So what are the intellectual arguments of the elite against

this religion which as we saw continues right into the imperial period.

So the new class of intellectuals they advance arguments of a whole series of kinds.

First of all, cosmology, morality, and gender against the shamans.

Before a doctor was a shaman and a shaman was a doctor.

It was the same profession and now we see that you could say spiritual healing

or faith healing takes one road and medical healing takes another road.

Okay? Why? Because we had the emergence of this Qi-based cosmology.

This is absolutely crucial to understanding not only

what's going to happen in the rest of Chinese history,

but that we go away from this world which is sort of

organized around ancestors and all these gods proliferating without any

—well there was some kind of system, a territorial system,

an ancestral system and so on—but now all of

this is going to be incorporated into one great rational system

based on the idea of Qi or energy, breath.

And this cosmology completely transforms medicine so that the medical profession

and the priestly profession are split into two.

And this leads to naturalistic, rationalistic interpretations of shamanistic healing.

So the great classic of Chinese medicine appears in the Han dynasty, and it's called the

Huangdi neijing 黃帝內經, the Internal Classic of the Yellow Emperor.

Incidentally, Yellow Emperor is one of the five emperors who shows up precisely

in this same period of the Warring States—didn't exist before.

And of course, well, I say of course: yellow is the color of the center,

so he is the emperor of the center, okay?

So: The Yellow Emperor said: "What the Master has told me is what every sick person knows.

But if the patient has not encountered perverse energies" —the term is xieqi 邪氣.

Perverse energies are exactly like ligiu, those ligui, those unfortunate dead,

now they're reinterpreted not as persons so much as energies that are

perverse in character and therefore cause illness, cause death, cause misfortune.

Okay? So: "if the patient has not yet encountered"—

he didn't say a gui 鬼, a bad god or spirit

—"has not yet encountered perverse energies and has not been frightened"

—so the psychological aspect as well—

"and yet falls suddenly ill, what is the reason? Is it because there are gods and ghosts?"

And his master Qibo 歧伯 says:

"This is because there are old perverse energies which linger without breaking out."

So we have a very interesting phrase in the Laozi, for example,

which says tugu naxin 吐故納新, describes the whole process of cultivation

that now is called qigong 氣功, as "spitting out the old to breathe in the new".

Okay? So here we see that, the idea that, well, what is a dead person?

A dead person is supposed to move on.

Stop coming back.

You belong to yin now.

We're in the yang world.

The yang world is the world lit by the sun.

You're in the dark underworld, you're supposed to stay there

and not come back to zuosui 作祟, cause trouble.

So these old perverse energies are clearly associated with the dead

and especially troublesome dead and so they're hanging around.

"Then the mind has something it hates and then again something it desires." So once again the shift to the psychological: "Within, his blood and energy"

—the key components of the person, from a medical point—so:

"his blood and energy are in disorder, and yin and yang attack each other."

In other words, yin and yang in the body should be in harmony

but now his body is all disordered

and so the yin and yang energies instead of harmonizing in the center, they're attacking each other.

"It comes out of nowhere and is invisible and inaudible,

so it seems it is ghosts or gods"—it seems, but it's not.

Okay? So: here we have one of the best possible illustrations of a rational system,

the rationalization, the creation of a highly rational system,

the cosmology of yin and yang and Qi and later on wuxing 五行 as well.

Okay? Here is another example this time taken from the great philosopher Zhuangzi,

generally associated with Daoism along with Laozi.

Wandering-in-the-islands asked Realgar:

"Why do you beat the drum and holler to drive away pestilence and drought demons?"

So here we are back in the shamanistic period and we have these people dancing

and to make it rain or make the end, come to end the drought,

and they're beating the drum —of course, the drum remains absolutely central

to all ritual, Daoist, Buddhist, shamanistic—and hollering,

that is also still characteristic of exorcisms:

they scream at the ghost that they want to drive away, the priests.

Okay, so: 2500 years ago that's what they were doing. "Why do you beat the drum and holler to drive away pestilence and drought demons?"

Realgar replied: "Because the people had many diseases,

the Yellow Emperor appointed Shaman Xian 巫咸

to bathe and fast in order to open the nine orifices."

We have seven orifices, seven holes, in the head,

and we have two down below.

Okay? So: that's the nine orifices, they have to be opened up,

because we have to be able to breathe

and we have to be able to have this tugu

and naxin, getting rid of the old and getting in the new, okay?

So: that means that they're blocked up, okay?

So: he has "to bathe and fast in order to open the nine orifices."

Then he "beats the drum and strikes the bell so as to excite the heart and exercise the body,

and to make steps and dance in order to stir up the energies of yin and yang."

