Week 11

Popular Religion
● Three Teachings (Sanjiao) - Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism
○ Syncretism of the 3 religions: not necessarily separate, but integrated into each other
○ confucianism: ideology and politics
○ Daoism: healthy, happy, long life with Gods and magic
○ Buddhism: foreign, deities to achieve a good afterlife
● Popular religion: certain religious beliefs and practices that weren’t subdued; can be seen
everyone (imagination, everyday, drama, stories)
○ hard to capture what it means, no religious organization like clergies
○ ancestor worship
○ imagination of afterlife
○ Pantheon of Gods
● Ancestor worship
○ important family ritual for patriarchal lineage
○ continuity between this world and the next (life and death)
○ veneration of the soul of a departed family member
○ Hun and Po (Yang and Yin)
■ souls divided into 2 different elements (Po is darker; Hun is related to bright and
light force)
■ one part of the soul is around descendants, dead body, and ancestors
○ Gods, ancestors, and ghosts are interconnected
■ Gods - people should worship them
■ Ancestors - only focused on you and your family
■ Ghosts - souls of other people’s ancestors; boundaries of yourself and others
● outsiders; marginal to gods; marginal to ancestors and kinship system
● Imagination of the afterlife
○ Death is the dispersion of 2 dominstant forces - yin and yang (Western Han)
■ one’s social status is unaffected by death - emperors stay emperors
■ instead burying live people to serve them, replica of them were created
(terracotta)
○ Introduction of Buddhism (2nd - 7th C)
■ birth, death, rebirth
○ Sinicization of hell (since 7th C)
■ hell is a transitional state between death and the next life
■ rebirth is only achieved after a lengthy process of judgment overseen by powerful
judges in the hells
■ karma is imagined as the law administered by bureaucratic forms
○ Soul’s journey after death into the underworld realm
■ pure land of the West
■ Heaven, silver/jade bridge
■ 7 days in each of the first 7 hells; leave the 8th hell only after being dead for a
hundred days; leave the 9th hell after a year; leave the 10th hell after 3 years
○ Funeral rituals
 ■ the underworld is the duplication of this world
■ the living descendant’s act of mourning affects the underworld
● The Pantheon of Gods
○ Bureaucracy
■ Jade Emperor - top; City Gods, Earth Gods, Kitchen Gods
■ well organized by bureaucratic order
○ Earthly domain
■ Kitchen/Hearth/Stove God are in each family;
■ they belong to Earth God which are in each village;
■ they belong to City God which are in each city
■ Can be assigned city god in the afterlife if they deserved it in living world
○ Underworld domain
■ souls are brought to different gods
○ always coexisting with social affects
● IDENTITY TOP AND NEXT IN THE ORDER OF THE HIERARCHY IN THIS
SUPERNATURAL WORLD