the official state cult—were the common property of the Chinese masses. Although some deities were clearly identified in the popular mind with either Buddhism or Daoism (or both) and others were patronized heavily by the elitist system of official religion, they all remained part of a gigantic, fluid network of national, regional, and local gods, each of whom could be supplicated by lay worshippers with no sense of disloyalty to the others.
Popular Chinese divinities were known by the generic term shen, or “spirit.” These spirits, represented by images or tablets and sometimes by both, were deified individuals, objects, or forces of nature. All possessed magical power (ling). Some deities had their own private shrines, while others were worshipped together in temples. The significant feature of this expansive religious world, in addition to its obvious eclecticism, was its organization along functional lines. In the words of C. K. Yang,
In popular religious life it was the moral and magical functions of the cults, and not the delineation of the boundary of religious faiths, that dominated people’s consciousness. Even priests in some country temples were unable to reveal the identity of the religion to which they belonged. Centuries of mixing gods from different faiths into a common pantheon had produced a functionally oriented religious view that relegated the question of religious identity to a secondary place.50
Religious Daoists claimed, for instance, that the City God was their own creation, whereas frescoes depicting the Ten Courts of Judgment in the City God’s temple testified to Buddhist influence. But the important point to both officials and the common people was that the City God was a local administrator, with vitally important bureaucratic responsibilities.
Yang has documented in detail the functional character of popular temple cults in traditional China. His survey of nearly eighteen hundred major temples in eight representative localities, although reflecting data drawn from sources published in the 1920s and 1930s, suggests patterns of distribution that probably prevailed in Qing times. Dividing these temples into five functional categories, Yang’s survey yields the following information: 33.7 percent of the temples were devoted to deities associated with the well-being of the social and political order (kinship groups, local communities, and the state); 22.7 percent were devoted to the general moral order (heavenly deities and underworld authorities); 8.1 percent were devoted to economic functions (patron deities of occupational groups, etc.); 1.1 percent were devoted to the preservation of health; and 3.8 percent were devoted to general and personal welfare (including “devil dispellers,” “blessing deities,” and unspecified gods). The remainder of the temples (30.6 percent) were monasteries and nunneries, the overwhelming majority of which (nearly 90 percent) were Buddhist.51
Yang emphasizes that this functional breakdown is somewhat misleading because Chinese gods undertook a wide range of responsibilities and could be appealed to for many diverse purposes. Thus, the low percentage of temples specifically devoted to health-giving deities does not reflect lack of concern with good health. Quite the reverse was true. But the fact that most Chinese deities were believed to have the power to bestow or restore good health made functional specificity less important in this particular instance. On the other hand, specific functions might be very important in individual localities. The Sea God (Haishen) and the Consort of Heaven (Tianhou), for example, had special significance in coastal areas. The community of Foshan, near Guangzhou (Canton), which was well known for its firecracker industry, had nearly a dozen temples devoted to the Fire God.
Overall, the most popular deities countrywide tended to be those identified with institutional religion of one kind or another. But whether patronized institutionally or not, most deities were viewed in bureaucratic terms, for this was by far the most natural way for nearly everyone in Chinese society to conceive of meaningful power. The higher the god’s bureaucratic status, the more powerful, although lines of authority and responsibility were not drawn as clearly in the huge popular pantheon as they were in the more orderly hierarchy of official religion. Moreover, as Benjamin Schwartz reminds us, “The application of the bureaucratic metaphor to the numinous world did not necessarily lead to the view that the divine bureaucracy would invariably support its human counterpart.”52
In the popular conception, as in the elite view, all gods were subordinate to, and servants of, Heaven. Characteristically, however, Heaven was personalized in the popular religious vocabulary by terms such as the Heavenly Emperor (Tiandi), the Heavenly Noble (Tiangong), and the Jade Emperor. Although popular religion was permeated with concepts and terms derived from elite culture, it was only a version of that culture, not a direct replica. Not only were abstractions such as Heaven generally personalized, but other concepts were also manipulated to conform more closely to the social outlook of commoners. Thus, whereas the elite version of nature and the cosmos emphasized harmony and order, the popular emphasis was far more on conflict and chaos. Whereas elite cosmology focused on the interaction and alternation of yin and yang, popular religion saw a constant struggle between yang spirits (that is, shen) and malevolent yin spirits known as gui (“ghosts” or “demons”).
