The Penguin History of the World

Though Chinese society was to grow much more complex by the end of the Warring States Period, a distinction of common people from the nobly born remained. There were important practical consequences: the nobility, for example, were not subject to punishments – such as mutilation – inflicted on the commoner; it was a survival of this in later times that the gentry were exempt from the beatings which might be visited on the commoner (though, of course, they might suffer appropriate and even dire punishment for very serious crimes). The nobility long enjoyed a virtual monopoly of wealth, too, which outlasted its earlier monopoly of metal weapons. None the less, these were not the crucial distinctions of status which lay elsewhere in the nobleman’s special religious standing through a monopoly of certain ritual practices. Only noblemen could share in the cults that were the heart of the Chinese notion of kinship. Only the nobleman belonged to a family – which meant that he had ancestors. Reverence for ancestors and propitiation of their spirits had existed before the Shang, though it does not seem that in early times many ancestors were thought likely to survive into the spirit world. Possibly the only ones lucky enough to do so would be the spirits of particularly important persons; the most likely, of course, were the rulers themselves, whose ultimate origin, it was claimed, was itself godly.

The family emerged as a legal refinement and sub-division of the clan, and the Zhou period was the most important one in its clarification. There were about a hundred noble clans, within each of which marriage was forbidden. Each was supposed to be founded by a hero or a god. The patriarchal heads of the clan’s families and houses exercised special authority over its members and were all qualified to carry out its rituals, and thus influence spirits to act as intermediaries with the powers which controlled the universe on the clan’s behalf. These practices came to identify persons entitled to possess land or hold office. The clan offered a sort of democracy of opportunity at this level: any of its members could be appointed to the highest place in it, for they were all qualified by the essential virtue of a descent whose origins were god-like. In this sense, a king was only primus inter pares, a patrician outstanding among all patricians.

The family absorbed enormous quantities of religious feeling and psychic energy; its rituals were exacting and time-consuming. The common people, not sharing in this, found a religious outlet in maintaining the worship of nature gods. These always got some attention from the élite, too, the worship of mountains and rivers and the propitiating of their spirits being an important imperial duty from early times, but they were to influence the central developments of Chinese thought less than similar notions in other religions.

Religion had considerable repercussions on political forms. The heart of the first ruling houses’ claim to obedience was their religious superiority. Through the maintenance of ritual, they and they alone had access to the goodwill of unseen powers, whose intentions might be known from the oracles. When these had been interpreted, the ordering of the agricultural life of the community was possible, for they regulated such matters as the time of sowing or harvesting. Much turned, therefore, on the religious standing of the king; it was of the first importance to the state. This was reflected in the fact that the Zhou displacement of the Shang was religious as well as military. The idea was introduced that there existed a god superior to the ancestral god of the dynasty and that from him there was derived a mandate to rule. Now, it was claimed, he had decreed that the mandate should pass to other hands. Inevitably, this cyclical view of history provoked speculation about what might be the signs by which the recipient of the new mandate should be recognized. Filial piety was one, and to this extent a conservative principle was implicit. But Zhou writers had also introduced an idea rendered not very comfortably into English by the word ‘virtue’. Clearly, its content remained fluid; disagreement and discussion were therefore possible.