An Intellectual History of Confucian Gods and the Rites to Feast Them

Abstract This book contests two assumptions: that Confucianism was a secular philosophy, and that the imperial court and bureaucracy did not engage in religious worship as a governing practice. The gods were objects of practical, liturgical discourse defined by the cosmic powers they exercise as harnessed by the rites at imperial terraces and temples rather than as abstract entities subject to theological speculation. The pragmatics of feasting the gods reveals a conception of built spaces of altar terraces and temples as existing on the same ontological plane of cosmic reality as the gods themselves. First, I situated the imperial cults in the context of their formation over the longue durée from the Tang through the Ming dynasty. Second, I adopted a comparative approach to the imperial cults predicated on the fact that successive dynasties deployed liturgies from the Three Teachings to bring order to the cosmos, the central aim of Ritual Governance. Third, I approached the sources as an intellectual historian by situating ideas in their historical contexts. I have refrained from reductive arguments that imperial rituals were motivated by the imperium’s perceived need to legitimate its power over society or that they were merely about reinforcing political and social hegemony. Such approaches elide historical agency by refusing to acknowledge what Confucians accepted as utterly obvious: the gods were powerful, and the virtuous sovereign must employ proper rituals to harness that power for the good of all under Heaven.