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 1^[inline]700^ the Chinese Emperor, K'ang Hsi,
issued his famous edict explaining the use of ^the
word^ Heaven 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 Cristian
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 di^[inline]s^tinguish themselves before the Chinese from the
Catholics the Protestant Church became known as the sect of Jesus, the
Catholic Church being known as the sect of the Lord of Heaven. The^[inline]y^ are rather misnomers, of course, because the
Protestants often use the term Lord of Heaven, while the Catholics by no
means leave out Jesus from their services.
I have never felt satisfied 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 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 was
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 merly
[the "merly" here is a result of the type writer
striking too high, but since Tenney corrected it in pen below, the mistake
is recorded]quietly changed to a celebration of the birth of
Christ . Even the for^[inline]merl^y sacred mistletoe and
holly were not forbidden to be used as decoration.
When 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 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 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 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 satisfactory 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 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 affect 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 Confucianist do not
believe in the immortality of the soul. Confucius 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 ^to^ 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 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 ascendant 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 [illegible: accomiment] of [illegible: worship] or as a sign of respect, forgetting 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 is China has caused me to feel that
the Protestant missionaries have been rather illiberal in not allowing the
Chinese to express their feeling 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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