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- Chinese Religions, Body (Religion), East Asian Studies, Daoism, Chinese Buddhism, Comparative Religion, and 25 moreChinese Philosophy, Ritual, Confucianism, Chinese Studies, China studies, Religious Studies, History of Religion, The Body, Transhumanism, Posthumanism, Human Enhancement, Ritual Studies, Theory of Religion, Utopia/dystopia, Utopian, Dystopian, and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, Utopian Literature, Utopian Studies, Dystopia, Dystopian Fiction, Utopia, Techno-Utopia, Utopia and Science Fiction, Utopia and Utopianism, Utopianism, and Chinese Science Fictionedit
Ancestor worship refers to rituals designed to commemorate and venerate the spirits of one’s deceased forebears. While it is often associated with the Confucian notion of filial piety, ancestor worship crosses the boundaries of religious... more
Ancestor worship refers to rituals designed to commemorate and venerate the spirits of one’s deceased forebears. While it is often associated with the Confucian notion of filial piety, ancestor worship crosses the boundaries of religious traditions, geographical regions, and socio-economic groups. Dating back to the Neolithic period, it is one of the oldest and most influential components of Chinese religious culture. Ancestral sacrifices are feature heavily in Shang Dynasty oracle bone inscriptions, the oldest existing Chinese textual records. These practices continued to flourish in early China and the worship of imperial ancestors was eventually incorporated into the official state religion. When the organised religions of Buddhism and Daoism began to spread, new forms of ancestor worship rituals, such as the Buddhist Ghost Festival and its Daoist equivalents, began to flourish. By the end of the Song Dynasty, following the Neo-Confucian reformation of domestic rituals, ancestor worship practices pervaded all echelons of Chinese society. Today, these are performed in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and among overseas communities in Southeast Asia and North America. These can be divided into several types: the worship of individual lineage ancestors, which entails the presentation of ritual offering to their tablets or images at the household altar, the collective veneration of ancestors, and most importantly the founder of the lineage, at the ancestral hall, and finally, communal rituals dedicated to the worship of the ancestors also take place at the grave on specific dates, such as the Qingming and Double Ninth Grave-sweeping festivals.
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The human body has long occupied a central role in religious praxis across the globe. Recent decades have witnessed a change in academic studies aimed at theorizing the body and its relationship with society and the cosmos. This article... more
The human body has long occupied a central role in religious praxis across the globe. Recent decades have witnessed a change in academic studies aimed at theorizing the body and its relationship with society and the cosmos. This article adds to this discourse by demonstrating the pervasiveness of the body as a root metaphor in medieval Chinese religious culture. The notion of the body as a microcosmic replica of the social, political, and metaphysical realms, and the need to synchronize it with the natural cycles of the universe, played a key role in the emerging doctrinal and liturgical schemes of Buddhism and Daoism, China's two main organized religious traditions. Using the apocryphal medieval Buddhist scripture The Sūtra of Trapuṣa and Bhallika as a case study, and reading it against the backdrop of earlier religious, medical, and philosophical texts, this article argues that visions of the body as an object of surveillance by the celestial authorities, and its purification and harmonization through ethical practices and ritual means, were hailed as the most significant religious activities in Buddhist and Daoist communities alike in medieval China, a feature that continues to occupy a central place in contemporary Chinese religious life.
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The commemoration of one's ancestors is one of the central institutions of Chinese ritual culture. Early sources, such as the Book of Rites and the Xunzi, feature detailed prescriptions of mortuary procedures, as well as theoretical... more
The commemoration of one's ancestors is one of the central institutions of Chinese ritual culture. Early sources, such as the Book of Rites and the Xunzi, feature detailed prescriptions of mortuary procedures, as well as theoretical discussions on the meaning of ancestral sacrifices. This article offers a new reading of these sources against the backdrop of recent scholarship on the neurophysiology of trauma to argue that in early China, mourning and commemorative rituals were sometimes seen as preventative therapeutic measures designed to deal with the death of one's loved ones and foil the potential development of trauma that might follow their loss. It begins by examining the role of funerary rituals in providing structure during the immediate aftermath of death and suggest that part of their efficacy lies in their ability to flood the mourner's working memory thereby thwarting potentially hazardous thoughts and desires from setting in. It then proceeds to discuss two components of ancestral rites, the preparatory stage of ritual fasting (zhai) undertaken by the mourner, and the subsequent interaction between the mourner and the "personator of the dead" (shi). It concludes by demonstrating the impact of ritual in facilitating a therapeutic experience of contact with one's ancestors that can physically contradict the distress and helplessness associated with the trauma of their death by replacing the memory of the loss of one's parents with the life-affirming, and palpably corporeal, celebration of their life.
