Ancestor veneration in China

What it is

Ancestor veneration is one of the main strands of Chinese traditional religion. Households hold rites for dead relatives whom they treat as having turned into divine beings, ones who keep their own names and characters. These ancestors are not put outside nature or beyond it; they belong to what is called this world, along with their ghosts and the gods. Lineages sharing a surname arrange the ceremonies and keep shrines for them. Since the dead are thought to reproduce the creative order of Heaven, honouring them is taken as a way of reaching Tian, the supreme power.

Where it comes from

Legendary accounts place the beginnings of this religion in the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties, when worship of Heaven and of ancestors took shape, according to the scholar Mou Zhongjian. He describes an orthodox faith accepted across every class and answerable to the state. The Song Dynasty mattered greatly later on, when neo-Confucian thinkers pressed for patrilineal descent-line ethics built on kinship and filial piety. Until the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, lineage organisations were the strongest body in local society and gave the rites their backing.

How it is done

Mourning and burial for parents, followed by regular offerings, sit at the centre of the practice. Funerals may include drawn-out wailing, a ritual washing of the body, dressing it in grave clothes, and white garments worn by the family. Food and money are handed over from the living to the dead. A spirit tablet is installed at a household altar, where incense is lit each day, announcements are made, and food, drink and spirit money are set out roughly twice a month and on festivals.

Tools and materials

The spirit tablet, a small plaque standing for the dead person, is the focus of the household altar and is said to hold the po soul. Incense, candles, wine, food and spirit money, or joss paper, are the usual gifts. White is worn for mourning. Graves of rulers could once hold bronze vessels and oracle bones, with human or animal sacrifices; ordinary burials held simpler things. In some cases bones are lifted years later, washed, dried and kept in an earthenware jar before their final resting place.

What it is for

Funerals are meant to show respect and to give comfort to the dead, and are also held to shield the descendants from harmful spirits and to send the soul properly onward. Regular offerings are made so the deceased are provided for after death. Kin ask ancestors for blessings; some Taoists have called on ancestors, or whole pantheons of them, for help in life or for the wiping away of sins. In Confucian terms the practice expresses filial piety, the duty owed by children to parents and elders.

Who does it

Households do most of the work. Within a family the eldest male commonly speaks before the altar, while clan elders and parents stand for their kin in the rites. In the past, lineage societies formed around a shared surname ran the ancestral shrines and held collective property. For particular rites, Taoist priests or Buddhist monks may be engaged, and an augur, a reader of signs, may pick the burial place so that qi, the flow of vital energy, is well placed.

Peoples and places

It is a major part of Han Chinese religion, and people of other ethnic groups in China observe it as well. The geography differs. In the south, lineage bonds are strong, seniority does not fix rank in the patrilineal order, and every line of descent has an equal claim on what a lineage owns. In the north, worship of communal deities is more common. Descent runs through men and is written into genealogy books; a family's ancestral home is where its patriline forebear was born, often about five generations back, or where the surname began.

What people believe

A person is often thought to hold several souls. The hun and the po are the two named groups, commonly tied to yang and yin. At death they separate: the hun is generally said to ascend to heaven, while the po goes down into the earth or stays in a spirit tablet, though ideas about the number and nature of souls vary. Ancestors keep their individual identities and become godly, and are held to embody or reproduce the order of Heaven. Women were once thought unable to carry a bloodline, as surnames passed down the male side.

When it is done

Rites follow family events and the farming year. Mourning for a parent was often set at three years, echoing the first three years of a child's life, when it depends entirely on its parents. Incense is burned at the household altar every day, with food, drink and spirit money offered about twice a month. Qingming Festival and Zhong Yuan Festival are the special times for gifts to the dead. Burial could also be delayed by rank: seven months for a king or emperor, five for a magnate, three for other officers, one for a commoner.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Chinese academics have argued over what to call the system. Mou Zhongjian writes of a clan-based traditional patriarchal religion, an orthodox faith of long standing that sat under the state, was diverse and inclusive, and stressed the social and moral work of religion; it kept concepts, feelings and rituals but had no separate organisation, because kinship filled that role. Zhuo Xinping holds that it and Confucianism completed one another, the one lacking a doctrine and the other a social body, and calls it the bedrock faith of the Chinese.

Compare and confuse

Ancestor veneration sits within Chinese traditional religion and overlaps with Chinese folk religion. It shares ground with Confucian practice and with Taoist and Buddhist ritual, and close customs include burnt paper offerings and the Taoist paper art called zhizha. Neighbouring East Asian examples include the Confucian shrine Jongmyo in Seoul and the noble rite known as Sacrifice to Heaven. Kindred ideas are ghosts in Chinese culture, Chinese spiritual world concepts, and the unity of Heaven and humanity.

Today

Ancestral tablets still stand on household altars, and lineage halls are still used. In modern China and Taiwan the dead may be given goods such as a toothbrush, money, food, water, and a credit card or a computer. Traditional Chinese martial arts, of which several thousand styles exist, often keep an ancestral altar at the school, called a wuguan or martial hall, with pictures of lineage teachers and founders and incense burned before them.

Days linked to Ancestor veneration in China

Questions people ask about Ancestor veneration in China

Good reading and sources

• Ancestor veneration in China on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data