The Great Vessel Blog

Calling to the Ancestors in Ancient China

The main religious difference between us and the Chinese is that whereas our word “God” has no connotation of “Ancestor” the Chinese word Ti, which is roughly equivalent, was applied directly to the Dead. To sacrifice to the dead is Ti, no matter how recent or historical the departed person is. The whole of Chinese religion centered around the feeding of ancestors with offerings, whereas we have excluded this dimension that was prevalent in pagan ritual. However, our religious terminology still teems with sacrificial metaphors, words like sacrifice, blood, offering and lamb and though few of us have ever performed a sacrifice, the conceptions which center round sacrifice and offering are very familiar to us.

Chinese ancestor ritual and sacrifice revolves around the Shi, the Dead One, literally the “Corpse.” The word shih/shi means to “lay out” and is applied to laying out the dead, laying out the sacred meal and laying out the results of a sacrificial divination. Here it refers to the one who “dies” to become a vehicle for something else.  At these sacrifices this was a young man, prepared by meditation, fasting and drinking the “clear wine”, who impersonated or embodied the ancestor to whom the sacrifice was being made. For the time of the ritual, the spirit of the ancestor entered into him. This was no frenzied possession like that of the Siberian shaman; on the contrary the demeanor of the Dead One was extremely quiet, restrained and radiant. The spirits of the dead in these hymns are “very bright and clear”; a dazzling radiance surrounds them, the nimbi and haloes of their divinity.

All the Spirits are drunk.

Surely they will come now,
The Spirits and Protectors,
Requite us with great blessings.
We have brought them clear wine,
The meats well seasoned,
Well prepared, well-mixed.
Because we came in silence,
Setting all quarrels aside,
They will come too, will accept,
And send down their blessings numberless.
We shall have no cares in time to come.

There has been an answer from the heavens.
Swiftly they flit through the temple
Very bright, very glorious.
Ah the glorious Ancestors!
The happy omens, the rich and endless blessings come down.
To you, too, they must reach.

Here, then, I come.
I take myself to the Bright Ancestors and make my prayer:

“You that roam up and down in the Sacred Place
You that ascend and descend in the Sacred House.
Grant me a boon, August Elders!
Protect this my humble person, save it with your light.
I, a little child
am not wise or reverent.
But as the days pass, as the months go by
May I learn from those that the Bright Presence surrounds.
O Radiance, doubling and re-doubling!
Help these my strivings
Show me how to make real
the power and the virtue (De) of the Way.”  

So here’s long life to you!
May their Shining Light beam on you, beam mildly on you!
May they help and be with us all, the Glorious Elders
May they help and be with us all, the Mighty Mothers.

(adapted from from Waley, Book of Songs, 209, 226, 341)

Stephen Karcher