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>> Hello again everyone.
We are starting Chapter number 6, this is video number 1.
The topic this time is -- two topics, Taoism and Confucianism.
And actually, I'm going to make it three topics by adding
in another subject in this first video.
So, the second video will be about Taoism, the third video will be about Confucianism.
But for this first video, I want to give you a kind
of general overview of religious practices in China.
That may be the wrong way to say it.
We're going to talk about something I'm going to refer to as Chinese folk religion.
When I say Chinese, I don't want you to get too confused because there is the modern country,
The People's Republic of China, and they have their own religious practices
and their own belief systems and so forth that are practiced today.
But, there's also Chinese culture as a broader concept,
which is certainly what the People's Republic of China is based on,
and also some of the other nations around China share a very similar cultural background.
And we need to dip into that very slightly in order to make Taoism
and Confucianism make much sense.
Now there's a couple things we should probably get out of the way right up front.
Number one, the idea of religion in -- well, a number Asian cultures, but particularly in China
and Japan, has a very different sense than it does in the United States at least.
And at its most basic, what we're talking about here is a difference
in religions being exclusive or not.
So what I mean by that is that if you go to someone in the United States
and you ask them their religion and they say they're Christian, then you know that they don't
that they are Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or Taoist or any of that.
The general way of talking about religion is that you have one
and that means you don't have any of the others.
So, if you're Jewish, you're not Muslim.
If you're Muslim, you're not Christian.
If you're Christian, you're not Hindu, and so forth.
And that comes from being in a culture that's very, very deeply grounded
in the idea of monotheistic traditions.
Most of America's background has had to do with Christianity or Judaism, to some extent Islam,
all of which are these monotheistic religions that have one god.
And if you believe in one god, then you believe there are not other gods,
so your religion has to be the only valid one.
In China, the idea or, in the broad concept of China that we're talking about here,
believing one religion, practicing one religion, doesn't exclude you from other religions.
So if you go to someone and say, are you Taoist?
And they say yes, that doesn't mean that they aren't also Buddhist
or that they don't also practice Confucianism
or that they aren't also some other religious tradition.
They can overlap, they can intermingle, they can interact with one another and that's all fine.
That's not seen, or at least traditionally wasn't seen as a problem at all.
It's part of the way the system worked.
So don't let that confuse you when we talk for these next few sessions,
these videos about Taoism and Confucianism and the next chapter about Shinto.
Don't get confused by the fact that they do overlap and interact quite a bit.
Now, the other thing we probably ought to talk about is the fact that there's this kind
of popular notion, or I don't know if it's that popular anymore,
but this kind of traditional notion
that China doesn't have any of its own religious traditions.
And what that means is that Buddhism is practiced very widely
in China, but it's not Chinese.
It comes from India, and then was imported into China a long time ago.
And then there's also Taoism and Confucianism, and these people who advance this position,
they say, well, those aren't actually religions, they're just ethical systems
of philosophical outlooks and so forth.
Now first of all, that's kind of crap, because Taoism and Confucianism really are religions
in the way we're defining the term.
But even if you did accept that idea that all three of those don't count,
there's still something that we'll refer to here as Chinese folk religion
that under lays all those other things, that's been around for a long, long time in China,
for as long as we have written records, that people believed in gods and goddesses
and that they orchestrated events and rituals and so forth in their lives to show respect
for these gods and goddesses and to hope for help from these gods and goddesses and so forth.
So, it's not at all true that there is no religious --
there is no inherent religious system in China.
There certainly is, it's just that it's fairly poorly understand
because not a lot of study has been put into it.
We're going to very, very broadly talk about it.
We've got like five and a half minutes, not even quite that in this video,
and I'm going to give you just a couple key elements that will help you understand things
when we talk about Taoism and Confucianism.
One of the things you need to understand
about this traditional Chinese religious belief is that it was very hierarchical.
And what I mean by that is there was an order, an order to the gods.