This struggle was viewed as natural and inevitable. According to a popular proverb, “Just as all things consist of yin and yang, and yin and yang are everywhere, so shen and gui are omnipresent.” The struggle between shen and gui did not normally represent a titanic battle between the cosmic forces of good and evil, however. Instead, the relationship between shen and gui came to be viewed as analogous to that existing between the Qing government and disruptive elements in society such as bandits and beggars. From a popular perspective, the goal of most Chinese religious practices—whether state sacrifices or more localized rituals—was to enlist shen in controlling or neutralizing gui. The Daoist rite of “cosmic renewal” (jiao), for instance, was explicitly designed to restore yang—light and life—and to expel the forces of yin—darkness and death.53
Gui were held responsible for all kinds of misfortune and afflictions, from accidents, illness, and death to barrenness, crop failures, and birth defects. They were believed to possess or kidnap people, to steal things, and to play tricks on people. They could remain invisible or assume a human or animal form. Although gui existed in seemingly endless profusion, they were associated primarily with the realm of yin: darkness, the ground, water, and lonely places. Many were believed to be unplacated spirits of the dead; others were considered to be inimical forces of nature. None were friendly. The supernatural world of the Chinese peasant, like the real one, could be a frightening place.
Gui could be appeased by offerings of incense, food, money, or goods. They could also be repelled by various means, including the written names or images of “demon-dispelling” deities such as Zhong Kui and Jiang Taigong, amulets made of peach wood or other potent materials, paper strips with the eight trigrams or the characters Heaven and Earth and yin and yang written on them, weapons such as swords, daggers, clubs, and spears, and various other yang symbols, such as loud noises, fire, blood, mirrors, and so on. Many protective objects were closely identified with the scholarly life of the Chinese elite: copies or pages from the Confucian classics or imperial calendar, written characters, calligraphy brushes, official seals, and such.
Rituals of exorcism employed numerous objects such as those mentioned above, as well as spells (jie or zhu) and written charms (fu). Some of these rituals could be undertaken individually or collectively by laypersons, but most involved “professional” religious agents—Buddhist and Daoist clergy, spirit mediums, sorcerers, magicians, and soothsayers—sometimes in combination. These individuals were believed to possess the special skills required to identify the source of gui-related problems and to devise successful strategies for their eradication.
The primary means for expelling gui were charms written in the form of commands from superiors (shen) to inferiors (gui). Henri Doré describes these magical devices in the following terms:
A charm is an official document, a mandate, an injunction, emanating from the god and setting to work superhuman powers who carry out the orders of the divinity. . . . The charm being an official document, . . . terminates in much the same manner as Chinese imperial edicts: “let the law be obeyed, let this order be respected and executed forthwith.” . . . The effect of the charm, as well as that of any other decree or command, depends principally on the power of him who has issued it.54
Although charms were generally associated with Daoist religious activity, Buddhist priests also employed them and sold them for profit in monasteries and temples. Charms could be used not only to drive away gui in every conceivable circumstance, but also to right wrongs (such as unjust lawsuits) and to provide for the needs and interests of the deceased.
There are many colorful accounts of the activation and utilization of charms by religious agents of various sorts, but not all “spiritual” activities involved high drama. Public divination, for example—based on the Yijing, astrology, physiognomy, the dissection of characters, the casting of lots, the reading of omens, and numerous other techniques—tended to be a more somber and subdued ritual. The same was true of the popular form of geomantic divination known as fengshui (lit. “wind and water”) or “siting.” Fengshui was predicated on the belief that yinyang currents of cosmic breath (qi), which flowed in every geographic area, influenced human fortunes. These currents, subject to various astrological influences, including “star spirits,” manifested themselves in local topography. The task of a geomancer (fengshui xiansheng) was to calculate, on the basis of an enormous number of topographical and astrological variables, the most favorable position to locate residences for both the living (homes, temples, businesses, official buildings, etc.) and the dead (graves).