—so once again we're back to this cosmological explanation of what's really going on

inside the body—"and to drink ale and eat scallions in order to remove blockages"

—so there's also a dietary recommendation just like a modern holistic doctor, okay?

—to "remove blockages in the five viscera."

We're not going to go into this too much, but the five viscera, the wuzang 五臟

as they're called, there are many texts

which explain that all space is organized —and time—according to these five directions, okay?

So: on earth, we have the wuyue 五岳,

the five mountain peaks that hold China down, keep it as a stable place.

Up in the Heaven, we have the wuxing 五星,

the five planets, and in our body we have the wuzang 五臟.

And so every space now is constituted of these five entities

which are like mountains which constitute the center,

the centers of the energies whether it is of the body,

of the space of the earth, of the space of the heavens.

So yinyang wuxing 陰陽五行, the five elements.

So: it's to remove blockages in the five viscera.

"Because he beat the drum and hollered in order to drive out

pestilence and the drought demon, the people, in their ignorance"

—and again we see here how much this is an elite discourse

—"the people in their ignorance," yumin 愚民,

"thought it was the drought demon who was causing trouble."

And then he adds:

"No one has ever proved that such prayers"

—actually it's a different author, Xunzi, as I recall—

"No one has ever proved that such prayers add so much as a day to anyone's life.

For this reason, people despise the shaman-invocators."

So he's indicating that not only they have these new cosmological,

naturalistic and psychological explanations

for illness or any other disaster but that people,

because they don't trust anymore the shamans.

Well, I'm not so sure about that,

because apparently even Gaozu trusted the shamans enough to invite them to court,

but that is another matter.

So, but there was certainly an elite group that stopped trusting the shamans and put in,

on the contrary, faith in new cosmological means of understanding disorder

and therefore understanding order and healing.

And this is when we start to hear shamanistic techniques being called zuodao 左道.

So what, in spite of what we just said about left and right?

Here we see China aligns with the rest of the world, and the left is sinister,

and it's wugu 巫蠱, black magic, and xiejiao 邪教, heterodox teachings,

which is still used today for Falungong 法輪功.

Okay, so: these terms of labeling as negative, they go way way back.

There's also something called "the female way of seduction."

All these are talked about by Lin Fu-shih, which is also referred to as "perverse seduction," okay?

So this idea of perversity, of sinister, of being unorthodox, okay?

So: as soon as we start talking about orthodoxy or heterodoxy,

that's it, we have to talk about orthodoxy.

And this is the period particularly, well, in the Warring States, it begins to come into place,

but it's not really put into place completely until in the course of the Han dynasty,

and that's why I call this section the first canon.

Now the author that we're basing ourselves on here, Michael Nylan,

teaches at Berkeley, the name of her chapter is "Classics Without Canonization."

So my use of the word canon here probably would not meet with her approval,

but again it's like the word shaman and it's used for convenience, okay?

"Learning and Authority in Qin and Han," so here we jump

forward into the bureaucratic empires of the Qin and Han.

Now, gender bias—patriarchy—went hand in hand with class prejudice,

and the conviction on the part of the male intellectuals

—notice when we talked about shamans, we talked about males and females;

when we talk about intellectuals, no more women on the horizon,

this will happen later but not in this period—it's all men.

The politicians, the government people, the intellectuals: all males.

And they see themselves as occupying the moral high ground of orthodoxy.

A second century Daoist book was criticized as being

"full of the miscellaneous sayings of shamans… mad and not canonical," bujing 不經.

So here, we keep seeing this word jing 經.

Jing refers to these books which are considered to be classics.

Some people translate it "scripture,"

because they really serve a function very very much like scripture

in the monotheistic religions, of course, also very different.

But nonetheless what it refers to is the warp as opposed to the weft of cloth which is woven, okay?

So: this is the vertical structuring element, and these are what are called classics.

So these miscellaneous sayings of the shamans

also "contravened classical knowledge," jingyi 經蓺.

A slightly later text explaining why "excessive sacrifices" of shamans

who "exact fees and requisition goods"

—in other words, the cost that they represent—states that,

"if we are to rule well, we ought to trust to the teaching of the Classics,"

to the meaning of the Classics, jingyi 經義.

So each time the references to the jing as the foundation for an orthodoxy

defined in moral terms as opposed to all of this stuff of the shamans,

which is heterodox and immoral.

So orthodoxy was clearly eminently political

and indissociable from "the Classics" inscribed in stone in the year 175 AD.

And Michael Nylan says, "From the mid-Han on…"

so around the middle of the Han, "knowledge of the Classics," jingshu 經術,

the techniques of the Classics, "knowledge of the Classics"

became a basis for recommendations to office.

