Lion and Dragon in Northern China

by Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston

If a Chinese goes to his t'u ti (village "god") or to Kuan Yin or to the Queen of Heaven (Shêng Mu T'ien Hou) or to Lung Wang the ruler of clouds and water, with prayers for rain, or for the cure of disease, or for safety from shipwreck; or if he beseeches the spirits of his dead ancestors to protect the family and grant its members health and prosperity, his proceedings are immediately condemned as idolatrous. But if a Christian goes and prays to St. Hubert for an antidote to a mad dog's bite or to St. Apollonia for a toothache-cure, or to St. Theodorus at Rome for the life of a sick child, or to the Blessed John Berchmans for the eradication of cancer in the breast, or to Our Lady of Lourdes for the cure of a diseased bone, this is not idolatry but good Christianity! As a matter of fact the ancestral spirits of the Chinese and the great majority of the Taoist deities are neither more nor less "gods" than the saints of Christendom. They—like the saints—are regarded as the spirits of certain dead men who in their new life beyond the grave are supposed to have acquired more or less limited powers over some of the forces of nature and over certain of the threads of human destiny. One is just as much a "god" as the other. The Christian refuses to call his saints gods because that would be confessing to polytheism, and as he professes to be a monotheist that would never do; but he insists on accusing the Chinese of turning dead men into gods because he wants to prove that the Chinese are idolatrous and polytheistic.

If he says that he goes by the verdict of the Chinese themselves, who apply to their dead men the title shên and (in some cases) the higher title ti, it is fair to remind him that if he insists upon translating the former of these terms by the word "god" he should at the same time supply a clear definition of the precise meaning which that word is intended to convey; when he has done that it will be time enough for us to consider whether the word "god" gives a fair idea of the meaning of the Chinese when they declare that their deceased ancestors have become shên. As to the supposed functions of the Chinese "deities" and the Christian "saints," it would puzzle a keen dialectician to say how the miracle-working of the one essentially differs from that of the other, or how it is that St. Thomas of Canterbury, in spite of his wonder-working bones, is a mere saint, while Kuan Ti—who was once a stout soldier, but having been canonised by imperial decree is now famous throughout the Chinese Empire as the spiritual Patron of War—is to be hooted at as a false "god."[316]

It would seem that what the Christian says, in effect, is this: If the Pope—the earthly head of our religion—canonises a dead man, that dead man becomes a saint, and you may pray to him as much as you like; if the earthly head of your religion—the Emperor of China—canonises a man, he becomes a false god, possibly a demon, and if you commit the sin of praying to him you do so on the peril of your soul. It is an exemplification of the old saying, "Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy is your doxy." In other words—you are right if you agree with me: if you don't you are wrong! That was indeed a true saying of Thackeray's, "We view the world through our own eyes, each of us, and make from within us the things we see."

Of course there are many degrees of "godhead"—if we are to employ that term—within the ranks of the Chinese "pantheon." The man who, on account of his distinguished career in this world, or the supposed miracles wrought by him since his removal to the next, has been canonised or "deified" by imperial decree, holds a much more important and imposing position than the ordinary father of a family who, as it were, automatically becomes shên—a spirit or ancestral divinity—through the simple and inevitable process of dying. But the difference is rather in degree than in kind. The Emperor, as Father of his people and as their High Priest or Pope, can raise any one he chooses to the position of a Ti, and can subsequently elevate or degrade him in the ranks of the national divinities in accordance with his imperial will. As a matter of fact the process is intimately connected with statecraft and considerations of practical expediency. "In the Chinese Government," as Sir Alfred Lyall says, "the temporal and spiritual powers, instead of leaning towards different centres, meet and support each other like an arch, of which the Emperor's civil and sacred prerogative is the keystone."[317]

What the Emperor can do on a large scale every head of a Chinese family does regularly on a small one. In a sense no ceremony is necessary: a man becomes an ancestral spirit as soon as he dies, irrespective of anything that his son may do for him. But his position as a shên is hardly a regular one—he is a mere "homeless ghost"—until the son has carried out the traditional rites. The shên chu[318]—the "spirit-tablet"—becomes the dead man's representative; no longer visible and audible, he is believed to be still carrying on his existence on a non-material plane, and to be still capable, in some mysterious way which the Chinese themselves do not pretend to understand, of protecting and watching over the living members of the family and of bringing prosperity and happiness to future generations. The filial affection of son for father is deepened on the father's death into permanent religious reverence, and this reverential feeling finds its natural expression in a system of rites and ceremonies which, for the want of a better term, we call ancestor-worship. The "idolatry" consists in bowing with clasped hands towards the tombs or spirit-tablets, placing before them little cups and dishes containing wine and food, and burning incense in front of the family portraits in the ancestral temple at the season of New Year, or (if there are no portraits) before a scroll containing the family pedigree. If the disembodied members of a family were "gods" in the sense usually attributed to the word their spiritual powers would not be confined—as they normally are—to the affairs of their own descendants. The orthodox Chinese knows that it is not only useless but wrong to "worship"[319] the spirits of any family but his own. "For a man to sacrifice to a spirit which does not belong to him," said Confucius, "is flattery."[320]

For the sake of brevity and convenience we may and sometimes do speak of the private ancestral spirits and of the great national divinities as "gods," but we should preserve the necessary distinctions of meaning in our own minds. That it is only a rough-and-ready mode of speech may easily be perceived when we attempt to make a single Chinese term apply to both these classes of spiritual beings. It is true enough that both (in most cases) sprang from the same human origin, so that their powers and functions differ, as already pointed out, in degree rather than in kind; but if—whether from ignorance or from a desire to be exceptionally polite—we were to describe a man's deceased forefathers as Ti (the nearest equivalent to "God" that the Chinese language possesses) we should probably be the innocent cause of an outburst of genial mirth. The average Chinese takes a very much humbler view of the degree of deification that has fallen to his dead father's lot than would be implied by the use of so distinguished a title.

It is a rather common opinion that "the worship of ancestors probably had its origin in the fear of the evil which might be done by ghosts."[321] Lafcadio Hearn, a devoted disciple of Herbert Spencer, took a similar view of Japanese religion, and held that Shinto was at one time a religion of "perpetual fear." Nobushige Hozumi, Dr. W. G. Aston and others have disposed of this opinion with reference to Japan. The former writer, who was called to the English Bar and subsequently became a Professor of Law at Tokyo, and was still proud to own himself an ancestor-worshipper, declared that "it was the love of ancestors, not the dread of them, which gave rise to the custom of worshipping and making offerings of food and drink to their spirits.... Respect for their parents may, in some cases, have become akin to awe, yet it was love, not dread, which caused this feeling of awe.... We celebrate the anniversary of our ancestors, pay visits to their graves, offer flowers, food and drink, burn incense, and bow before their tombs entirely from a feeling of love and respect for their memory, and no question of 'dread' enters our minds in doing so."[322]

So far as I have had opportunities of judging of Chinese ancestor-worship, I am strongly of opinion that, subject to what has been said in an earlier chapter,[323] the words of this writer are as applicable to China as they are to Japan.[324] There seems, indeed, to be very little reason why any one should propound or hold the theory that a loving father was liable to turn into a malevolent ghost. What the Chinese believe is that their deceased ancestors are well-disposed towards them, and will give them reasonable help and protection throughout the course of their lives: though if the ancestral graves are left uncared-for or the periodical sacrifices neglected or the spirit-tablets not treated with respect, or if living members of the family have wasted the family property or have been guilty of discreditable conduct, then no doubt the spirits will be angry and will punish them for the crime of lack of filial piety (pu hsiao), the worst crime of which a Chinese can be guilty.