Fengshui specialists operated at every level of Chinese society, from the Qing imperial household down to the peasantry. They played an important role in city planning, influenced military strategy, and were particularly important in making burial arrangements.55 The most propitious site for any purpose was at the proper junction of yin and yang currents of qi. In the words of a knowledgeable nineteenth-century Western student of fengshui,
The azure dragon [yang] must always be to the left [looking southward], and the white tiger [yin] to the right of any place supposed to contain a luck-bringing site. . . . In the angle formed by dragon and tiger . . . the luck-bringing site, the place for a tomb or dwelling, may be found. I say it may be found there, because, besides the conjunction of dragon and tiger, there must be there also a tranquil harmony of all the heavenly and terrestrial elements which influence that particular spot, and which is to be determined by observing the compass and its indication of the numerical proportions, and by examining the direction of the water courses.56
The “compass” in question was the luopan, an elaborate instrument about four to eight inches in diameter, with a magnetic needle pointing south and a series of concentric circles arranged in symbolic sets. Jeffrey Meyer describes the prototype:
Schematically the circles of the compass begin with an inner set which deals with the center, then a group dealing with earth, then the Prior Heavens, and finally the Posterior Heavens. Represented among the circles are nearly all the Chinese symbols which are used in dealing with space and time: the trigrams and hexagrams in both the Prior and Posterior Heaven sequences, the ten stems and twelve branches, . . . the five agents, yin and yang, the twenty-four directions, the nine moving stars, the six constellations, the twenty-eight asterisms, . . . the four seasons and directions, the . . . twenty-four fifteen-day periods of the solar year, and the seventy-two five-day divisions of the year. All these are interrelated in various combinations and thus repeated frequently in the thirty-eight circles.57
Geomantic compasses were not always so complex, but all assumed an integral relationship between topography and astrological configurations.
The luopan was often used in conjunction with popular almanacs (see chapters 1, 9, and 10) because the fundamental assumption of both was that certain stars and groupings of stars, in phase with yin and yang, the five-agents, the eight trigrams, and other cosmic variables, played a crucial role in earthly affairs. This assumption was shared by all levels of Chinese society and expressed in a variety of rituals, from the worship of Heaven in official sacrifices to the ceremonies of Religious Daoism and fengshui divination. Thus, in practice, popular astrology—not to mention Buddhist notions of karmic retribution, Religious Daoist ideas of merits and demerits, and concepts such as the mysterious, slow-moving cosmic force known as qiyun (“rhythms of fate”)—complicated the essentially naturalistic interpretation of fate embraced by orthodox Confucians (see chapter 6).
Fengshui specialists had comparatively high status in traditional Chinese society, despite persistent criticisms from officials and gentry. These criticisms were not, however, directed against the general theory of fengshui, for, as indicated above, all levels of society accepted its basic assumptions, and all employed it in a wide variety of ways. Instead, scholars and officials objected to certain specific practices of geomancy that generated social tensions (competition for favorable fengshui) or led to delayed burials (a serious breach of mourning ritual). Above all, they decried the manipulation of the Chinese masses by religious agents who were not part of the orthodox elite. This fear motivated much elite criticism of popular religious practice in China.
