A Spiritual Geography of Early Chinese Thought : Gods, Ancestors, and Afterlife

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters. were deeply interested in the religiosity that they witnessed in their various missions. Though these figures provided productive insights into many local communities of their time, their missionary aims and goals also often colored descriptions of what they saw and read. In more modern academic parlance, their theoretical methodologies were sometimes based upon the religious doctrines of their own religious communities; their own religious doctrines, then, often framed how they understood and communicated religion in China. This primarily manifested as taking a broad category, "Christian religion, " as the epistemological or metaphysical framework of Chinese religion. The nineteenthcentury missionary and sinologist James Legge's choice of translating terms such as Heaven Tian 天 and Shangdi 上帝, China's High Deities, as "God" has given some the impression that the early Chinese worshipped the Abrahamic God. Later scholars moved decidedly away from assuming the axiomatic status of the Abrahamic religions (or any specific religion). Chun-Fang Yu, for example, claims of Chinese religions that "there is no God transcendent and separate from the world and there is no heaven outside of the universe to which human beings would want to go for refuge" (Yu 2007: 1243-5). Frederick Mote argued that "The Chinese ... have ... no creator, god, ultimate cause, or will external to itself " (Mote 1972: 26). Sociologist Marcel Granet, in La pensée chinoise, claimed that the "governing ideas" of early Chinese thought included no "world of transcendent realities outside the human world" (Granet 1934: 279); Granet In Chapter 5, "Mencius on Heaven, " he argues the same of Confucius' most important follower, Mencius. Clark will show, in Chapter 6, how early Chinese texts represent, assume, and ritually illuminate afterlife beliefs (and a metaphysical conception of persons that supports it). Then it is often claimed that (4) God and the afterlife are morally irrelevant to Confucian moral theory. Clark will argue that canonical "Confucian" texts represent the High God and afterlife beliefs as morally salient to so-called "Confucian" moral theory. Chapter 7, "Sacrifice, " looks at ancestor worship, a well-known aspect of the religious geography of China. Such early conceptions of ritual, which centrally involve the High God, ancestors, and the afterlife, affirm the moral salience and communal power of such beliefs. ## A Deeper Dive The final two chapters dig deeper into early Chinese thought by expanding discussion of the nature and status of gods. Chapter 8, "The Evolutionary Psychology of Chinese Religion," coauthored by Clark and Winslett, takes insights from cognitive science to show that one should expect to find supernatural punishment-representations of a moralizing and providential high god who rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked-in early Chinese texts. Supernatural punishment theory, a recent development in the cognitive science of religion, holds that the solution to early human cooperation beyond kin-groups was widespread belief in a superknowing, morally providential high God. Since not all divine punishment occurs ante-mortem, supernatural punishment theory, in combination with other afterlife beliefs produced by other cognitive faculties, leads us to expect to find representations of afterlife beliefs and postmortem punishment and rewards. We vindicate supernatural punishment theory in what has long been considered an outlier to standard cognitive science of religion-China; the cognitive science of religion resists verification, it's been claimed, because China is not religious. Finally, if there are High Gods, then there are likely lesser gods. Winslett, in Chapter 9, "Lesser Deities of the Pre-Imperial Era, " looks at other extrahuman agents in the spiritual geography of early China, collectively understood as Lesser Deities. It shows how these deities are pervasive across materials from this "The notion of 'gods' and religious beliefs in early China are often considered to be either unique to a single non-representative thinker, and therefore irrelevant in the writings of mainstream Chinese thinkers, or inconsequential to Chinese moral and political thought. Rejecting the claim that religious practice plays a minimal philosophical role, Kelly James Clark and Justin Winslett offer a textual study that maps the religious terrain of early Chinese philosophical texts. They analyse the pantheon of disembodied spirits, from high gods down to ancestor spirits, and discuss their various representations as anthropomorphic, transcendent and enforcers of morality, as well as examining conceptions of the afterlife and the role of the religious ritual in moral formation. Demonstrating how religious beliefs are both textually endorsed and ritually embodied, this book reveals that religion in early China is neither philosophically irrelevant nor limited to the domain of cognition, and instead forms a complex philosophical system capable of adapting to social, economic, political and environmental conditions."-- Provided by publisher "It is widely claimed that notions of gods and religious beliefs are irrelevant or inconsequential to early Chinese ("Confucian") moral and political thought. Rejecting the claim that religious practice plays a minimal philosophical role, Kelly James Clark and Justin Winslett offer a textual study that maps the religious terrain of early Chinese texts. They analyze the pantheon of extrahumans, from high gods to ancestor spirits, discussing their various representations, as well as examining conceptions of the afterlife and religious ritual. Demonstrating that religious beliefs in early China are both textually endorsed and ritually embodied, this book goes on to show how gods, ancestors and afterlife are philosophically salient. The summative chapter on the role of religious ritual in moral formation shows how religion forms a complex philosophical system capable of informing moral, social, and political conditions"-- Provided by publisher