The Religion of The Chinese E-Book

J. J. M. De Groot

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 204

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

J. J. M. (Jan Jakob Maria) de Groot, Ph.D., (1854-1921) was a Dutch Sinologist and historian of religion. In this scholarly book published in 1910, he details the history, rituals, and beliefs of the major traditional religions of China: universal animism, polydemonism, specters, ancestral worship, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. He thought that one spiritual essence could be detected beneath a great variety of religious, philosophical, and even political expressions in China, and his lifework was the discovery and exposition of that essence.

The reader should be mindful that this was written while China was still under its imperial system of government with an emperor at its head, prior to the revolutions which established a republic and later a communist system that eschewed any state religion. Currently China is officially an atheist country. The CIA World Factbook reports China's religions as "Daoist (Taoist), Buddhist, Christian 3%-4%, Muslim 1%-2%". (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ch.html on Feb 4, 2013), therefore although this eBook is over 100 years old, it is still relevant to modern China's culture and traditions.

Leseprobe

The Religion of The Chinese

J. J. M. de Groot

Booklassic 2015 ISBN 978-963-526-660-9

Chapter1 INTRODUCTION

 Is China's religion a world-religion, and as such worth studying?

A place as a world-religion must, without hesitation, be assigned to it on account of the vast number of its adherents. It has extended the circle of its influence far beyond the boundaries of the empire proper, and has gained access, together with Chinese culture generally, into Korea, Japan, Manchuria, and Turkestan, as well as into Indo-China, though, of course, in modified forms. Hence a proper understanding of the religions of East Asia in general requires in the first place an understanding of the religion of China.

China's religion proper, that is to say, apart from Buddhism, which is of foreign introduction, is a spontaneous product, spontaneously developed in the course of time.

Its origin is lost in the night of ages. But there is no reason to doubt, that it is the first religion the Chinese race ever had. Theories advanced by some scientists that its origin may be looked for in Chaldean or Bactrian countries must as yet be rejected as having no solid foundation. It has had its patriarchs and apostles, whose writings, or the writings about whom, hold a pre-eminent position; but it has had no founders comparable with Buddha or Mohammed. It has had a spontaneous birth on China's soil.

Since its birth, it has developed itself under the influence of the strongest conservatism. Its primeval forms were never, as far as is historically known, swept away by any other religion, or by tidal waves of religious movement and revolution. Buddhism eradicated nothing; the religion of the Crescent is only at the beginning of its work; that of the Cross has hardly passed the threshold of China. In order to understand its actual state, we have to distinguish sharply between its native, and its exotic or Buddhist element. It is the native element which will occupy us first and principally.

Chapter2 UNIVERSAL ANIMISM. POLYDEMONISM

 THE primeval form of the religion of the Chinese, and its very core to this day, is Animism. It is then the same element which is also found to be the root, the central nerve, of many primeval religions, the same even which eminent thinkers of our time, as Herbert Spencer, have put in the foreground of their systems as the beginning of all human religion of whatever kind.

In China it is based on an implicit belief in the animation of the universe, and of every being or thing which exists in it. The oldest and holiest books of the empire teach that the universe consists of two souls or breaths, called Yang and Yin, the Yang representing light, warmth, productivity, and life, also the heavens from which all these good things emanate; and the Yin being associated with darkness, cold, death, and the earth. The Yang is subdivided into an indefinite number of good souls or spirits, called shen, the Yin into partides or evil spirits, called kwei, specters; it is these shen and kwei which animate every being and every thing. It is they also which constitute the soul of man. His shen, also called hwun, immaterial, ethereal, like heaven itself from which it emanates, constitutes his intellect and the finer parts of his character, his virtues, while his kwei, or poh, is thought to represent his less refined qualities, his passions, vices, they being borrowed from material earth. Birth consists in an infusion of these souls; death in their departure, the shen returning to the Yang or heaven, the kwei to the Yin or earth.