Traditional Chinese homes reflected the complex religious world outlined above. They were served by religious agents such as priests and geomancers, and protected by a host of deities and guardian figures. The majority, at least in south China, had an altar to the household Lord of the Earth on the floor outside the door, a niche for the Heavenly Official (Tianguan) above it, and a place for the God of the Hearth (Zaoshen; aka Kitchen God) near the cooking stove. Wealth gods might be located in the hall or the main room of the house, along with Guanyin or another patron deity. Even the Qing emperors worshipped some of these deities. For instance, imperial devotions to the God of the Hearth took place in the Kunning Palace, with rituals closely approximating those of the Han Chinese.58
But the focal point of religious life in virtually every home in China was the ancestral altar, located by definition in the principal room. In Chinese society, ancestor worship was primary; individual or communal worship, only secondary. This became increasingly true of the Manchus as well as the Han. As Eveyln Rawski points out, not only did the Qing emperors devote ever more attention to official displays of filial piety at the Grand Ancestral Temple (Taimiao) and the less formal “family” ancestral hall known as the Fengxian Palace, they also carried out forms of domestic ancestor worship in more intimate surroundings, such as the Yangxin Palace, the Chengqian Palace, the Yuqing Palace, and the Qianqing Palace. Here, they burned incense in front of the portraits and/or spirit tablets of deceased ancestors in the Chinese fashion. Special sacrificial offerings and the chanting of Buddhist sutras marked the birthdays and death dates of these departed spirits.59
From the standpoint of both the Qing rulers and their Han subjects, no ritual or institution did more to reinforce the solidarity of the family system, and thus the social order, than ancestor worship. The basic premise of the practice was that the soul of a departed family member consisted of two main elements, a yin component known as po (associated with the grave), and a yang component known as hun (associated with the ancestral tablet). According to one popular conception, these basic components became three separate “souls,” each demanding ritual attention: one that went to the grave with the body, one that went to the Ten Courts of Judgment and was eventually re-born, and one that remained near the ancestral tablet on the family altar. Po had the potential of becoming gui if unplacated by sacrifices, but the spirits of one’s own ancestors were not generally considered to be gui. One’s own naturally became shen, assuming they received proper ritual attention.
There were two universal aspects of ancestor worship in traditional China, mortuary rites (sangli) and sacrificial rites (jili). Mortuary rites involved elaborate mourning practices that differed in particulars from region to region but shared certain major features. These were, in the order they usually occurred: (1) public notification of the death through wailing and other expressions of grief; (2) the wearing of white mourning clothing by members of the bereaved family, ideally according to the five degrees of relationship (see chapter 4); (3) ritualized bathing of the corpse; (4) the transfer of food, money, and other symbolic goods from the living to the dead; (5) the preparation and installation of a spirit tablet for the deceased; (6) the payment of ritual specialists, including Buddhist monks and Daoist priests; (7) music to accompany the corpse and settle the spirit; (8) the sealing of the corpse in an airtight coffin; and (9) the expulsion of the coffin from the community. These basic practices applied to Qing imperial burials as well.60
In most regions of China a funeral procession for the body and spirit tablet, followed by a feast for family members, marked the formal conclusion of the mourning process. Burial did not always take place immediately after death, however. High-status families—including the Qing imperial household—often kept the coffin in the domestic realm for several months or even longer as a mark of respect for the deceased (and perhaps to await an especially propitious time for interment according to fengshui calculations).61 In all cases, regardless of when the funeral procession and feast took place, families strained their financial resources to the limit in order to exhibit the proper measure of filial devotion (and community status) in their ritual display. Deceased children were not usually so honored, however, for their premature death was itself considered an unfilial act.
Sacrificial rites were of two main sorts: daily or bimonthly devotions and anniversary services. Incense was burned regularly on the domestic ancestral altar, which housed the family spirit tablets in hierarchical order. In front of these tablets often glowed an eternal flame, symbol of the ancestor’s abiding presence within the household (see figures 4.10 and 4.11). Anniversary rites took place on the death date of each major deceased member of the family. Sacrificial food was offered, and living members of the family participated in the ceremony in ritual order based on age and generation. Sacrifices were also made to the ancestors during major festival periods and on important family occasions such as births and weddings (see chapter 10). Analogous rituals took place in the sacrificial hall of each Qing imperial tomb, some of which were located in an area about eighty miles northeast of Beijing (the Dongling or Eastern Tombs) and others of which were located about ninety miles southwest of the capital (the Xiling or Western Tombs).
In the eyes of orthodox Confucians, ancestor worship was considered to be essentially a secular rite, with no religious implications. Deemed to be nothing more than the “expression of human feelings,” mourning and other ritual observances expressed love and respect for the dead, at the same time cultivating the virtues of filial piety, loyalty, and faithfulness. Ancestor worship was a standard means of “honoring virtue and repaying merit” (chongde baogong) in the stock Chinese phrase. The Confucian gentleman sacrificed to his ancestors because it was the proper thing to do; lesser men did so to “serve the spirits.”
