Chinese Poetry and Prophecy: The Written Oracle in East Asia (Asian Religions and Cultures) - Hardcover

Strickmann, Michel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804743347 ISBN 13: 9780804743341

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2005

Synopsis

This book argues that the most profound and far-reaching effects of Buddhism on Chinese culture occurred at the level of practice, specifically in religious rituals designed to cure people of disease, demonic possession, and bad luck. This practice would leave its most lasting imprint on the liturgical tradition of Taoism. In focusing on religious practice, the book provides a corrective to traditional studies of Chinese religion, which overemphasize metaphysics and spirituality.

About this title

About the Author

The late Michel Strickmann was Professor of Chinese Religions at the University of California, Berkeley, and a world-renowned expert on Taoism and on Asian popular religion. Stanford University Press has also published his Chinese Magical Medicine (2002).

From the Back Cover

Focusing on oracular texts, Chinese Poetry and Prophecy examines the role of divination in Chinese culture, particularly in religious practice. Drawing on a dazzling array of ancient and modern sources, the author establishes the oracular sequence of important but obscure works in his celebrated engaging style.
This is the second posthumous work of Michel Strickmann to be to be edited by Bernard Faure for publication by Stanford University Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chinese Poetry and Prophecy

The Written Oracle in East AsiaBy Michel Strickmann

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4334-1

Contents

List of Illustrations...............................................................ixForeword............................................................................xiIntroduction........................................................................xx1. Ritual and Randomization.........................................................12. Chinese Oracles In Partibus......................................................73. Termina Technica.................................................................304. Modern Studies, Editions, and Translations.......................................345. New Evidence: A Clutch of Taoist Oracles.........................................476. New Evidence: The Oldest Buddhist Sequence.......................................577. La Trahison Des Clromanes: Divination in a Buddhist Setting.....................768. Writing and Chinese Ritual.......................................................879. Visions of Diffusion: Central Asia and the West..................................98Notes...............................................................................145Bibliography........................................................................185Index...............................................................................209

Chapter One

RITUAL AND RANDOMIZATION

The Chinese are an ancient people Before us is a hard campaign. MANAS (Kirghiz epic)

Among its immediate neighbors, China has long enjoyed fame as the homeland of divination. Chinese mantic systems are legion and are found in the most diverse settings, from elaborate and formal temple altars to boisterous marketplace stands. In one form or another, fate-calculation appears in nearly every context, from the most solemn to the most mundane. This obsession with destiny (or what the future holds in store) is one of the most deeply rooted features of Chinese life. The art and science of fate has spread far beyond temple confines and the stalls of mantic professionals into the deepest matrix of Chinese culture: cuisine. What other culture could have welded its two chief concerns, eating and fate-reading, into the institution of the fortune cookie?

The central nature of divination in Chinese culture has been recognized by those neighboring societies most indebted to the Chinese example. A twelfth-century chronicle, the sBa-bzhed, repeatedly describes Tibetan envoys being sent to China in the eighth and ninth centuries to acquire mantic techniques or consult Chinese diviners. In the quadripartite schema of world monarchy propounded in an influential fourteenth-century Tibetan source, the ruler of India is King of Religion, Iran's ruler King of Riches, the monarch of the North is King of Armies, but the ruler of China, King of Divinatory Sciences. The awesome phenomenon of lasting Chinese empire was thought to rest upon a consummate mastery of mantic arts-a notion which we find reflected in the oral literatures of Central Asia. These depict the redoubtable Chinese troops as fearsome adversaries, and their Khan as a ruler who owed his sovereign powers to magic.

