La Pensée Cyclique—Rural Religion in China (29)

One year ago on Round and Square (29 October 2011)—Middles: World Series "Three All"
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Rural Religion in Early China." 
Click here for the introduction to "La Pensée Cyclique" the "umbrella topic for this series.

[a] Mythology RF

Click here for other posts in Round and Square's "Rural Religion in China" series:

Rural 1          Rural 2          Rural 3          Rural 4          Rural 5          Rural 6          Rural 7          Rural 8

Rural 9          Rural 10        Rural 11        Rural 12        Rural 13        Rural 14        Rural 15        Rural 16

Rural 17        Rural 18        Rural 19        Rural 20        Rural 21        Rural 22        Rural 23        Rural 24
Rural 25        Rural 26        Rural 27        Rural 28        Rural 29        Rural 30        Rural 31        Rural 32 
Rural 33

Language and Myth 

Having fully established the structure and patterning of early rural society in China, Granet begins the final section of this foundational section with an interesting problem, one with which students of China have long been familiar—the lack of “meaningful” mythology in the Chinese tradition. Indeed, it is just short of shocking that the Chinese tradition has so few genuine myths, and that the Chinese would (for millennia) be so little interested in the origins of the universe and the concept of creation. Granet rightly points out that those origin myths that eventually took root were rather late creations of a different intellectual universe than the one covered in his earlier pages. This is, indeed, the very opposite of the Indian case, as well as that found in southern Europe. Indeed, across the globe, most human societies have been fascinated with the origin of the world around them. 

          One might imagine that at the time when the cults destined to a long fortune 
          were born and in a period when the religious festivals aroused so much 
          poetic feeling, a powerful mythological creation was carried out. Yet, if we set 
          aside the myths of belated and quite artificial invention, China’s poverty of 
          myth and divine figures seems extreme, and it contrasts with the richness 
          shown in this field by the Mediterranean and Indian world.[1]   

          On pourrait croire qu'au moment où naissaient des cultes destinés à une 
          longue fortune, et à une époque où les fêtes religieuses excitaient tant 
          d'émo­tions poétiques, il se fit un puissant travail de création mythologique. 
          Pourtant, si l'on ne compte pas ceux qui sont d'invention tardive et tout 
          artificielle, la pauvreté de la Chine en mythes et en figures divines paraît 
          extrême, et fait contraste avec la richesse qui signale en ce domaine le 
          monde méditerranéen et le monde indien.[2]

[b] Sketch RF

Granet looks to the Chinese language for part of the answer, but it is not deeply persuasive. In fact, I suspect that his playful (as I take it) approach in the passage below is meant to sketch the parameters of the situation rather than create an argument. It more akin to broad early brush strokes on a blank sheet than a carefully honed set of arguments, and this is in keeping with Granet's sometimes perplexing (but always incisive) approach to Chinese social life.

          Does the reason for that poverty lie in the Chinese language?  It is true that 
          the language, in which no differentiation so to speak is made among verbs, 
          substantives, and adjectives, is ill-adapted to the play of epithets which 
          appears to be one of the primary conditions of mythic invention.[3] 

          La raison de cette pauvreté est-elle dans la langue chi­noise ? Il est vrai que 
          ce langage, où l'on ne différencie pour ainsi dire pas verbes, substantifs, 
          adjectifs, se prêtait mal au jeu des épithètes qui semble une des conditions 
          premières de l'invention mythique.[4]

[c] Context RF

The reality is that China is mythically impoverished, but historiographically rich. That is something that has roots in the way that the social order developed. The public cults became a part of a broader political unit that, ultimately, would take a very great interest in documenting its activities in detail. How the people got to that point—how they climbed down out of their trees and began tilling the fields in social union—is left to only vaguely constituted beliefs and sayings.

Government is recorded, but not social life in the fields. The social life from which higher forms of order would spring was left to collections of folk sayings that were eventually collected in poetry anthologies such as the Shijing. On the other hand, the recording of government activities would soon become an enormous undertaking, with a comprehensiveness and detail that would dwarf other genres in prestige. 

Granet’s next statement is more difficult to handle, but it makes sense in the context of his other writings. His discussion of language quickly goes well beyond impersonal verb forms and connects with the very foundations of the social gatherings themselves. Language is never isolated, never a thing in itself. Granet continues in this vein by noting that the earliest feelings that he calls “religious” were rooted in the “confused emotions” at the heart of the gathering forces of the festivals. 

