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Ghosts and spirits in the Sung neo-Confucian world: Chu Hsi on Kuei-Shen

Gardner, Daniel K. Journal of the American Oriental Society. New Haven: Oct 1995. Vol. 115, Iss. 4; pg. 598, 3 pgs

INTRODUCTIONTHE SUNG (960-1279) WORLD WAS one filled with ghosts, spirits, and gods of all Variety.Temples and shrines to powerful deities dotted the Chinese landscape; ghosts and monsters madetheir presence felt everywhere; freak accidents and miracles were commonplace; spirit possessionwas rampant; and divination was part and parcel of daily life. Traffic with the numinous was notlimited to any one social stratum, as recent work has demonstrated; rather it was an activity thatengaged elite and non-elite alike.(1)But where the traditional non-elite pursued and promoted trafficking with the spirit world, they didnot make records explaining and debating it; the elite did. This article is an attempt to analyze onesuch set of records, taking as its main subject Chu Hsi (characters omitted) (1130-1200), perhapsthe pre-eminent thinker of the Sung dynasty, and certainly the most prominent philosopher inChina's Neo-Confucian tradition, from the Sung through the fall of imperial China. In extensiveconversations and writings, Chu explained and defended his understanding of spirit beings toothers, tending, in the course of such explanation, to situate the topic of the numinous in thecontext of his elaborate and coherent world-view.Most scholarship on Chu Hsi has been devoted to explicating his influential Neo-Confucianmetaphysics, especially his understanding of the two central concepts of li (characters omitted)("principle") and ch'i (characters omitted) ("material force" or "psychophysical stuff"); little attention,however, has been paid to the role played by spirit beings in this metaphysics. As a result, readersdo not easily escape the impression that Chu Hsi's world was one largely devoid of monsters,ghosts, gods, and spirits.This is not to say that scholars have completely ignored Chu's views on spiritual matters; but inpresenting these views they almost always emphasize one aspect at the expense of all others,namely, that Chu took the terms that traditionally had been used for ghosts (kuei) (charactersomitted) and spirits (shen) and transformed them into abstract concepts referring to the contractive(kuei) and expansive (shen) forces of the universe.(2) Readers, here, are left with the impressionthat Chu was attempting to strip the term kuei-shen of its meaning as "ghosts and spirits" and thatthis elite world and the world of popular beliefs had absolutely nothing in common.

Ghosts and spirits in the Sung neo-Confucian world: Chu Hsi on Kuei-Shen

The reality is more complex. Chu's understanding of spirit beings (kuei-shen) is a subtle,multifaceted one;(3) a reading of the Chu-tzu yue-lei (characters omitted), a record of conversations that took place between Chu and his disciples (especially chapters three and sixty-three), and the Hui-an hsien-sheng Chu Wen-kung wen-chi (characters omitted), Chu's collectedwritings, reveal a Chu Hsi who, on the one hand, transforms kuei and shen into naturalistic forces,but at the same time acknowledges fully the existence of strange ghosts and spirits and evenspends a great deal of time considering and explicating them. This is to say that, while Chu'sinfluential philosophical system may in the end be "rational," analyzing the universe as it does interms of li and ch'i, this does not preclude it from tolerating, indeed embracing a belief in the spiritworld. I hope that at the least, then, this article will serve to correct the assumption that Neo-Confucian thinkers such as Chu Hsi rationalize the world into an altogether ghost-free one.CHU HSI AND KUEI-SHENChu Hsi, on occasion, cautions students against paying too much heed to spirit beings:The matter of spirit beings is naturally a secondary one. They have neither form nor shadow; this isdifficult to grasp, but there's no need to. Better to expend your efforts on the urgent matters of dailylife. The Sage said: "You are not even able to serve man, how can you serve the spirits? You donot even understand life, how can you understand death?"(4) This says it all. (YL 3.1a3)(5)Later Chinese literati, on account of such remarks, assumed Chu to be a skeptic concerning spiritbeings;(6) but nowhere, here or elsewhere, is there a hint of skepticism. Chu, like Confucius muchearlier, is not questioning the existence of spirit beings; he is simply admonishing his followers toconcern themselves with the more pressing and immediate matters of life. The irony, of course, isthat while Chu would have his students turn their attention to matters other than spirit beings, hisattention--as reflected in the voluminous remarks made over the course of more than thirty years--remains firmly fixed on the topic throughout his life.(7)For Chu, spirit beings are to be found everywhere in the universe, manifesting themselves in avariety of ways: as the spontaneous activity of the cosmic ch'i; as ghosts, demons, and monsterswho threaten humankind; and as the spirits of ancestors invoked by descendants in ancestralworship. Disparate though these phenomena may seem, all of them--for Chu--constitute spiritbeings or kuei-shen:Rain and wind, dew and lightning, sun and moon, day and night, these are all traces of thecontractive and expansive forces; these are the just and upright kuei-shen of broad daylight. As for

Ghosts and spirits in the Sung neo-Confucian world: Chu Hsi on Kuei-Shen

the so-called "howlers from the rafters and butters in the chest," these then are called the unjustand depravedkuei-shen; sometimes they exist, sometimes they don't; sometimes they go, sometimes they come;sometimes they coalesce, sometimes they disperse. In addition, there's the saying, "pray to themand they will respond, pray to them and they will grant fulfillment"; these too are what we call kuei-shen. These are all of one and the same principle. (YL 3.2b1)Indeed, all of Chu Hsi's discussion of spirit beings in the Chu-tzu yue-lei and the Hui-an hsien-sheng Chu Wenkung wen-chi are cast in terms of these three manifestations: as expansive andcontractive forces, as ghosts and spirits, and as ancestral spirits.(8)1. Kuei-shen as Contractive and Expansive ForcesOver and over again in his works Chu asserts that kuei and shen are nothing but ch'i, the materialforce or stuff of which, according to Chu, the whole universe and all things in it are constituted.(9)Ch'i is active, always in the process of change and transformation.(10) Ch'i expanding is the shenaspect of ch'i; ch'i contracting is the kuei aspect:Shen expands, kuei contracts. For instance, when wind, rain, thunder, and lightning first issueforth, this is the oparation of shen; as the wind dies, the rain passes, the thunder stops, and thelightning ceases, this is the operation of kuei. (YL 3.1b11)By identifying kuei and shen with the activity of the cosmic ch'i, by making them abstract andethereal forces, Chu renders the kuei-shen of traditional accounts explicable; kuei-shen portrayedin texts like the Tso chuan, the Shih chi, the dynastic histories, and the Mo-tzu as ghosts or apparitions who sometimes visit themselves as personal beings on the living are to be understoodthen as manifestations of changing cosmic chi'i, that is, chi'i in various states of contraction andexpansion.In short, in the first of his three categories of kuei-shen, Chu to a large degree is taming the spiritsof the tradition, by thorougly naturalizing them and making them into the forces that explain theactivity and transformation of the universe. Kuei and shen may be wondrous, in that they accountfor all the manifestations we find in the world around us, but they are not by any meansinexplicable creatures; they are not incomprehensible ghosts, monsters, or deities from someunknowable realm.