5.9: Daoism and the Fall of Han

This Han Confucianism was only for the elite. Daoism, by contrast, both incorporated aspects of popular religion and served ordinary people, especially as Han governance fell apart. Popular religion included three types of spirits: cared-for ancestors; neglected dead people who became hungry ghosts or demons; and nature gods like those of Shinto, imagined as somewhat like people or animals. Confucian texts like the Record of Rites presented spirits as formless. But most people thought of deities like Heaven and Earth anthropomorphically, while rain spirits looked like dragons, local spirits of trees or streams often looked like snakes, and birds, foxes, bears, and other animals could be good spirits or demons who could make trouble.

Figure 5.2. Bronze and iron plaque in the form of a demon. Latter Han. About 4” wide. Why do you think most sources don’t talk much about demons? Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

People had long pacified spirits and demons with blood sacrifice, contacted them in shamanistic trances, and assured fertility of field and womb with orgiastic rituals. Daoists rejected blood sacrifice, replaced trance and orgy with written charms and petitions, exorcised demons and brought them into a pantheon, a hierarchy of all gods. They also added new types of spirits: transcendents with their purified qi and special powers and Lord Lao (the deified Laozi, supposed author of the Dao De Jing), who embodied the Dao. Don’t forget the Queen Mother of the West! Daoists won adherents by promising transformations of the increasingly chaotic real world, and building communities that protected people.²⁶

The Great Peace (Taiping) movement, beginning in roughly AD 145, taught that the cosmos encompassed heaven; humans of nine sorts from transcendents down to slaves; and earth (the realm of nature spirits and the dead). All were made of cosmic qi, which needed to flow smoothly to prevent natural disaster and political corruption. Followers abstained from alcohol and meat, meditated, made vegetarian offerings to ancestors and spirits, and purified themselves in expectation of a new age. Beginning in the next jiazi year (using the old Shang counting system, AD 184 by our count), they believed, the whole world would experience the proper flow of cosmic qi so that everyone would be healthy, long-lived, good, and happy. A leader named Zhang Jue and his brothers in 175 organized disciplined units to spread the word, and in 184 about 360,000 followers wearing yellow headscarves rebelled against the “blue heaven” of Han to bring in the “yellow heaven” of a new, better age. The “Yellow Turbans” were defeated, but the militarization required to defeat them led to the fall of the Han dynasty.²⁷

A second Daoist community survived the fall of Han. A fangshi magician named Zhang Daoling, searching the mountains of Sichuan for a special ingredient, had a trance-vision in which Lord Lao appointed him “Celestial Master,” gave him healing powers, and told him that the world would soon end. He should gather followers and teach them to purify themselves to serve as “seed-people” for a new epoch. Celestial Master Zhang and his successors taught that Lord Lao ruled the whole cosmos through a heavenly bureaucracy of spirit generals who could conquer the demons that caused sickness, misfortune, and death. The Celestial Masters organized whole households of their followers into districts, headed by officials (both men and women) recruited and promoted on the basis of merit. In return for paying a tax of five pecks of rice or the equivalent in silk, pottery, or other goods, adherents won protection from demons by a whole list of spirit generals called a “register” and carried in a sash around the waist. Individuals who had committed sins, however, were still vulnerable to demon attack. A sick person would be isolated to identify those sins in their own minds; then a senior master would write them down in triplicate and burn them, petitioning the heavenly bureaucracy to erase them from the record.

A strong sense of community came from practices probably influenced by Buddhism (regular recitations of the Dao De Jing and ethical commandments, and detailed rules about daily life) and festival banquets for all, with wine and meat served as a break from normal practice. Initiation into higher levels of the hierarchy (meaning one could call upon greater and greater registers of demon-quelling spirit generals) involved ritualized sexual intercourse, a violation of ordinary norms that may have bound members more tightly together against the outside world. Community members also cooperated in offering services to that wider world: maintaining roads and bridges, for instance. The Celestial Masters submitted to post-Han warlord Cao Cao, who dissolved their tight organization. But the sect still exists today, and many of their ideas and values were also absorbed into the underlying popular religion.²⁸

Legalist government practice was so widespread after four centuries that it had reshaped popular religion. Confucianism was by no means the only ideology or religion in Han times. Han Confucianism comprised disparate strands. It created dignity for emperors and enabled officials to argue against war and state monopolies. Officials deployed it to oppose female dynastic power. The clans developed it as an ideology to shore up their organization and keep property together. As they became a new aristocracy, they relied on Confucianism as a family practice that set them apart from the commoner class they had sprung from.

Confucianism’s victory was not inevitable. Anthropologist Eugene Anderson points out that at the court of the king of Huainan, Liu An (d. 122) scholars focused on practical Daoist economic thought. Elsewhere a scholar recorded controlled experiments in research on agriculture that were sponsored by the government, and gave practical advice on farming. If Liu An, or someone else with his interests, had ruled the Han empire instead of Wudi, Anderson asks, would serious agricultural science have developed?²⁹ A mixture of Daoism with practical economics and science would have led to a very different kind of civilization, and the impact of Buddhism – which the next chapter will discuss – would have taken different directions, too.

Note: In China today, the whole past up into the nineteenth century is called “ancient.” In American and European usage, the “ancient” period ended with the fall of Han, and the “medieval” or “middle period” of Chinese history began.