Abstract
Efforts to understand the “other” trigger an interest in the religiosity and culture of the other and enhance a hermeneutic inquiry into their behavior. This was the case with ancestor-related praxes of the Chinese people. Their search for systematic explanations of ancestor-related practices prompted a long hermeneutic process that generated the materials investigated in this study. The chapter focuses on the various and contrasting assessments by foreign interpreters of ancestor-related practices, analyzes the responses of Chinese indigenous scholars and proposes “ancestor religion” as an interpretative framework for those practices.
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De Phyllis G. Jestice, ed. Holy People of the World: A Cross-Cultural Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004), pp. 51–52.
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Chinese culture has a tradition of providing guidelines for conducting rituals . The most ancient were the Zhou Li and Liji, but one of those who standardized ancestor rituals was Chu Hsi (1130–1200), who compiled a manual which, as the title reflects, was designed for conducting family rituals .
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The situation has changed remarkably. This is observable especially among Chinese scholars who have embraced and adopted Christian and Western methods of inquiry. Their contribution consists in shedding light on aspects that foreign researchers, because of the limitations inherent in their status, could not have access to. Their inquiries extend to classical literature, archaeological materials and so forth. A few cases of this change are illustrated by Liu Yuan and his research on ancestors rituals during the Zhou and Shang dynasties, Liu Yuan 刘源, Shangzhou jizuli yanjiu《商周祭祖礼研究》(北京 : 商务印书馆, 2004) and Khiok-Khng Yeo, Ancestor Worship: Rhetorical and Cross-Cultural Hermeneutical Response (Hong Kong: Chinese Christian Literature Council, 1996); Bong Rin Ro, ed. Christian Alternatives to Ancestor Practice, (Taichung: Asian Theological Association, 1985).
- 4.
The basis of this highly acclaimed methodological insight was discussed in a paper wherein Nicolas Standaert assessed the different predominant ways of interpreting intercultural encounters. See Nicolas Standaert, Methodology in View of Contact between Cultures: The China Case in the 17th Century (Hong Kong: CSRCS Hong Kong University, 2002). After showing the shortcomings of the existing models, he presented his interactive and cooperative model. A few years later, he wrote The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange between China and Europe, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), in which he applies his theory to the appraisal of funeral rituals among Chinese converts and missionaries during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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For further explorations of the different responses, see Tian Zhen 田真,《世界三大宗教与中国文化》(北京市 : 宗教文化, 2006).
- 6.
See J.J.M. de Groot, The Religious System of China, vols. 1–4 (Leiden: E.J. Bill, 1892–1910); J.J.M. de Groot, The Religion of the Chinese, (New York: McMillan, 1912); Marcel Granet, La Religion des chinois (Paris: Allbin Michel, 1922); Laurence G. Thompson, Chinese Religion: an Introduction, 4th ed. (California: Wadsworth, 1989) and Maurice Freedman, “On the Sociological Study of Chinese Religion,” in Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, ed. Arthur P. Wolf (California: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 19–41.
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This hypothesis can also be sustained in the light of a Chinese Confucian classical view of family rituals. In fact, ancestral rites and funeral s—an intermediary step towards ancestor status—predominate in the manual or vade mecum for the religious conduct of a Chinese family. See Chu Hsi , Chu Hsi’s Family Rituals: A Twelfth-Century Chinese Manual for the Performance of Cappings, Weddings, Funerals, and Ancestral Rites, trans. Patricia Buckley Ebrey (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991).
- 8.
See in this regard the assessment by Vincent Goosaert and David A. Palmer of ancestor worship in the twentieth-century China, a time of systematic reforms of funeral legislation in answer to prevailing ideological changes such as those following the May Fourth Movement, the communist revolution, the transition from an agrarian to an industrialized urban setting and so on. In the name of ecology, hygiene, space management and the fight against superstitions, traditional burial was progressively replaced by cremation (huohua 火化), followed by the option of interment of ashes (rutu 入土), dispersal of ashes in the sea (haizang 海葬), or memorial tree planting (shuzang 樹葬). Evaluating the implementation and reception of those changes, they note that “the central state may have won the moral battle on creation thanks to scientific and environmental arguments, but it clearly lost in the case of ash burial and its significance for filial piety .” Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China, (Chicago: The University Press of Chicago, 2011), p. 237.
- 9.
See Xinzhong Yao and Yanxia Zhao, Chinese Religion: A Contextual Approach, (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 1–2.; Yong Chen, Confucianism as Religion: Controversies and Consequences (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 108–112.
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Batairwa Kubuya, P. (2018). Introduction: Are Ancestors a Problem?. In: Meaning and Controversy within Chinese Ancestor Religion. Asian Christianity in the Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70524-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70524-8_1
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