The highest gods ruled the lower gods who ruled lower gods and so forth.
And this hierarchy, this bureaucracy if you want,
reflected the way things were in the world of the living.
So, there was a highest god, an emperor of heaven,
and he was reflected in the emperor here on earth.
And there were provincial governors here on earth, but there were also provincial gods
that looked over certain regions.
And each town would have its own gods,
just like each town would have its own elders and its own leaders.
And these were very, very literally seen as being reflections of one another.
So just like humans could be promoted or demoted or fired or transferred,
gods could also switch around their roles.
That wasn't seen as odd or inappropriate or anything like that.
Gods were only in their positions as long as they were effective in their positions.
And if you had a god that wasn't working, you probably need to fire that god and get one
that is working, just like if you had somebody in your employ who wasn't working
or if your governor was not working, you would try to elect a new governor, that sort of thing.
Now, another thing you need to understand about this traditional system is
that human beings play in important role in this, too.
Dead human beings are particularly what I'm thinking of here.
And they play them in one sense in the role of ancestors.
An ancestor is just what it sounds like.
It's a family member, in this case a family member who has died,
and is still remembered as being part of the family.
And what does that remembrance mean?
Well, it could play out a variety of different ways,
but generally there'll be rituals to remember their name.
There will be rituals to offer them kind of food and supplies for living
in the afterlife, for existing in the afterlife.
And you'll take care of them, take care of their spirits.
They, in return, will help you out with spiritual matters.
So, I'm saying there's a hierarchy in the spirit world just
like there's a hierarchy in the real world.
Well, we're all part of the real world,
We can't access that spiritual hierarchy directly necessarily, but our ancestors can
because they're part of that spirit world.
They're very low, they're just citizens of that spirit world.
But they're there and we aren't.
But ancestors aren't the only form of dead person.
Dead people can also become ghosts.
And ghosts are essentially, and this is a very simplified version,
but they're essentially ancestors who have been forgotten.
Ancestors who are no longer being taken care of.
And because of this, they are, in a very literal sort of sense,
or at least in imagining of this, they're starving.
Because nobody remembers them, because nobody's providing for their spiritual needs,
they are starving and maybe even going crazy.
And so what they'll start to do is try to attract attention from the world of the living.
They will blight crops or hurt or frighten people in order to get attention for themselves
so somebody will start to take care of them again.
So, ghosts and ancestors are really the same thing, just in different positions.
Ancestors are being remembered, ghosts have been forgotten.
Now a god is also possible.
I mean a human being can be remembered as a god.
And when a human being is remembered as a god, that really just means,
and again this is simplified, but that really just means that they are being worshipped,
they are being taken care of by people who are not responsible for them.
So for example, if your great-great-grandfather is dead
and you make offerings to him, that's an ancestor.
But if your great-great-grandfather is dead and I make offerings to him
or people all throughout the state or the country make offerings to him
because he was a great leader or something, then he's a god, probably a minor god,
but part of that heavenly hierarchy.
Now this idea that gods, ghosts and ancestors are really all the same thing is something we
want to keep in mind when we're looking at these traditions.
There is this very rich spiritual system, and it's got a lot of different layers to it.
So, you remember your ancestors, that's great.
You forget them, they become ghosts.
Here's an important thing to keep in mind, too.
A ghost can become an ancestor because if a ghost is starving
and bothering a human community, one of the ways to quiet it down, to get peace again,
is to make offerings to it, to quiet it by giving it gifts,
by giving it the supplies that it needs.
And that basically is the definition of a god, of a minor god.
Now you're remembering somebody else's ancestor and taking care of them.
So, this idea that there's a heavenly hierarchy, that we humans have some place in it,
and that when we die, we still move around in this system of gods and ghosts and ancestors.
Those will be fairly important when we're talking about the next two topics,
which are Taoism and Confucianism.
All right, that's enough little groundwork here.
We'll start with Taoism in video number 2.