Thus man is an intrinsic part of the universe, a microcosmos, born from the macrocosmos spontaneously. But why should man alone be endowed by the universe with a dual soul? Every animal, every plant, even every object which we are wont to call a dead object, has received from the universe the souls which constitute its life, and which may confer blessing on man or may harm him. A shen in fact, being a part of the Yang or the beatific half of the universe, is generally considered to be a good spirit or god; a kwei, however, belonging to the Yin or other half, is, as a rule, a spirit of evil, we should say a devil, specter, demon. There is no good in nature but that which comes from the shen or gods; no evil but that which the kwei cause or inflict.

With these dogmata before us, we may now say that the main base of the Chinese system of religion is a Universalistic Animism. The universe being in all its parts crowded with shen and kwei, that system is, moreover, thoroughly Polytheistic and Polydemonistic. The gods are such shen as animate heaven, sun, moon, the stars, wind, rain, clouds, thunder, fire, the earth, seas, mountains, rivers, rocks, stones, animals, plants, things—in particular also the souls of deceased men. And as to the demon world, nowhere under heaven is it so populous as in China. Kwei swarm everywhere, in numbers inestimable. It is an axiom which constantly comes out in conversing with the people, that they haunt every frequented and lonely spot, and that no place exists where man is safe from them. Public roads are haunted by them everywhere, especially during the night, when the power of the Yin part of the universe, to which specters belong, is strongest. Numerous, in fact, are the tales of wretches who, having been accosted by such natural foes of man, were found dead by the roadside, without the slightest wound or injury being visible: their souls had simply been snatched out of them. Many victims of such encounters could find their way home, but merely to die miserably shortly after. Others, hit by devilish arrows, were visited with boils or tumors, which carried them off, or they died without even any such visible marks of the shots. And how many wayfarers have fallen in with whole gangs of demons, with whom they engaged in pitched battles ? They might stand their ground most heroically, and ultimately worst their assailants; yet, hardly at home, they succumbed to disease and death.

Ghosts of improperly buried dead, haunting dwellings with injurious effect, and not laid until re-buried decently, are the subject of many tales. Especially singular, but very common, it is, to read of hosts of specters setting whole towns and countries in commotion, and utterly demoralizing the people. Armies of spectral soldiers, foot and horse, are heard moving through the sky, especially at night, kidnaping children, smiting people with disease and death, playing tricks of all sorts, even obscenities, compelling men to defend themselves with noise of gongs, drums and kettles, with bows, swords and spears, and with flaming torches and fires. They steal the pigtails of inoffensive people, cutting these off, actually in broad daylight, even from very respectable gentlemen and high nobles, preferably while enjoying some public theatrical performance in a square or bazar, or when visiting a shop, or even in their own houses, in spite of securely barred doors. To some the idea occurs that the miscreants may be men, bad characters, bent on deriving advantage somehow from the prevailing excitement. Thus tumults arise, and the safety of unoffending people is placed in actual peril. Unless it be admitted by general consent that the mischief is done exclusively by invisible malignant specters, the officials interfere, and, to reassure the populace and still the tempest of emotion, imprison persons upon whom suspicion falls, preferably sending out their policemen and soldiers among members of secret religious sects, severely persecuted by the government as heretics because enemies of the old and orthodox social order, as evil-intentioned outlaws, the corroding canker of humanity. In most cases, their judicial examinations corroborate their pre-conceived suspicion, for they admirably understand the art of extorting, by scourge and torture, even from the most obdurate temperaments, any confessions, but especially such as they beforehand have assumed to be true. Flagellation, banishment to Turkestan, strangulation with a rope, and similar things, inseparable from Chinese judicial methods, crown the work.

While such whirlwinds of public excitement blow, the most intelligent, as well as the most ignorant, go wild with excitement and fear. The absurdest stories are circulated and universally believed. Officials in such emotional disturbances concert measures, and throw oil into the fire. They issue proclamations, each directly calculated to increase the disturbance of the public mind. They exhort people to stay at home, close their doors, and look after their children. They prescribe medicines and charms, to be used internally or externally. They try to avert the specters by means of sacrifices, summoning them to go away; even emperors from the height of their thrones have posed with respect to specter-plagues and sent officers and ministers to the regions where they prevailed in order to offer sacrifices to them and, in the sovereign's august name, summon them to cease their terrible work. Such mental typhoons are seldom confined within narrow limits, but mostly spread over several provinces.