At the heart of China's reputation in the field of occult inquiry lies the I-ching, the Book of Changes; beneath it, supportively, the mantic tortoise. Still other systems flourished under the early Empire: divination, prognostication, hemerology, and medical diagnosis. Recent archeological discoveries have brought us closer to an appreciation of certain universally accepted methods and assumptions of fate-calculation that provided the underpinnings of daily life: beliefs and practices hitherto known chiefly from literary sources such as the Lun-heng and Ch'ien-fu lun. Yet already by the Later Han period, the religious situation in China had altered considerably from the time when tortoise and milfoil had supposedly reigned supreme. By the first century C.E., Buddhism had begun to make its way in China, and in the course of the second century, Taoism came into being as an organized socioreligious system. By the fifth century, the basic amalgam of Buddho-Taoist ritual was already in process-an amalgam that has influenced Chinese culture down to our time. By the end of the Early Medieval period, then, the moral climate of China had changed for good. A new set of otherworldly instances and sanctions had come into being, to evaluate and prescribe life and conduct in this world. This development radically affected all aspects of communication with the spirit-world, including, naturally, those practices subsumed under the rubric of "divination."

Into the new ritual system were incorporated many, perhaps even most, of the preexisting components of Han cosmology. As the consciously sinocentric Taoist system developed, progressively endowing older elements of Chinese culture with new significance, we find the classic cosmology being reassembled within a new theogony. Thus, in medieval Taoist sources, we are able to trace a large measure of continuity with, for example, the Ma-wangtui materials. Taoist ritual texts abound in references to the classic mantic systems of China and hallowed cosmological principles. We find the trigrams and hexagrams in use as spatiotemporal signposts in ritual and as symbolic emblems of good or ill fortune in hymnody. The asterisms, too, were portentous and central to Taoist cult. Yet curiously, early medieval Taoism strictly forbade its votaries to practice divination. Recourse to the mantic arts was lumped together with a host of common activities deemed undesirable by Taoists. These included offerings to deceased ancestors, blood sacrifice to local deities ("the gods of the profane," su-shen), and giving money to priests. Through allegiance to Taoism, the faithful had put themselves in the hands of a far higher power than the spirits invoked by diviners. Divination was superfluous or, worse still, a direct insult to the Tao.

For all of Taoism's absorbing interest as a crystallization and internal reform of Chinese tradition, Buddhism represents a far more imposing phenomenon in the history of Asia. Some may bridle at the notion of listing Buddhism among China's gifts to East Asia, but I think there can be little question regarding the essential originality of the Buddhist rites and institutions which China transmitted to Korea, Japan, Tibet, and Vietnam. The compartmentalization of our studies has regrettably drawn a cordon sanitaire around Chinese Buddhism, enabling many self-declared specialists to operate largely independently of Chinese social and cultural history as a whole. Here we have a truly massive body of primary sources cordoned off from the field at large. A more mature historiography, and one more fully liberated from native categories, would never tolerate the neglect of this material on the grounds that it somehow represents an alien intrusion into the culture. The history of Chinese Buddhism of course comprised a good deal more than a millennium of translation activity. The vast majority of the 3,360 works contained in the hundred volumes of the Taisho Sino-Japanese Buddhist Canon were written, not in India, but in China and Japan.

Small wonder, then, if many of the components of Chinese culture reached the encircling countries together with Buddhism-and may even have come there in Buddhist guise. The system of divination which we shall be considering belongs to this category. It testifies to the steady infiltration of the fabric of Chinese Buddhism by a massive, if diffuse, complex of Chinese ritual practice. As found outside China, it is, in fact, a Chinese oracle in Buddhist vestments, and we shall discover that the system's oldest recoverable Chinese torso is also Buddhistically draped.

