How have Confucians from ancient times to the present conceptualized human interactions with gods and spirits during devotional feastings within the confines of intentionally constructed spaces and circumstances. Confucian ritualists drew from the ancient Classics to formulate correct, canonically based devotional rites and continually debated the meaning of this textual legacy in the context of changing practices. Papers address such questions as, What do the Classical texts say about proper rites to gods and spirits? What are the consequences of violating Classical prescriptions? What effects do these rites have on the moral status of ritual practitioners? How must one conduct these rites in order to accomplish the goals of feasting gods and spirits? These papers address three main themes: the techniques of proper countenance to ensure the efficacy of visualization of the spirits of one's deceased ancestors, modes of feasting gods and spirits, and organization of ritual spaces.
How did Confucian officers of the imperial court during the Song and Ming dynasties conceptualize the relationship between official ritual spaces and the cosmos? Records of court discussions on the proper construction of official ritual spaces divulge an imperative that altar terraces and temples must exactingly match the ebb and flow of particular spheres of the cosmos. Confucian officers did not imagine the correspondence between built space and cosmic sphere as merely second-order symbolic representations of a purportedly more real cosmos. Rather, the rites conducted at imperial altar terraces and in temples were seen as an integral part of the cosmic order of things. This paper basis its findings on a comparison of Suburban Feastings conducted at Round Terrace, understood as a microcosm of Vaulted Firmament, and Libation Rites at Culture Temple that housed the sages, worthies, and scholars who transmitted the Dao.
This paper addresses justifications for why ritual sacrifices to Confucius in the late imperial period continued to include beef offerings, contrasting with a widely followed taboo on killing bovines and consuming beef observed in daily life and non-Confucian ritual practices. Dating only back to the Tang-Song transition, this taboo was a late addition to practices shared amongst Chinese religious traditions. Nevertheless, it had a significant impact on food and ritual cultures, giving rise to new conflicts about ritual purity and meat consumption. Though some Confucian fundamentalists rejected it as non-canonical, late imperial sources record many examples of others struggling to negotiate the sacrificial tradition with their personal observances of the taboo. Using examples from popular morality texts, I explore how their author, a late Qing Confucian socio-moral reformer, navigated this tense religious environment, as he championed the beef taboo while also defending Confucius' continued ritual beef consumption.
What does the Ji yi chapter in Record of Rites say about techniques for maintaining the proper countenance when approaching spirits of the dead, especially as a part of visualization practice? It shows that visualizing one's deceased ancestors is tied to maintaining the correct countenance and affect during sacrifice. Some influential accounts of early moral self-cultivation, such as the Mencius, incorporate the similar underlying principle that one is more apt to act morally in the real or imagined gaze of one's family members. While the existence of ritual impersonators of the dead is acknowledged to be a part of funerary ritual, re-descriptions of early Chinese self-cultivation practice often leave out summoning the dead in favor of an emphasis on the development of the individual's faculties. In examining the role of visualizing the dead during ritual offerings, this paper asks, What is lost when one forgets them?
Making offerings to Confucius in Confucian temples (kong miao/wen miao) is a widespread practice in Mainland China, South Korea, and much of the Chinese Diaspora. Based on recent ethnographic work, this paper surveys the diverse ritual offerings to Confucius in temple settings today, with a focus on the varied and innovative practices in mainland China, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the United States. In analyzing ritual offerings to Confucius, questions arise regarding the ritual process, ritual meaning, as well as the possible impact of social factors such as national and cultural identities. In the ever-changing contemporary realities of lived Confucian traditions, Confucius is unfailingly a deity to whom ritual offerings must be made.