Chinese Religions (Popular Religion, Daoism, Confucianism)

Question 1

Define oracle bones

Answer 1

• Artifacts discovered and called dragon bones. They looked like bones and had writing on them so they deemed them as magical and spiritual as a result of the writing, they even ground them up for medication.
• The very beginning of writing in ancient chin). Chinese still use 40% of the characters on the bone. The cracks in the bones predicted divination and the future by the Shang dynasty
• The oracle-bones were tortoiseshell or cattle scapula used by diviners to answer questions put by rulers to their dead ancestors. Hollows were scraped out in the bone, which would then be touched by a burning hot poker and the resulting cracks interpreted in answer to the question. Later, inscriptions were added that identified the question and the result, and sometimes the verification, i.e., whether or not the divination proved correct.

Question 2

Define spiritual potency (ling)

Answer 2

ling just refers to the ability of gods, ghosts and spirits to do things in the human world. They can affect the lives of living people through one’s spirit powers.

Question 3

Define the extrahuman realm

Answer 3

• Extra human carries the assumption that they are part of the human experience (supernatural and superhuman suggest superiority to humans and the natural world)
• Gods often not understood to be divine beings, not super human or super natural. Their presence is not weird or unexpected they live among the humans, they are not human but they are a fundamental part of the worldview
• Fundamental connection between deities and the natural world, they are not outside of the natural world they are intimately connected with it (celestial masters are an example of this)
• The gods are other than human but they are not greater than humans, as a result some humans may outrank some gods and some humans may outrank some gods
• (one man’s ghost is another mans ancestor). Ghosts are the unknown dead and ancestors are the known dead

Question 4

Define ming (destiny / lifespan)

Answer 4

Ming is the belief that every individual had an allotted death and allotted life span/destiny

Question 5

Define spirit mediums (wu)

Answer 5

• in early Chinese religion the wu’s engaged in 3 ritual (ritual of communication, rituals of exchange and rituals of antogonism/excorism- engaging in spiritual combat)
• Participation in death rituals: death was believed to occurred when the spirit wandered from the body, the first part of funeral ritual was to try to call the spirit back (similar to indigenous religions) the spirit medium did tihs

Question 6

Define qi

Answer 6

• key component of correlative cosmology (things happen due to the interaction of Qi)
• Qi: pneumas, material energy (Qi character is a combination of two Chinese characters translated to wind and rice- the steam rising off the rice is what is consumed by the spirits, one of the main offerings because spirits ate the essence of food)
• The Doctrine of qi: all energies in the world are due to the entity of qi, everything is made out of qi (material energy). Qi can be condensed or lively. (e.g., wind is a force and this is like qi)

Question 7

Define yin and yang

Answer 7

• Yin and yang (lit. dark and light side of a hill- they are correlative so one is not bad and good)
• yin is the energy of all that is soft, dark, moist, passive, contracting, sinking. Yang is the energy of all that is hard, bright, dry, active, expanding, rising
• Highlighted the notion of correlation. The time of maximum yin (dark) that’s when yang is born and vice versa. They naturally generate each other, they are not dualistic they are interdependent polar opposites.

Question 8

Define the Way (Dao)

Answer 8

• The way (Dao). Used across Chinese philosophy. In Confucianism, Dao is the way of humans (e.g., the Dao of a gentleman). The Dao is a path of practice, is what makes them as they are

Question 9

Define Hun and po souls

Answer 9

• believe in multiple souls
• Po (dark/wet) remains with the bones and is buried with the body cold and wet, and hun (translated as cloud soul) is the soul associated with the body and wander away from the body

Question 10

Define filial piety (xiao)

Answer 10

-respect due to the old from the young, the character shows the young holding up the old. Moral obligation to the old.)

Question 11

Define the “filial and incorrupt” rank

Answer 11

• Confucian mourning practice notion that it was incumbent upon the living to venerate the ancestors. The amount of time you spent mourning them was based on your relationship to them. Spend a full 3 years mourning parent because they took care of you for the first 3 years of life.
• Filial and incorrupt rank: It was possible to get a job as a high-level bureaucrat just based on your filial piety. If anyone was mourned their parent with high filial piety they could get a job with the government, solely based on their filial piety. And their rank in the government was called filial and incorrupt rank

Question 12

Define the immortals (xian)

Answer 12

• xian is a spiritual ideal
• Antiquity of this notion: survives on wind and dew, has benevolent qualities
• the quest for immortality (Cultivation of qi and creation of elixirs. Aside: cinnabar (congealed mercury- looked rather unearthly)
• The eight immortals as popular deities (Iron crutch li is one of the 8 immortals)
• 3 types of immortals: heavenly immortals, earthbound immortals (leave human society behind), those who achieve immortality through the simulated corpse (bureaucratic afterlife)

Question 13

Define the spirit register

Answer 13

In the Celestial Masters tradition of Daoism, the Spirit Register refers to the particular list of deities and spirits that a given Celestial Master is able to call upon for assistance. Though the The Great Petition for Sepulchral Plaints (cited in this lecture) is slightly different, in that it describes a set list of deities, the ritual format (calling down gods by name, ordering them to act on the petitioner’s behalf, the use of bureaucratic language) is very similar.