Observers throughout China have long noted a divinatory procedure combining sticks and a printed oracle in verse. The system is striking in its ubiquity no less than its banality. It appears to have been found everywhere in China, in every colony of overseas Chinese, and in every country directly influenced by Chinese culture. There are two essential operations. First, a stick is obtained at random from a collection of numbered sticks-often one hundred-by shaking their container, which may be either open or closed; if closed, a hole at one extremity permits the egress of a single stick. The number on the stick is then matched with the corresponding printed sheet, or page of a booklet, which contains the querent's fortune. Different observers have documented a variety of situations in which these procedures take place as well as variations of detail. The most formal setting is a temple; the sticks are found on an altar, before an image of the deity who serves as the oracle's patron (and is presumably deemed to be its source). A. J. A. Elliot, for example, writing of Singapore in the fifties, tells us that Cantonese women there will go to the temple with paper money, incense sticks, and food offerings. After having presented her offerings, the supplicant has a choice of several bamboo vases of sticks. She will take up one of these which is specifically designated for the type of request she has in mind. She faces the image of the deity, and shakes the vase until one and only one stick falls out (should more than one emerge, she must start over). If she wishes, she may then seek the deity's further confirmation of the stick chosen, through recourse to the kidney-shaped divining blocks that lie on the altar. If they land with one flat side up, the other down, the god has validated the chosen stick. She will then take the stick to the temple attendant, who gives her the corresponding printed sheet of paper, and helps her interpret it.

This is comparatively elaborate; the procedure may also be reduced to its bare essentials. It may be conducted independently of professional guidance, and even privately, for booklets exist in which all the numbered oracles of a single sequence are contained. They too stress the sacred and solemn character of the proceedings; whether or not material offerings are specified, reverence to the sponsoring deity is essential if a true response is to be obtained. In temple oracles as well as in the booklets, the mantic verses are often headed by evaluations of relative auspiciousness, "quality-tags," as it were; the oracular poems are frequently accompanied by additional explanatory matter, in prose and/or verse, sometimes credited to the patron deity itself, or to celebrated literary or historical figures.

By the nineteenth century, this characteristically Chinese system was known to the pioneer scholars of world folklore, and we find it described in a number of classic works by nonsinologists. The German ethnographer Adolf Bastian gave an account of its use among Cochin-Chinese sailors; it also figures in La mythologie des plantes, by Angelo de Gubernatis, and in the Rev. Hilderic Friend's Flowers and Flower Lore. Friend, who had lived in Canton and so seen the oracles in operation, had no hesitation in linking them with the rhabdomancy of the Magi as described by Lenormant. He saw in the divining sticks a source or reflection of the magic wand.

Closer to our own time, the keen eye of the expressionist poet Henri Michaux calmly noted the mechanical, prefabricated aspect of the system (which he associated with the "innate craftsmanship" of the Chinese): "On fait rouler des petits btonnets dans une bote, il y en a toujours un qui s'avance un peu plus que les autres, vous le retirez. Il porte un numro. On cherche la feuille d'avenir correspondant ce numro, on lit ..., et il ne reste plus qu' y croire." Indeed, the artisanal aspect here would appear to have supplanted the inspired descent, or ascent, of the spirit in the quest for hidden knowledge. Still, there are elements of potential interest, and the entire procedure may nevertheless prove to be in close alignment with the perceived configurations of the invisible world. The first gap to be closed by the intervention of the divine will concerns the choice of stick. Thereafter, the supplicant must confront and wrestle with the god's own words, in often cryptic poetic form. For all its foreshortening of the mantic horizon, there is still room in this scenario for the mysterium tremendum-at least if we can find in our hearts a measure of sympathy for the Chinese otherworld, which has long since taken on the guise of a vast bureaucracy, the original paperwork empire. It may be that the time is ripe for greater sympathy; perhaps our own spiritual culture will soon begin to tread the same path, in step with our increasingly regimented social life. It would in any case be rash to dismiss these Chinese oracles before we have scrutinized the poetry itself; may there still linger traces of mantic frenzy after all?

