The Chinese Ancestral Rites
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The Chinese Ancestral Rites.
By Charles D. Tenney, Formerly Counselor of the U. S. Legation,
Peking, China.
In the year 1700 the Chinese Emperor, K’ang Hsi, issued his famous
edict explaining the use of ^[inline]"^Heaven^[inline]"^ by the Chinese as meaning God and pronouncing
the rites performed in honor of Confucius and the ancestors to be civil
rites and not worship. The Jesuit missionaries became the advocates of this
view and proposed to allow the Christian converts to continue to perform
the ceremonies. The Catholic missionaries of other orders however, notably
the Dominicans, dissented from the conclusion of the Jesuits, and referred
the whole matter to the Pope for his decision. The Pope decided against the
Jesuits. This angered the Emperor and led to the first persecution of the
Catholic priests. All missionaries remained proscribed by Chinese law until
the Treaties of 1858 gave them freedom to propagate the Ch^r^istian religion. When the Protestant missionaries
arrived in China , they accepted the ruling of the Pope in regard to the
use of Heaven for God and also in regard to the Confucian and ancestral
rites. As they wished to distinguish themselves before the Chinese from the
Catholics^[inline],^ the Protestant Church became known
as the ^[inline]"^sect of Jesus^[inline]"^, the
Catholic Church being known as the ^[inline]"^sect of the
Lord of Heaven^[inline]"^. The^se^ are
rather misnomers, of course, because the Protestants often use the term
^[inline]"^Lord of Heaven^[inline]"^, while
the Catholics by no means leave out ^[inline]"^Jesus^[inline]"^ from their services.
I have never felt satiafied with the decision of the early
Protestant missionaries to accept the decision of the Pope regarding the
Confucian and ancestral rites. Owing to the fact that these rites have been
in use
among the Chinese for many
generations, it has become a matter of duty to continue the ceremonies. So
the first act required of a Christian convert is to do something condemned
by his conscience. I remember well a conversation which I once had with an
intelligent and serious-minded young Chinese. This young man said to me
“in my native place a rumor is current that the first act required of
a Christian convert is to split up the ancestral tablets. I wish you to
understand that I do not believe this rumor , but I ^would like to^ refer to you as my authority for contradicting
it." I was put in a very embarrassing position by this appeal. I could only
say that Christian converts did not continue to practice the ancestral
rites, though I had never heard of their being required to split up the
tablets. I could see that the young Chinese was convinced by my reply that
the rumor to which he had referred substantially correct. It would have
been very easy to avoid the suspicion of unfilial conduct on the part of
the Christian convert by drawing up a Christian ceremony to take the place
of the old one and so allowed the continuity of the old rite to remain
unbroken. They were wiser in the early days of Christianity about
interfering with the habits of the pagans. The early church fathers simply
put a new meaning into the old ceremonies and allowed them to continue.
Thus the spring ceremony in honor of the goddess Eastre was continued and
even made more elaborate, though a new meaning was put into it. This made
the change of religion easier for the first generation of converts, and
after the lapse of a few generations the old meaning was lost and
forgotten. So the Saturnalia of the Romans and the winter festival of the
Britons were quietly changed to a celebration of the birth of Christ. Even
the formerly sacred mistletoe and holly were not forbidden to be used as decoration.
When an old rite is taken over
with a new application or meaning, it soon loses its old objectionabl
features in favor of the new meaning.
I once had an experience which almost duplicated the early
troubles of the Catholic missionaries with the Emperor K’ang Hsi. I
was serving at the time as president of the government University at
Tientsin. The monthly rites in honor of Confucius were observed at the
University as in all the Government schools of China, but because some of
the students came from Christian families and I knew had been taught that
the rites were sinful^[inline],^I made the rule that there
should be no roll call or marking of attendance, so that all who had
conscientious scruples regarding the ceremony might absent themselves. When
Yüan Shih-k’ai was governor of Shantung in 1901 he had begun to
organize a provincial college and had invited one of the American
missionaries to act as president. After the death of Li Hung-chang,
Yüan had been promoted to ^[inline]be^ Viceroy of the
metropolitan province and Chou Fu, a distinguished Confucian scholar had
been appointed to succeed him in Shantung. He came to me before leaving for
his new post and explained that he was troubled because the missionary at
the head of the new college had refused to allow the usual ceremony in
Honor of Confucius to be performed in the college, His Excellency asked how
I got over the difficulty , and I explained my arrangement by which
Christian students were allowed to absent themselves from attendance. The
new governor said that this arrangement would be quite satisfactory to him,
provided that the usual rite prescribed for all government schools, should
be continued for the benefit of the Confucianist students. He asked that I
should correspond with with the missionary, suggesting to him my method of
procedure. I did so, but was somewhat surprised to receive the reply that
my method would be unsatisfactory to him because he considered it to be
"dishonest”. I communicated the reply to His Excellecy Chou Fu,who
then said that he regretted losing
the services of the foreigner in the important work of organizing the new
college, but that he regarded it as essen tial that
the usual rites should be observed. He proposed another method of meeting
the scruples of the missionary. He promised that on his arrival at his new
post, he would issue a proclamation explaining the ceremony as an act of
honor to Confucius as the founder of Chinese literature but in no sense an
act of worship. That is, he would repeat the response that the Emperor
K'ang Hsi had made two hundred years before to the petition of the Jesuits.
I felt that this would be useless, but consented to send the message to the
missionary concerned. In due course his reply came to the effect that he
could not allow the continuance of the ceremony because he regarded its
"tendancy to be idolatrous, however it might be explained”. The result
was that the well equipped foreigner was obliged to resign and turn over
his important work to less competent Chinese hands. I was much struck by
a remark of Governor Chou Fu in the couse of our conferences on this
subject. He said"It is absurd to say that we worship Confucius. We
Confucianists do not believe in the immortality of the soul. N
^[inline]C^onfucius no longer exists. How can you worship
what does not exist?” I considered it very unfortunate that the
control of the new university should be lost to the competent hands of the
foreign missionary through what seemed to me the unreasonable position of
the Proestant Missionary body. the ancestral rites are so connected in
China with the principle of honor to parents and ancestors that the
discontin uance of the ceremony brands the new
faith as unfilial. To the Chinese the new religion suffers the same
handicap that any new faith would suffer among us if the first act required
of a convert were to go the cemetery and spit upon the graves of his
parents. The fine feeling of respect for parents is one of the best
features of the old Chinese civilization and in the process
of the modernizing of China that
is now going on^[inline],^ that honor to parents , the
value of which we recognize in the Fifth Commandment ,is fast disappearing.
Instead of requiring Christian converts to pay no more attention to the
ancestral tablets, I should much prefer that the church draw up a new
ritual for Christian converts in which the thanks of the descendant should
be expressed to God for the gift of life through the medium of the
ancestors. The new ritual should include thanksgiving to God for the
example and discip line of the parents, and the old
form of worship should be allowed to continue with these modifications.
Thus the rite might be made even more elaborate for those within the church
than for those outside. Protestans generally object to the laying out of
food as an accom^pan^iment of worship or as a sign
of respect,fo^r^getting the ritual of worship that
is ordered in the Old Testament according to which food is offered in the
worship of Jehovah. We decorate the graves of the departed with flowers.
The Chinese would arrange small dishes of food about the graves to express
the same feeling.
In general, my experience in China has caused me to feel that
the Protestant missionaries have been rather illiberal in not allowing the
Chinese to express their feeling^[inline]s^ in their own
way. They have generally tried to force upon them the Puritan forms of
worship and the customs of other lands rather than to follow the lines of
least resistance as did the old church fathers in their dealings with the
pagans.
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