Question 14

Discuss Shang dynasty understandings of death (as per the oracle bones and archeological evidence)

Answer 14

• animistic cosmology (things in the world are animated by spiritual entities)
• People were buried with grave goods

Question 15

Discuss the functional distinction between gods, ghosts and ancestors

Answer 15

• The gods are other than human but they are not greater than humans
• Ghosts are the unknown dead
• ancestors are the known dead

Question 16

Discuss life and death in correlative cosmology

Answer 16

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Question 17

Discuss two of the visions of life and death presented in the Zhuangzi

Answer 17

• Transformation? Maybe death is a kind of transformation (passage). Physical ailment tied to correlative cosmology. Wanted to stay in death even when offered life as a king, tied to allotted time of death
• A peaceful afterlife? –> Zhuganzi and the skull (we don’t know by a skull what kind of death someone experienced- skull came and lectured him and told him he doesn’t want life again. Zhuganzi assumed its better to be alive than dead and the dead person told him he is happier than the highest king thus, peaceful aftelife and no reason to be afraid of death)

Question 18

Discuss the Confucian understanding of ritual (li)

Answer 18

• Key practice (li- ritual/ ritual propriety)
• Table manners and etiquette to ancestor veneration all examples of li, discipline us and teach us how to behave properly In our relationships.

Question 19

Discuss the role of the bureaucratic metaphor in Celestial Masters ritual

Answer 19

• Bureaucracy very central to chinese history
• The celestial masters (group of Daoists) understood to be human beings that have access to a certain subset of the celestial pantheon. As you get promoted in the celestial master hierarchy you get access to more and more gods
• Regularly report back to gods and update a fate roster, every individual has a set life span and this was the bureaucracy. This is parallel to bureaucracy, performing rituals between gods and humans.

Question 20

Discuss symbolism of “soul silk”

Answer 20

• becoming an ancestor (Sharing ashes at the community ancestor table)
• As part of a traditional Chinese funeral, after the individual dies, there is a small physical object made of paper called soul silk and the item is placed in a familys home. Do ancestor veneration in front of the soul silk, then after a year they are understood to be a formal ancestor and you take the soul silk and combine/include it in the family’s ancestral altar. Symbolic of a rite of passage even after death

Question 21

Consider practical techniques for dealing with the dead in the Daybook literature

Answer 21

• These texts were buried in the tomb of officials (could be useful for next life). Essentially technical manuals, practical suggestions for how to deal with invading members of the extra human realms.
• E.g., people becoming dead/sick before the allotted time was due to a demon, the practical solution was not a spiritual medium/exorcism, instead just find the spot where demon is buried and dig it

Question 22

Discuss the techniques for achieving immortality

Answer 22

• As the immortality cult grew in popularity, people believed that it could be achieved through any number of methods: through religious sacrifices, through immortality drugs, through ingesting gold and gems, eating the flowers of a certain plant, abstaining from grains, regulating the breath, or even by transforming the body into abird
• Cultivation of qi and creation of elixirs (Aside: cinnabar)
• one of the most important ways was modifying the diet. In early Daoist thought, one of the key ways of becoming an immortal was changing the constitution of one’s body through elixirs
• Eventually, the search for the elixir of immortality turned from external experiments and geographical explorations to internal methods involving practices of yoga and breathing exercises
• Daoist longevity techniques (for producing health and immortality) are based on an understanding of qi as the primordial energy of the universe. They focus on balancing the yin and yang forces in the body so as to recover and suffuse the body with qi. This means the retention of all outflow of qi in the form of breath, blood, and semen

Question 23

Discuss life and death in correlative cosmology

Answer 23

• there is no sense of a soul ascending to heaven or of a ghost descending to the grave. Change and transformation brought about through the interplay of yin and yang forces are responsible for the beginnings and the endings of things. The human state is merely a phase in the ongoing processes of transformation that reflect the power of nature. One accepts death as one accepts life, understanding both to belong to the eternal flow that is the Dao.
• If one follows yin and yang, then life results; if one opposes them, then death results.If one follows them, then order results; if one opposes them, then disorder results.

Question 24

Discuss Shang dynasty understandings of death (as per the oracle bones and archeological evidence

Answer 24

Oracle-bone inscriptions also provide the earliest record of Chinese theories of soul. They indicate that for ordinary people, upon death, the vital life-force departed from the body and lived on in the vicin- ity of the body as a ghost. When the body entirely disintegrated, the ghost would then descend to the underworld called the Yel- low Springs, or continue to exist in the grave. As mentioned above, however, this common post-mortem existence gave way to the idea that individual souls could have a heavenly destiny