Numbered sticks need not be the only means of access to the verse sequence. The oracle in the Kuan-ti ming-sheng chen-ching (Ch'ao-chou 1858: 3.10a-b) informs the reader that should he be unable to go to the god's temple for a consultation, he may use the booklet at home, with ten coins. Varying numbers of coins are referred to in earlier sources, as well. Doolittle records another alternative. One of the six classes of professional fortune-tellers whom he observed in nineteenth-century Foochow "traverses the streets in pursuit of employment." In one hand he carries a bamboo-and-horn clapper, to announce his presence; in the other, a caged bird. His equipment also includes "sixty-four small sheets of paper, on each of which is sketched a figure of a god, or bird, or beast, or person; on each sheet is also written a short verse, usually four lines, each of seven characters. These sheets are folded up in such a manner that the picture and the poetry shall be unseen." When a client summons him, the diviner sets out the slips of paper, opens the cage, and allows the bird to select one, or sometimes two, which will then be expounded for the client's benefit. Birds as agents of the divine have, of course, a long prior history. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, birds are still plucking forth destinies today. Note, too, that this nineteenth-century Foochow sequence included a pictorial element.

If the oracle itself is fixed and bookish, inspiration and ingenuity may be directed toward discovering new means of access. William P. Lebra tells us that "Okinawan diviners ... most commonly rely on books used in association with divining blocks or sticks and do not claim supernatural powers as in the case of a shaman ... One was found to be using the abacus in place of the divining sticks or blocks, and some informants appeared to be rather impressed with this novel method."

Chapter Two

CHINESE ORACLES IN PARTIBUS

The system has spread far beyond China's borders. We find it in Tibet, among the many forms of Chinese divination of which the Tibetans expressed such keen appreciation. Though themselves not lacking in mantic inventiveness, they also made use of precisely the same method. The method has been described by David Macdonald, of Scottish and Sikkimese parentage, who spent his early years in the vicinity of Darjeeling and served from 1905 to 1925 as a British agent in Gyangtse, Central Tibet. His evidence is significant as showing the system's presence in central Tibetan culture, rather than simply on China's periphery, in Amdo or Khams. He describes the bamboo sticks as being used in conjunction with a booklet, and also notes that this form of divination (like Tibetan arrow-divination) is connected with Gesar. This legendary hero was seen as an incarnation of Vaisravana and explicitly equated, in Ch'ing times, with Kuan Ti. Ren de Nebesky-Wojkowitz describes a Gesar arrow-divination (Ge-sar mda' mo) in which a large number of numbered arrows are shaken in a high vessel until one or more arrows emerge. Their numbers direct the inquirer to the corresponding passage of a divining book. During the Ch'ing times, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the cult of Gesar/Kuan Ti swept Tibet and Mongolia. The Mongols, too, have this form of divination, under Kuan Ti's auspices, and their oracle booklets also include predictions of his imminent advent as hero and savior. We will find Kuan Ti as a prominent patron of this type of divination in China, as well.

The use of divinatory booklets (mo-dpe) in conjunction with a system of lots (either sticks or cards) or dice is common in Tibet. Several varieties have been described by Austine Waddell. Rolf Stein has published a manual of thirty-three slips. This appears to represent a somewhat different system, and Stein's close examination of the text is one of the few such studies in depth. Stein's remarkable analysis of a series of frequently recurring narrative vignettes in the Tibetan manuscripts from Tun-huang is also noteworthy, for these fragments of myths and legends were used in the formation of oracle texts as well as in the etiological justification of rituals; they thus illustrate the original Tibetan component of what was to become, in later Tibet and Mongolia, a highly Sino-Tibetan oracular idiom. The Tibetans have been amazingly inventive in devising and assimilating mantic systems, but it is strange that Robert B. Ekvall, in his description of numerous highly idiosyncratic methods in use until recently in Tibet, never mentions the seemingly ubiquitous consultation of an oracle book by means of lots or dice. At all events, Tibetan data are highly relevant to the study of all forms of divination in China, structurally as well as historically. Sinologists should be alerted to the bulk and the importance of these Tibetan materials.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804743347
• ISBN 13: 9780804743341
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248
• Editor: Faure Bernard