Where belief in specters and spectrophoby so thoroughly dominate thought and life, demon lore is bound to attain its highest development. Literature in China abounds with specter tales,—no stories in Chinese eyes, but undeniable truth. A very large number may be traced to books of the T'ang dynasty, belonging to the seventh, eighth or ninth century. Confucius divided the specters into three classes: those living in mountains and forests, in the water, and in the ground. The first class is the most dangerous. And, among them, the most notorious are specters with one eye on the top of their heads, which, merely by their presence, cause drought, and, as a consequence, destruction of crops, dearth, famine,—all which mean in China destruction of thousands, nay millions of lives. Such calamities have always harassed China like chronic plagues. Books, dating from the earliest times, mention their prevalence. Religious ceremonies to avert them and bring down rains have always formed an integral part of the official duties of princes, governors, and mandarins. The arrival of one pah —as these devils are called, even in classical works, suffices to call forth such a catastrophe. It may come with the quickness of wind. In order to defend yourself and your country against it, catch it and throw it into the dung-pit, or into the privy, and the drought will vanish: thus runs the sovereign recipe.

Water demons, too, are numerous, and of various sorts. Most of them are souls of drowned men, unable to release themselves from their watery grave unless they draw another human being into it. Accidents which befall those who cross a body of water are ascribed to those demons, lying in ambush for victims. They are a constant lurking danger to fishermen, boatmen, and washerwomen. They blow hats into the water, linen from the bleaching ropes; and while the owner exerts himself to recover his property, they treacherously keep the thing just beyond his reach, until he loses his equilibrium and tumbles into a watery grave. Should a corpse be found on the silt, its arms or legs worked deep into the mud, every one is sure to believe that it is a victim of a water ghost, drawn down by those limbs with irresistible force.

Cramps paralyzing a swimmer, are likewise the clutches of a water ghost. When a man is missed, and later found dead in the water, every one is ready to explain that a water ghost has decoyed him away from his house by some trick, and drowned him.

In the third place, we have the demons which inhabit the ground. They dwell also in objects firmly attached to the soil; in houses and heavy things. As the soil, if fecundated by the celestial sphere, is the productive part of the universe, which engenders all sorts of living things, disturbance of such earth spirits by digging in the ground or moving heavy objects, naturally, by the laws of sympathy and universalism, disturbs the repose and growth of the embryo in the womb of woman. Their baneful influence even affects babies already born, these as well as the vegetable kingdom being dependent for their growth on the life-producing earth. It is those spirits which cause convulsions; and everybody feels sure that, should a child fall into their clutches it would certainly forthwith turn black and blue. They are, of course, notorious for causing the pains of pregnancy, and even miscarriage.

The fear of such a result restrains a man from many imprudent acts, should his wife or concubine be pregnant. Especially perilous it is then to drive a nail into the wall, as it might nail down the earth specter which resides in it, and cause the child to be born with a limb stiff and useless, or blind of one eye; or it might paralyze the bowels of a child already born, and give it constipation with fatal result. The dangers which threaten a future mother increase as her pregnancy advances. In the end nothing may be displaced in the house; even the shifting of light objects becomes a source of danger. Instances are known of fathers who had rolled up their bedmats after they had long lain flat, being frightened by the birth of children with rolled-up ears. Once I saw a boy with a harelip, and was told by the father that his wife, when pregnant with this child, had thoughtlessly made a cut in an old coat of his, while mending it.

But nothing is so perilous as the commotion created among earth specters by repairs of houses, or by the application of labor to the soil. When at Amoy any one undertakes anything of the kind, the neighbors take good care to seek lodgings elsewhere for their women who are expecting confinement, not allowing them to return until the work is fairly advanced, and the disturbed spirits have had time to resettle in their old abodes. In default of a suitable place to shelter such a woman, public opinion obliges the builder to delay till after her confinement.

