13 - Official religion in the Ming

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In the absence of a belief in a world-transcending creator and lawgiver to whom human society would have been bound to submit for its own salvation, the Chinese social order was understood by its members to flourish or perish by its harmonious or disharmonious relations with the encompassing cosmos. The cosmic order was experienced as normally life-giving and life-sustaining, and as governed by the known periods of solar, lunar and sidereal time. The importance of astronomy and of time periods defined by astral motion was reflected in Chinese religion in the sovereignty of the astral cult over all others. The polar-equatorial framework of Chinese astronomy located the cosmic sovereignty in the region of the north celestial pole which was viewed as the central palace of the heavens. Earth, as the counterpart of Heaven, was characterized by its fecundity, which worked under the rule of the seasons and was assisted by the cooperation of human communities in agriculture and husbandry. But Earth, as the place of burial, was also the passageway of souls leading from life to death and from death to life. Hence the association of cults of fertility and of the ancestral cult with the earth. The assumed survival of human and animal souls after death permitted the mythopoeic imagination to create and sustain an invisible world of active forces behind the visible phenomena long after the birth of Chinese philosophy in the late Chou period.

The active forces of the unseen world, understood as spirits, were accessible to human contact in the ceremonial settings of sacrifice and prayer; and through them, the cosmos was understood to be responsive.