Hou Chi devoted himself, in the interests of his countrymen, to agriculture, and at the date of this ode, which of course cannot be older than the twelfth century B.C., was still worshipped as the Father of Husbandry. At the same time, in view of the profound feelings of veneration and affection which his personality aroused in the hearts of his countrymen, it was specially laid down that his spirit was not to be allowed to take precedence of God.
The concluding lines of this panegyric are important for their bearing on sacrifice, a phase of religion on which, so far, we have but slightly touched. Hou Chi himself, we are told, had established the custom of offering up sacrifices of grain—a primitive form of the Harvest Festival, or Thanksgiving; but now the writer of the ode asks,
and which may be compared with "the ram of consecration" (Exodus xxix. 31), is declared by commentators to mean
And fill the earthenware vessels with broth.
At length the fragrance mounts on high,
And God, well pleased, smells the sweet savour,
Sweet indeed, and in due season.
It remains to add that the Chinese term used is Shang Ti and not T‘ien, bearing out a distinction I have attempted to establish between these two expressions, which are beyond all doubt names for one and the same Being. T‘ien may be regarded as God Passive, Shang Ti as God Active; T‘ien as Jahveh, or Jehovah (in spite of Dr Pusey's prohibition of these forms), Shang Ti as God. T‘ien is perhaps more an abstract, Shang Ti a more personal Deity. Reference to T‘ien is usually associated with fate or destiny, calamities, blessings, prayers for help, and so forth. The commandments of T‘ien are hard to obey. He is compassionate, as well as to be feared, unjust, and cruel. Shang Ti is more definitely associated with a heaven for departed spirits, and He walks, as God did in the Garden of Eden, leaves tracks on the ground, enjoys, as we have seen, the sweet savour of
There is a singular passage in Chuang Tzŭ, the Taoist writer of the fourth and third centuries B.C., who will shortly claim our attention, which passage has nothing to do with Taoism, but has passed, like many other sayings of the kind, into popular usage. The Emperor Yao, who, as we have already seen, abdicated in favour of the peasant Shun, is said to have previously wished to abdicate in favour of Hsü Yu, a worthy hermit of the day, and to have addressed him accordingly. But the hermit replied,
We have now nearly done with the Odes, the chief source of all that we really know, or can infer, of the
God is acting oppressively,
God is getting angry.
That God sends down death and disorder?
Almighty God makes no mistakes,
and then a whole verse, as follows:
The value of an oath was greatly enhanced by calling God to witness. There would be a solemn sacrifice in a temple, and an oath would be taken, of which this is an actual example: "If I am not loyal
The life of Confucius furnishes us with another illustration. He had been taken prisoner by rebels, and was released on condition of not proceeding to the Wei State. Thither, notwithstanding, he continued his route; and when asked by a disciple whether it was right to violate his oath, he replied, "It was a forced oath; the spirits do not recognize such." One more example of these old-world beliefs. A treaty of peace having been concluded (B.C. 589) with the eastern tribes, a princelet suggested attacking them while off their guard. To this the Grand Augur said, "The violation of a treaty will bring you bad luck. Neither the spirits nor man will help you; how, then, can you expect to succeed?" The princelet went his own way, and suffered a severe defeat. With regard to any general fear of God, we learn from the earlier records that such fear was limited to evil-doers, whose acts would be contrary to the proper harmony of the universe. Given right conduct on the part of man, there would be no further intervention on the part of God. The When sacrifices are mentioned in the various records we have been using, it is understood that the victim in each case would be one of the domestic animals, variously enumerated, under B.C. 637, as six, and under B.C. 529 as five. These animals, to adopt the larger number, would be the horse (specially so mentioned under B.C. 563), ox, sheep, fowl, dog, and pig. Under B.C. 637 we read that the ruler of one feudal State insisted upon the ruler of another State offering up in sacrifice the ruler of A little more than one hundred years later, B.C. 529, we read that the prince of the Ch‘u State succeeded in extinguishing the Ts‘ai State, and sacrificed the eldest son of his vanquished rival. Even if the sacrifice of human beings, in the usual acceptance of the term, was not widely practised, we know that both men and women were often buried alive as companions to the dead. Under B.C. 590 we have an account of the burial of a feudal ruler, who had governed badly and had wasted the resources of his State upon improper objects. His two chief ministers gave him an extravagant funeral, using lime made from burnt oyster-shells (as extracted at the present day) for lining the inside of the grave, and having more than the usual number of carriages and horses,
Yen-hsi, the son of Tzŭ-chü.
