HISTORY OF RELIGIONS

CHAPTER I

CHINA

THE RELIGION OF THE STATE

Origins-Canonical Books-Nature Worship-Divination-Ancestor Worship-Modern Cultus-Veneration of Confucius-Religious Ideas The Gods-Heaven and the Moral Order-The StateHeaven and the Life of the Individual—Moral Obligations—Ceremoniousness and Reverence.

THE scene of the mythical history of the primitive Chinese is in the north-western corner of China proper, in the present provinces of Kan-su and Shen-si. Thence the progenitors of the dominant race pushed eastward along the line of the Yellow River (Hoang-ho), and spread out in its basin. (Shan-si, Shan-tung, Ho-nan) to the sea, gradually reaching south to the valley of the Yang-tse Kiang, which was, even under the Chou dynasty, the extreme south of the empire. The myths of the origins of Chinese civilisation in the Shuking carry its development along with this expansion, and the provinces named above are the stage of the legendary history of the early dynasties. There is no hint of an antecedent migration from Mongolia or Tibet. So far as tradition knows the people was native in its earliest seats and its culture was autochthonous; and, notwithstanding the attempts that have been made to connect this civilisation with that of Egypt or Babylonia, Western scholars generally concur on the latter point with the Chinese.

The country which in the course of centuries they made

their own was not an uninhabited wilderness. The classical texts in their accounts of historical times as well as of the prehistoric ages have much to say about barbarous tribes in all quarters, whom they qualify by such designations as "big bowmen," "dogs by the fire," "huddled vermin." These barbarians do not seem to have presented any serious obstacle to the Chinese occupation, and they certainly made no contribution to Chinese civilisation.

Chinese history presents a long array of dynasties, ascending to remote antiquity, accompanied by a precise chronology which, leaving Fu-hi and Shen-nung out of the reckoning, brings the first "historical" emperor, Huang-ti, to the throne in 2704 B. C. These dates were, however, computed under the Han dynasty (206 B. C.-8 A. D.); another system, considerably shorter, is found in the "Bamboo Books," according to which Huang-ti acceded in 2491 B. C. The attempt to find a fixed point in an eclipse mentioned in the Shu-king in the reign of Chung-k'ang has not led to any assured results; the first astronomically ascertained date is the year 776 B. C. The historian Szě-ma Tsien (ca. 163-85 B. C.) does not undertake to give an exact chronology before 841 B. C., with which year the second period in the history of the Chou dynasty begins.

The traditional dates of the early dynasties to which we shall have frequent occasion to refer below are as follows: Hia, 2205-1766 B. C.; Shang, 1766-1122; Chou, 1122-841, 841-249; (interregnum, 249-221); Ts'in, 220-206; Western Han, 206 B. C.-8 A. D.; Eastern Han, 25-220 A. D.1

In China certain books have for many centuries been accepted as regulative in religion, morals, and government. They are not regarded as revealed or inspired: their authority is due solely to the prescription of antiquity or to the wisdom and virtue of their reputed authors; but no professed revelation has exerted a more absolute supremacy

1 These dates are taken from Arendt, "Synchronistische Regententabellen zur Geschichte der Chinesischen Dynastien," in Mitteilungen des Seminars für orientalische Sprachen zu Berlin, Jahrgänge, II-IV.

over the minds of men or more completely dominated a whole civilisation. These books are the five Canonical Books (King) and the four Classics (Shu.1) The Canonical Books are the Shu-king, or Book of Historical Documents; the Shi-king, or Book of Poetry; the Yih-king, or Book of Permutations (a manual of divination, in whose unintelligible oracles speculation has discovered occult philosophy); the Li-ki, or Rites and Ceremonies; and Ch'un-tsʻiu (Spring and Autumn), a meagre chronicle of the principality of Lu from 722 to 481 B. C. The four Classics are the Lun-yü, Conversations of Confucius (Legge, "Confucian Analects"); the Ta-hioh, or the Great Teaching; the Chung-yung, or Doctrine of the Mean; and Meng-tszě, the teaching of the philosopher Mencius.

All these books are associated in one way or another with the name of Confucius (551-478 B. C.). He is commonly regarded as the compiler of the first four Canonical Books and the author of the fifth; the Analects are a collection of his sayings, chiefly in intercourse with his disciples; the Great Teaching and the Doctrine of the Mean are attributed to disciples of the sage or to his grandson; Mencius (372-289 B. C.) is the greatest of his successors. Criticism-native as well as foreign-demands some qualifications of this comprehensive attribution, but does not impugn the right of this whole literature to be called in a general sense Confucian.

The emperor Shi-huang-ti (246-210 B. C.), who in 220, after long years of war, brought all China under one rule and erected on the ruins of the anarchic feudalism that had prevailed for centuries a firmly centralised empire, recognising in the veneration for the past fostered by the Confucian literature a grave peril to the new order of things which he had established, and being convinced that nothing short of extirpation would avail, issued in 213, an edict ordering that the official chronicles of the states, except

1 The enumeration and classification is comparatively modern, perhaps from the time of the Sung dynasty (960-1127 A. D.).

those of his own country, Ts'in, should be destroyed; all copies of the Shu-king and the Shi-king in the hands of private scholars were to be burned within thirty days; to possess these books, or even to talk about them with other scholars, was forbidden under penalty of death. The only writings exempted by this decree were works on medicine, divination (to which class the Yih-king belongs), and agriculture. The persecution, though severe, was not long continued; the emperor died in 210, and his short-lived dynasty fell in 206. Under the following dynasty, scholars set themselves with all diligence to recover the treasures of antiquity, which had acquired an enhanced value from the effort to annihilate them. The existing texts of the ancient books proceed from this restoration and recension by the scholars of the earlier Han period (206 B. C.-8 A. D.). The Li-ki was compiled in the same age from various memoirs on rites and customs, chiefly representing the usages of the Chou dynasty (1122-249 B. C.). From that time on these writings have possessed canonical character; in particular the Confucian teachings have enjoyed an authority which had not before been universally conceded to them.

The religion of China may be summarily defined as a union of nature worship and ancestor worship. At the most remote time of which any record is preserved it appears fully systematised and regulated, and its character has remained substantially unchanged to the present day. Worship is offered to heaven; to the heavenly bodies, and to the weathergods-cloud, rain, wind, and thunder; to the regents of the seasons; to earth; to mountains, rivers, and seas; to the spirits of the soil and the crops; to the tutelary deities of the empire and its subdivisions and of cities and towns; to the spirits of former sovereigns, statesmen, and sages, the inventors of the arts of civilisation (including the first match

1 The text of the decree may be found in Legge, Life and Teachings of Confucius, pp. 7-9: Scholars do not learn what belongs to the present day, but study antiquity. They proceed to condemn the present time, leading the masses of the people astray and into disorder.