This attitude was consistent with the general neo-Confucian tendency to encourage rational and secular interpretations of otherworldly phenomena. In neo-Confucian literature, for example, the popular religious terms gui and shen became expressly identified as the abstract forces of yin and yang. Official religion was justified at least in part as a means of motivating the masses to perform acts of Confucian piety. Sections on religion in local gazetteers often quoted the following remark attributed to Confucius: “The sages devised guidance in the name of the gods, and [the people of] the land became obedient.” Even the employment of priests, geomancers, and other religious agents by elite households could be explained away as matters of habit, female indulgence, or a kind of filial insurance for ancestors in case the popular Buddhist version of the afterlife happened to be correct.62
But where did neo-Confucian “rationalism” end and popular “superstition” begin? Although popular religion reflected the social landscape of its adherents, it was still in many ways “a variation of the same [elite] understanding of the world.” The “Heaven” of the Chinese literati may have been remote and impersonal, but it could reward Confucian virtue and punish vice in the same spirit, if not the same basic way, as the Jade Emperor and his agents. The omens and avenging ghosts of popular vernacular literature had their supernatural counterparts in the official dynastic histories. The cosmological principles of astrology and divination—not to mention many specific religious beliefs and practices—were the same for all classes of Chinese society, as was the tendency to view the spirit world in bureaucratic terms.
Furthermore, the evidence suggests strongly that in the mind of the elite, shen and gui were not always identified simply as the abstract forces of yin and yang. It may even be suggested that the ceremonial observances for official sacrifices, community religion, and domestic worship evoked many of the same emotions in the elite that they did among the common people, although the evidence is largely impressionistic. At least the sense of interlocking rituals—reinforced by common symbolic elements (architecture, written characters, colors, numbers, plants, animals, deities, and culture heroes, etc.) as well as common practices (the use of music, the burning of incense and prayers, bowing and kneeling, etc.)—gave all sectors of Chinese society a sense of shared interest and common cultural purpose.
There was, of course, a heterodox tradition of popular religion that was far less compatible with the outlook of the Qing elite. Sworn brotherhood associations of the Triad type in southern China, and Buddhist-oriented folk religious sects of the White Lotus variety in the north, challenged Chinese social conventions, and were marked by a strong millenarian emphasis. Monotheistic religious teachings such as Islam and Christianity also contained millenarian elements and posed a threat to the Confucian order by their devotion to a religious authority higher than the state. Uprisings by groups with these and other religious affiliations caused enormous difficulties to the Qing state, as we have seen briefly in chapters 2 and 4. And while it is important to remember that large-scale insurrections such as the White Lotus Rebellion (1794–1804), the so-called Panthay Rebellion (1856–1873), and the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864) had multiple causes, most of them socioeconomic, the millenarian appeal of certain sects of Daoism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity in Qing China should not be underestimated.63
Millenarianism in its quasi-Christian form proved to be particularly threatening in the case of the Taipings. They worshipped a non-Chinese God, looked to Jesus for succor and salvation, promoted Christian values, attacked Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, advocated communalism and equality between men and women, and sought to eliminate longstanding social practices such as concubinage, foot binding, and ancestor worship.64 But they also made many concessions to Chinese tradition in the realms of both theory and practice. For instance, they used concepts, phrases, and allusions from Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist sources, held traditional views on the place of ritual in preserving status distinctions, honored Confucian views on matters such as name taboos, and employed conventional symbols of imperial legitimacy in their political institutions and public ceremonies. Even their private devotions to God (Shangdi or Tian)—the Heavenly Father (Tianfu)—bore a striking resemblance to ancestor worship down to the burning of incense before a spirit tablet in homes and offices.65
Undoubtedly the use of such time-honored terms and concepts, sources of authority, ceremonial forms, and political symbols somewhat diminished the revolutionary impact of heterodox movements—particularly in the popular mind. It is true, of course, that even in orthodox society a tension always existed between the “ordered” realm of elite ritual (li) and the “disorder” of popular (su) religious practices.66 But the dialectic operating between the two favored order overall, as did shared ethical attitudes, philosophical concepts, and specific ritual practices. Similar cultural common denominators existed in the areas of Chinese art, literature, music, and drama, as we shall see.