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Scientific advances in the field of bio-medicine have fundamentally changed the ways in which we think about our bodies. Disease, aging, and even death, are no longer seen as inevitable realities but as obstacles that can be controlled,... more
Scientific advances in the field of bio-medicine have fundamentally changed the ways in which we think about our bodies. Disease, aging, and even death, are no longer seen as inevitable realities but as obstacles that can be controlled, and in some cases even reversed, by technological means. The current discourse, however, can be enriched by an investigation of the various ways in which the aging process was perceived and explained throughout human history. In this article, I argue that in early China, the experience of aging and the challenges and anxieties it produced played a constitutive role in the shaping of religious culture. Drawing on a variety of medical, philosophical, and liturgical sources, I outline two models of aging: one that presented aging, and especially the loss of virility, as an undesirable but solvable condition that can be reversed with the aid of various rejuvenation techniques, and a more socially conscious model that depicted aging as a process of gradual social ascension, a natural but fundamentally unalterable condition that should be accepted, marked, and even celebrated through ritual. I conclude by demonstrating the legacy and lasting influence of these models on two of the most fundamental tenets of Chinese religion: the pursuit of longevity and the ideal of filial piety.
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The recently excavated Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan manuscripts have been instrumental in reconstructing early Chinese self-cultivation practices, such as meditation, calisthenics and sexual exercises , providing scholars with new... more
The recently excavated Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan manuscripts have been instrumental in reconstructing early Chinese self-cultivation practices, such as meditation, calisthenics and sexual exercises , providing scholars with new information that was not preserved in the received literature. This article focuses on the production, dissemination, and use of these manuscripts and their role in promoting regimens of self-cultivation. Fusing two theoretical frameworks, the 'religio-medical marketplace' model and the 'supply-side religious economy' paradigm, with a close reading of excavated and received sources, I suggest that the production of these manuscripts can be seen as a component of a conscious strategy employed by 'masters of techniques' in their attempts to attract the patronage of elite customers in the religio-medical marketplace. This was done by employing a multifaceted approach: couching these manuscripts in familiar terminology and literary allusions, presenting the problems of their clientele, aging men, as solvable conditions, and limiting access to their texts and techniques in order to package them as luxury items. Uncovering the methodology and ideology behind the manufacturing of these manuscripts, I argue, allows us to determine the utility, pragmatics, and cultural practices embedded and reiterated in their narratives and shed new light on the role of textual production in the propagation of self-cultivation regimens in early China.
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This essay offers a new reading of Xunzi’s ritual theory against the backdrop of excavated technical manuals from the Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan collections. While most studies tend to focus on the sociopolitical and moral aspects of... more
This essay offers a new reading of Xunzi’s ritual theory against the backdrop of excavated technical manuals from the Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan collections. While most studies tend to focus on the sociopolitical and moral aspects of Xunzi’s thought, I attempt to demonstrate that in composing his theory of ritual, Xunzi was not only concerned with defending the Confucian tradition against the criticism of his fellow philosophical masters, but also responding to the emergence of bio-spiritual practices such as meditation, sexual cultivation, and gymnastic exercises. Alarmed by the growing popularity of these individual corporal techniques among the Warring States elite, Xunzi opted to repackage and redefine ritual as a superior technology of the body that would enable humans to transform their bodies and minds and obtain physical and spiritual bounties while at the same time enhancing sociopolitical stability and harmony by creating an organic communal body.
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The interplay between language and politics has been the subject of increased academic interest in the last few decades. The idea that language can be used as a device not only for communication but also for control and manipulation,... more
The interplay between language and politics has been the subject of increased academic interest in the last few decades. The idea that language can be used as a device not only for communication but also for control and manipulation, however, is by no means new. This article traces the emergence of one of the first fully formed Chinese theories of language, Xunzi’s ‘rectification of names’ doctrine, in order to reconstruct a social history of language in early China. In addition to situating Xunzi’s philosophical system in the intellectual and historical context of the late Warring States period, this article also draws on Michel Foucault’s theory of knowledge and power to argue that early Chinese thinkers were fully aware of language’s constitutive role in the restoration of sociopolitical stability and thus sought to portray linguistic engineering as an efficacious, noncoercive, tool of government as part of an overarching single ruler-based political system.
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This chapter surveys the development of religious thought, namely new ways of thinking about ritual and justifying religious innovation, in early China. The waning political power of the Zhou royal court resulted in the decline of the... more
This chapter surveys the development of religious thought, namely new ways of thinking about ritual and justifying religious innovation, in early China. The waning political power of the Zhou royal court resulted in the decline of the authority of the ritual system associated with it. New rituals, designed by religious innovators, began to emerge, challenging established ways of interacting with the divine realm. Alarmed by these challenges, elite thinkers who saw themselves as guardians of the old ritual system of the Zhou were forced to create new ways of theorizing religion and explaining ritual efficacy. Drawing on a variety of transmitted and excavated textual sources, the chapter analyzes this lively debate as a dispute between two conflicting modes of religiosity: a practical model associated with a mechanical approach to ritual utilized by religious innovators to justify the invention of new practices, and an alternative mode advocated by the old guard, which redefined the category of ritual via a moral and cosmological framework and stressed the need for a complete sense of religious piety and devotion to a fixed body of ritual practices.
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Encyclopedia entry on the Warring States thinker Xunzi