The concern for orthodoxy led as well to the creation

of a "national register of sacrifices," sidian 祀典

that will play a role right down—in fact we could say that there still is a sidian.

Right? There still is a register of sacrifices, even though it's not official,

because there are five official zongjiao 宗教, religions which are legitimate

and all the others are sort of minjian xinyang 民間信仰 or fengjian mixin 封建迷信,

feudal superstition or popular belief, but they don't qualify.

So this categorization, this hierarchization of legitimate and illegitimate

—orthodox and heterodox—

religious practices continues down to the present day.

So we see this national register of sacrifice, what is this?

It's a list like the Shanhaijing in fact of all of the legitimate gods,

the gods that the state recognizes, and it excludes what are called yinsi 淫祀,

which we translate as "illicit sacrifices,"

but the word yin 淫 originally refers to "adulterous,

unregulated desire" associated with female seduction.

So we have a contrast between the pursuit of private pleasure, si 私 and yu 欲;

to this the male thinkers opposed a discourse of virtue and public morality.

The response to drought,

for example, should not be to get the women shamans to come in

and to go do their dances, but it should be

—again the Zuozhuan tells us this—

"Put in good repair your walls, the inner and the outer;

lessen your food; be sparing in all your expenditure.

Be in earnest to be economical, and encourage people to

help one another—this is the most important preparation."

And he ends, "What have the shaman and the deformed person to do with the matter?"

So here the deformed, hunchbacks, cripples, that's the people who become shamans,

and this again goes on right through: many kan miaozhe 看廟者, shou miaozhe 守廟者,

people who take care of temples,

they're often marginal figures of their kind who basically, who have no,

cannot hold a job for themselves and so they take care of the temple,

and these are people who belong to the lowest, the dregs of society very frequently.

So this idea that the heterodoxy is defined in term of ugliness

and even criminality because somebody who has been,

for example, had his foot cut off, is often a punishment.

"Kings in antiquity relied on the solidity of their virtue," says another text, "to bring peace to the world,

and on the capaciousness of their actions to embrace the multitudes.

The feudal lords honored them as their overlord,

and the people adhered to them as to their own parents."

Again this is a concept that the sovereign of any area, the local magistrate,

for example, in the county all the way up to the emperor is called fumuguan 父母官.

He's the official who is in loco parentis, he replaces the father and mother,

so they're sort of a family metaphor for understanding political order.

Okay, so: "the people adhere to them as to their own parents.

That is why Heaven and earth were in harmony and the four seasons came in order

and why the stars, the sun, and the moon followed their circuits without disorder."

So notice here: the fact that nature is regular

means that there's moral virtue on the level of government.

So once again we encounter this moral feature, so we have a cosmological system

which is naturalistic with psychological explanations of illness and all that,

but at the same time, this idea that the human being by being virtuous can move Heaven,

by being sincere can move Heaven and even cause the order of the seasons to—no eclipses and so on.

Okay? "In antiquity," he goes on,

"lords did not act carelessly and multiply sacrifice,

nor take their own person lightly and rely on shamans.

Do you think that by spurning the worthy"—in other words,

the intellectual, the people who are literate and who are prepared,

"by spurning these worthy people,"

like Yao and Shun are the worthy people, virtuous

—"and employing shamans you can seek sovereignty for your person."

This is some counselor advising the king,

I forget of which state, that going and sacrificing to the Wudi,

to the Five Emperors will not help him to gain sovereignty over a larger area.

So we can summarize then by saying that sovereignty

depended no longer on the ancestors or on the gods

but on the "solid virtue" and capacity of the sovereign,

as Son of Heaven, to be in harmony with the Heavenly order

as expressed in Heavenly and calendrical regularity.

And we'll see when we get to the Han dynasty

how this actually translates into new rituals

and notably the ritual of the Mingtang 明堂.

Mingtang literally means the Hall of Light

and it was organized in such a way that it had like 12 rooms,

one for each of the months of the year and then each month the Son of Heaven

had to go and sacrifice, make the appropriate sacrifices in the appropriate room,

so he's modeling his ritual behavior on the course of the heavens.

So you can see how far we've come: from political power,

which is totally dependent on the ancestors under the Shang, shifts to Heaven,

which is still basically moral and anthropomorphic,

which gives the Heavenly Mandate, to now,

it's this natural, calendrical, regular heavens with the laws

that seemed to clearly govern the Heaven.

And the emperor, the Son of Heaven,

has to model himself on this regularity of the heavens

in his ritual behavior in the Mingtang.

M01.2.3 Arguments Against Shamans: The Role of Intellectuals

Intellectual Change in Early China: Warring States and Han

Meet the Instructors