The natural history of the demon kingdom is not herewith exhausted. A very large contingent has been contributed to it, in all times and ages, by the animal kingdom. Animals have, in fact, the same natural constitution as men, being built up of the same Yang and Yin substances of which the universe itself consists; and while identification of specters with men prevails in demonism, the investment of animal specters with human attributes, and even human forms, has been the result. China has its were-wolves, but especially its tiger demons. The royal tiger is her most ferocious brute, the terror of its people, often throwing villages into general commotion and panic, and compelling country people to remove to safer spots. Folklore abounds with tales of man-tigers ravening as bloodthirsty demons; with tales of men accused of having raged as tigers, being delivered to the magistrates, and formally put to death by their orders; of wretches being chased by the people with lances and swords, or burned in their own houses. Wounds inflicted on a were-beast are believed to be visible on the corresponding part of its body when it reassumes human shape: a trait also of our own lycanthropy. As in other countries where royal tigers live, so in China exceptional specimens are known to prey preferably on men. But instead of ascribing this idiosyncrasy to their having experienced how easy a prey man generally is, or to their steady predilection for human flesh after having once tasted it, the Chinese aver that the man-eater is incited by the ghost of every last victim to a new murder. Thus fancy has created a class of injurious human specters in the service of the monster, or sometimes thought to inhabit it ; each such specter brings the beast on the track of a new human victim, desiring nothing better than to deliver itself from its bondage by thus getting a substitute.

There is hardly any species of animal in China about whose changes into men folk-lore has not stories to tell. Foxes and vixens especially, but also wolves, dogs, and snakes are notorious for thus insinuating themselves into human society for immoral purposes, disguised as charming, handsome lads and female beauties; and not seldom they devour them in the end, and at all events make them ill, delirious, insane. Reynard is also depicted as an enormous impostor, so enormous that there are instances of his having assumed the garb of religious holiness, nay, the shape of the Buddhas themselves, to insinuate himself into the favor of men, and even to obtain access to such awe-inspiring places as imperial palaces. Instances are even known of his descending on a cloud in a Bod-hisatwa's shape, to settle on an altar, and appropriate for years the sacrifices offered by men and women who flocked to worship his divinity.

Evil may be inflicted upon men by stags, by hares, monkeys, rats, otters, snakes, tortoises, toads, frogs, even by such tame domestic animals as cats, donkeys, goats, pigs and cows, assuming human forms, seducing men and women, bewitching their senses to the detriment of their health, haunting their dwellings, possessing the inmates and making them ill. Tales are even circulated about cocks, geese, crows and other birds, even fishes and insects, doing every sort of evil, especially after assuming human shape. Those endless changes of men into beasts and beasts into men, in order to play their tricks as devils, are the best illustrations of the influence exerted upon the Chinese mind by the system of universalism, teaching animation of all beings by the same Yang and Yin, who compose the Tao or order of the universe.

Moreover, trees, shrubs, herbs and objects are implicitly believed to send out their souls, in order to inflict evil on men. We read of whole gangs of man-shaped specters of large and small dimensions, spreading consternation and fear, and being later on found to be leaves, blown about by the wind. We read of people overhearing conversations in the dead of night, which at daybreak were discovered to have been held by utensils or other things, and were no more heard after the things had been burned, or totally destroyed. Lids of coffins have shot through the air, wounding people or crushing them to death, and the spirits could not be laid but by burning the coffins and their contents. A great number of such flying object-specters emitted a nauseous smell of decaying human or animal matter, and, when touched, were found to be soft and slippery. Objects which were in the possession of ancestors may recall the remembrance of these to superstitious minds, that is to say, they may haunt them. Rotten wood and old brooms may haunt houses as incendiary specters. Images of men and animals in particular are firmly believed to be capable of haunting, being in fact completely identified by childish minds with the beings they represent. Tales tell how the cause of the evil was discovered by brave and clever men, who, lying in ambush, wounded the specter during its haunting excursion in animal shape, or in the form of a man; how they followed the bloody track, and discovered the animal, tree or object wounded, or with the arrow in its body; such tales are very numerous, and afford curious reading. The fate of such a specter is soon told: if an animal, it was killed, burned, cooked and eaten; if a tree, it was hewn down and burned.

Especially mischievous and dangerous are souls of animals, trees and objects which are old. To hew down an old tree is most perilous work, entailing vengeance from the specter—disease, death. There is in Fuhkien an aversion to planting trees, the planters, as soon as the stems have become as thick as their necks, being sure to be throttled by the indwelling spirit. This may account to some extent for the almost total neglect of forestry in that part of China, so that hardly any, except self-sown trees, are growing there.