Ah, this Yen-hsi
Was one in a hundred.
When he came to the grave
He looked terrified and trembled.
reminds me that at the present day, when the idea of God has faded in China to little more than a name, He is still occasionally spoken of as the Wearer of the Blue Clothes.
In another case, one of the feudal princes, seeing that some mess had been made in his courtyard, fell down in a fit of passion upon a charcoal brazier, and was so badly burnt that he died. Five chariots with their teams of horses, together with five men, were buried alive in his honour. The historian quaintly adds that his death was due, partly to his violent temper and partly to his love of cleanliness.
A writer of the fourth century B.C. relates how and when the custom of burying alive became unpopular with the Chinese people.
"A certain man having died, his wife and steward took counsel together as to who should be buried with him. All was settled before the arrival of his brother (a well-known disciple of Confucius); and then they informed him, saying, 'We must ask you to go down with the body into the grave.' 'Burial of the living with the dead,' replied the brother, 'is not in accordance with established rites. Still, as you say that someone is wanted to attend upon the deceased, who better fitted than his wife and steward?
In spite of this last statement, we know that at the grand funeral of the so-called First Emperor, in B.C. 210, all his concubines were buried alive in the magnificent mausoleum where his body was laid, as well as all the workmen who had constructed it and knew the secret of its treasures; the workmen, of course, not from any religious motive. To return to natural phenomena, which have at all times entered very largely into the religious beliefs of the Chinese, and may be said to do so even at the present day, when gongs and cymbals are still beaten to prevent a great dog from swallowing the sun or moon at eclipse time. There is a passage in the Canon of History which is understood, no doubt rightly, to refer to an eclipse. The two Grand Astronomers, appointed under the Emperor Yao, had been neglecting their duties and giving way to intemperance. Then there suddenly occurred what we may call a "celestial failure"; the blind musicians beat their drums; officials and people hurried wildly about; while the two Grand Astronomers behaved like mere impersonators of the dead. Grand Astronomers had in those days an uneasy billet; the penalty for antedating or postdating an eclipse was, in both cases, death. Eclipses are only mentioned once in the Odes, at a very early date, which has been carefully verified. On the 20th April, B.C. 610, another eclipse of the sun took place. This is not the first instance recorded in the "Springs and Autumns," but the remarks of the commentary are more conveniently arranged for quotation. The writer says, "On the occasion of an eclipse of the sun, the Son of Heaven should not have his table spread so lavishly as usual, and should have drums beaten at the altar to the spirits of the land, while the feudal princes should present offerings of silk to the spirits of the land and have drums beaten at their courts, thus manifesting their own service of the spirits and so teaching the people to serve their rulers, according to the respective rights of each, as was customary in ancient days." It is obvious that an eclipse was regarded as a threatening notification from on high, vague though Drought had always been regarded as a divine visitation, and sacrifices and prayers for rain were as common in ancient days as they are at present. In B.C. 637 there was a serious drought in the Lu State. The reigning prince wished to burn a witch as a propitiatory sacrifice; but a minister said, "No, that is not a proper course to take. Rather put your city walls into good repair; spend less on your table, and be economical in your general expenditure. Exalt thrift and urge the people to help one another. That is the right course to take. What has a witch to do with the matter? If God now wishes her to die, why did He ever give her life? If she can really produce drought, to burn her will only increase the calamity." The witch's life was spared, and that year there was not great scarcity of food. Famines were divided into five classes of intensity, based upon the number of the five kinds of grain Locusts have always been one of the plagues of China, and there is quite a literature on the various methods for getting rid of this pest. In B.C. 623 we are told that locusts fell from the sky like rain, being, happily, killed by the fall. The annals of China contain Raining blood, too, has been satisfactorily accounted for by the presence of a red secretion, chiefly from the pupal chrysalis of a certain butterfly (genus Vanessa); as to several of the other entries, we may follow the Confucian maxim: "Hear much, and put aside those points on which you are in doubt." Earthquakes were very naturally supposed to proceed from supernatural agencies. One writer says, "It is the way of the earth to be still; its moving was accounted strange, and was therefore