[d] Gathering RF

The language clearly did not need verb forms that were more specific if people lived their roles within the family and even beyond it. As long as differentiation by gender and age occurred (and that was only divided three or, at most, five ways), there was little need, in Granet's imaginative argument, to give a sense of individual personality at the most basic level of family life. Terms such as "father," "mother," "eldest brother," "youngest sister," and "grandmother" served that function already, and (so Granet's thinking seems to go) specificity at the local level was superfluous.

          Furthermore, in ancient Chinese the verb was thoroughly impersonal; 
          nothing predisposed people to conceive of active forces in the form of 
          individualized agents. Why should they have personified them?  Actually, the 
          earliest religious beliefs were scarcely differentiated from the confused 
          emotions, from the complex images when they sprang.[5]   

          Bien plus, dans l'ancien chinois, le verbe est foncièrement impersonnel ; 
          rien ne prédisposait à conce­voir, sous forme d'agents individualisés, les 
          forces agissantes : pourquoi les eût-on personnifiées ? Précisément les 
          premières croyances religieuses se différenciaient à peine des émotions 
          confuses, des images complexes dont elles procédaient;…[6] 

Just as Granet argues that the movements, sharing, and gathering at the seasonal festivals were about more than individuals—groups move and “think” differently than the sum of their parts, as Durkheim often wrote—so, too, were beliefs about forces that connected people to the outer world. They need not be individualized. Indeed, as Granet argues, there was little way they could have been. Personification of the “unseen world” is something that only grows out of a very different set of social relations. It is not the engagement with that world that we see in the closed domestic unit or the gatherings at the festivals. Granet uses social and linguistic evidence to argue against the individualization (and personification) of the ancestors at this early point. The evidence goes far beyond the linguistic, however, as we have seen in Granet’s argument up until now.

[e] Entwined RF

The religious imagination was profoundly social. The ancestors, almost as soon as their flesh merged with the soil and their essences penetrated the Yellow Springs, lost their particularity, their sense of individuality, and entwined with the mass of spirits hovering over the flowing waters of the large rivers near holy places where people gathered in the spring and the autumn. They became a society of ancestors, just as vague as—yet arguably even more powerful than— the living society that was created by the seasonal gatherings. 

          No sacred force appeared in an individual form; neither the Holy Places nor 
          even the Ancestors were thought of as distinct substances endowed with 
          personal attributes.[7] 

          [N]ulle force sacrée n'apparaissait sous un aspect individuel : ni le Lieu Saint, 
          ni même les Ancêtres n'étaient imaginés comme des subs­tances distinctes 
          pourvues d'attributs personnels.[8]

The same is true of the holy place itself. There is a sense of its difference, and that is profoundly important. But it is the holy place’s melding with the broader concept of “nature” that truly set it apart. It is somewhere and everywhere at the same time. It is not the land under cultivation (that had a particularity that anyone could notice), but it was not marked with any more specificity than that. I would argue that it was marked by its reverent potential, and that almost any place that was not under cultivation had the potential to be considered sacred. The lands bore potential, and they reached that potential when their natural elements—the springs and vales, the large trees and flowing rivers—merged with the gathering force of human society.

Click here for other posts in Round and Square's "Rural Religion in China" series:

Rural 1          Rural 2          Rural 3          Rural 4          Rural 5          Rural 6          Rural 7          Rural 8

Rural 9          Rural 10        Rural 11        Rural 12        Rural 13        Rural 14        Rural 15        Rural 16

Rural 17        Rural 18        Rural 19        Rural 20        Rural 21        Rural 22        Rural 23        Rural 24
Rural 25        Rural 26        Rural 27        Rural 28        Rural 29        Rural 30        Rural 31        Rural 32 
Rural 33

[f] Potential RF

Notes

[1] Marcel Granet, The Religion of the Chinese People [Translated by Maurice Freedman] (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 53-54..

[2] Marcel Granet, La religion des chinois (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1922), 24.

[3] Granet, Religion, 54.

[4] Granet, La religion, 25.

[5] Granet, Religion, 54.

[6] Granet, La religion, 25.

[7] Granet, Religion, 54.

[8] Granet, La religion, 25.

[9] Granet, Religion, 54.

[10] Granet, La religion, 25.

Bibliography

Granet, Marcel. The Religion of the Chinese People [Translated by Maurice Freedman]. New York: 
     Harper & Row, 1975.

Granet, Marcel. La religion des chinois. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1922.