We see then the Chinese people believing itself to inhabit a world filled with dangerous specters on every side. I have stated that they perform, in the Too or order of the world, the leading part in the distribution of evil, because they represent its Yin, or cold and dark half. They thus exercise a dominant influence over human fate as well as the shen, the good spirits of the Yang, who are the distributers of blessing. But the Yang is above the Yin, as heaven, which belongs to it, is above the earth; heaven then is the chief shen or god, who controls all specters and their doings ; and we must not fail to lay stress upon the great tenet of Chinese theology, that no spirits harm man but with the authorization of heaven, or its silent consent. In its oldest form this dogma is clearly laid down in the Yih and the Shu, the principal classical bibles of China's religion, and social and political institutions. We read there: "It is heaven's Tao or way to give felicity to the good and bring misfortune upon the bad; the kwei harm the proud—the shen render the modest happy."

Thus we see that the kwci or specters, as sole and general agents of heaven for the distribution of evil among men, are an indispensable element in China's religion. Their dogmatical existence is the main inducement to the worship of heaven, which aims first of all to secure the propitiation of this supreme power to the end that it may withhold its avenging kwei. All the shen or gods of inferior rank, being parts of the Yang, are the natural enemies of the kwei, because these are the constituents of the Yin ; indeed, the Yang and the Yin, in the order of the world, are in an eternal struggle, manifested by alternation of day and night, summer and winter, heat and cold. The worship and propitiation of the gods, which is the main part of China's religion, has, like the worship of Heaven or the Supreme God, no better purpose but to induce the gods to defend man against the world of specters, or, by descending and living among men, to drive specters away by their overawing presence. That cult in fact means invocation of happiness, but happiness simply means absence of misfortune which the specters bring. Idolatry means the disarming of specters by means of the gods.

Accordingly the belief in specters is net in China, as among us, banished to the domain of superstition or even nursery tale. It is a fundamental principle of China's universalistic religion; it is a doctrine as true as the existence of the Yin, as true then as the existence of the order of the world, or the Tao itself. But for that doctrine and its consequences, China's cult of gods would appear rather meaningless, and would certainly show itself in forms quite different from those it actually assumes. If missionaries in China wish to conquer idolatry, they will have to destroy the belief in demons first, together with the classical cosmological dogma of the Yang and Yin, in which it is rooted, and which constitutes to this day Confucian truth and wisdom of the very highest kind. They will have to educate China in a correct knowledge of nature and its laws; China's conversion will require no less than a complete revolution in her culture, knowledge, and mode of thought, which have been tutored throughout all time by antiquity, and the classical books through which antiquity speaks.

The study of the relations of the Chinese to their spirit world, and of that spirit world itself, consequently, is a study of their religion. It is the study of the animism, magic and idolatry of a great part of the human race. It is at the same time a study of customs, belief, and culture. It is also the study of the antiquity and history of culture. Indeed, more perfectly than anywhere else in this world, culture is in China a picture of the past. Her literature may be regarded as the chief creator of this phenomenon. Mental culture and religion have, indeed, been transmitted in China from age to age by tradition; and tradition was always guided by books in which it was written, and the oldest of which are the most esteemed. It was the books that, merely describing them, in fact petrified them, keeping them remarkably free from novelty, which, in Chinese civilized opinion, always is corruption and heterodoxy. Almost everything which the books have to tell, the Chinese take for truth and genuine fact, as reliable as any, they being in fact not advanced far enough in science and culture to distinguish between the possible and the impossible. This fact, too, renders their books of the highest value to students of China's religion; Chinese books must of necessity be their guides. Individual experience and personal inquiry, though highly useful, become matters of secondary importance.

The belief in a world of specters which are of high influence upon man is in China's religion even more than its basis. It is a principal pillar in the building of morality.

The Tao or order of the universe, which is the yearly and daily evolutions and revolutions of the Yang and the Yin, never deviates or diverges; it is just and equitable to all men, producing and protecting them impartially. Heaven, the greatest power of the universe, the Yang itself, by means of the gods rewards the good, and by means of the specters punishes the bad, with perfect justice. There is, in other words, in this world no felicity but for the good.