recorded." Nothing, indeed, as matters turned out; the disease was traced to the fact that four of the ladies of the harem bore the same surname as the prince himself. Marriage between persons of the same surname has always, with certain special exceptions, been forbidden in China; in this case it was held that the rule extended to relations with concubines as well. Already, as we have seen, the worship of God and of the departed spirits of human beings had been enlarged to include spirits assigned to such inanimate objects as hills and trees. In B.C. 563 a feudal prince, bent, as usual, upon a marauding expedition, had occasion to cross the Yellow River. There was a pause; two pairs of jade tablets were bound together by a thread of red silk, and a prayer was offered up, showing the supposed righteousness of the campaign, and closing with these words: "If the enterprise be crowned with success, there will be no disgrace attaching to you, O ye spirits of the river. Do you, therefore, decide." Then the jade was dropped into the stream, and the prince crossed over. In all worship of spirits, faith was the essential. We have the record of a minister explaining to his prince that a small State could only contend against a large State if the former were governed according to the rule of right, while the latter was abandoned to wild excesses. "What I mean," he said, "by rule of right is a loyal care for the people on the part of
Good spirits are usually regarded as invisible, though instances have been known, in more modern times, of spirits mixing with ordinary people, and being distinguishable only by the fact that their apparent bodies cast no shadow. Evil spirits, in the form of horrid goblins, have often been seen in China as elsewhere. In 660 B.C. a spirit actually came down—"came down" are the words used—and settled in the Kuo State. The suzerain, or king of the Chow State, asked his Grand Augur what this arrival might portend; to which the Augur made the following reply: When the prosperity of a State is increasing, good spirits come down to take note of its virtuous administration; similarly, when a State is about to perish, spirits also come down to watch its evil administration. So that the arrival of spirits
It would be of surpassing interest to know exactly what was in the minds of the ancient Chinese when they spoke of spirits, and especially what was the exact connotation of the phrase "came down" as applied to spirits. Where did they come down from, and what was the nature of the place they left by so coming, and of its other inhabitants? Were they attendants upon God, in a state of happiness, and subject to His commandments? We know from a passage in the commentary, that under the Chow dynasty, as already mentioned, God took precedence of all spirits, including that of Hou Chi, the divine founder of the House of Chow. Let us now see what more the commentary may have to divulge on the shadowy question of the soul. Thus we have, five hundred years before Christ, a simple statement that there was such a thing as a soul, that it was of a twofold character, and could remain in the world after the death and disappearance of the body to which it had belonged. How this view was further expanded in scope as time went on, and overlaid with a variety of fantastic beliefs, will be more appropriately dealt with when we come to a later period of religious development in China. In addition to the chief commentary on the "Springs and Autumns," from which most of the above details have been gleaned, two other commentaries of considerable, but not of such surpassing value have come down to us. There is a short note on "Praying for Rain " by one of these commentators (already mentioned), named Ku-Jiang, which is perhaps worth quoting. "Prayers for rain should be offered up in spring and summer only; not in autumn or winter. Why not in autumn or winter? Because the moisture of growing things is not then exhausted; neither has man reached the limit of his skill. Why in spring and summer? Because time is then pressing, and man's skill is of no further avail. How so? Because without rain just then, nothing could be made to grow; the crops would fail, and famine would ensue. But why wait until time is pressing, and man's skill is of no further avail? Because prayers for rain are the same as asking a favour, and the ancients did not lightly ask favours. Why so? Because they
So far we have reviewed in a desultory way—perhaps the only possible way—two important ages in Chinese history: (1) the age of the early, and more or less legendary Emperors, who first ruled, and finally misruled the empire from the beginning of the third to nearly the end of the second millennium B.C.; and (2) the feudal age, from 1122 B.C. down to, roughly speaking, the middle of the sixth century B.C. The feudal age did not, indeed, come to an end at that date; there were still a couple of centuries and more to run before the Chow dynasty collapsed under the overwhelming power of one of the feudal States, the ruler of which became, as he styled himself, the First Emperor of a united China, meaning that "the great