Heaven Is Empty , livre ebook

Heaven Is Empty
SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture

Roger T. Ames, editor
Heaven Is Empty
A CROSS-CULTURAL APPROACH TO “RELIGION” AND EMPIRE IN ANCIENT CHINA
FILIPPO MARSILI
Cover image of the Chinese Terracotta Warriors from iStockphoto.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Marsili, Filippo, author.
Title: Heaven is empty : a cross-cultural approach to “religion” and empire in ancient China / Filippo Marsili.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Series: SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017059913 | ISBN 9781438472010 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438472034 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: China—Religion—History. | China—Religious life and customs. | China—History—221 B.C.–960 A.D. | Han Wudi, Emperor of China, 156 B.C.–87 B.C. | China—Kings and rulers—Religious aspects—History.
Classification: LCC BL1825 .M37 2018 | DDC 299.5/1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059913
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Do you have Chinese ghosts? Millions. Said Lee.
We have more ghosts than anything else.
I guess nothing in China ever dies. It’s very crowded.
—John Steinbeck, East of Eden *
See, in these silences when things let themselves go and seem almost
to reveal their final secret, we sometimes expect to discover a flaw in Nature,
the world’s dead point, the link that doesn’t hold, the thread that,
disentangled, might at last lead us to the center of a truth …
These are the silences where we see in each departing human shade
some disturbed Divinity.
—Eugenio Montale, “The Lemon Trees” **

* John Steinbeck, East of Eden (New York: The Viking Press, 1952), 261.
** Eugenio Montale, “The Lemon Trees,” in Cuttlefish Bones , trans. William Arrowsmith (New York, W. W. Norton, 1992), 7; the original Italian poem is in Eugenio Montale, “I Limoni,” in Ossi di seppia (Milano: Mondadori, 1948), 10.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Introduction: An Empire without a “Religion”
1. Readings of the “Sacred”: Chinese Religion, Chinese Religions, and Religions in China
2. Writing the Empire: Ex Pluribus Plurima
3. Narrating the Empire: Metaphysics without God, “Religions” without Identity
4. Time, Myth, and Memory: Of Water, Metal, and Cinnabar
5. Place and Ritual: From Templum to Text
Conclusions: The Importance of Getting Lost
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
This book has been conceived and written throughout a long process and in different places. Innumerable teachers, colleagues, and friends made it possible with their help, encouragement, and example, and I hope I can at least duly acknowledge some of them here. Of course, the shortcomings, mistakes, and oversights are all mine.
The advice and support I received at Saint Louis University’s Department of history in the past few years from Phil Gavitt, Charles (Hal) Parker, Damian Smith, Torrie Hester, Mark Ruff, Silvana Siddali, Jennifer Popiel, Lorri Glover, Flannery Burke, Douglas Boin, Luke Yarbrough, Claire Gilbert, and Fabien Montcher have been both fundamental and heartwarming. I also am particularly grateful to Thomas Madden, Michal Rozbicki, and David Borgmeyer, whose contributions, respectively as heads of the Centers for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Intercultural Studies, and International Studies went beyond their individual generosity. Fellow Sinologist Pauline Lee of the Department of Theology has been crucial in helping me refine themes and arguments in my manuscript and for getting me acquainted with the latest developments of American scholarship on history of religions.
Christopher Ahn and Diane Ganeles of SUNY Press followed me with professionalism and patience making my first editorial experience with a monograph both instructive and pleasant. I am also grateful to the three anonymous readers for their precious comments and advice.
Among all the friends and colleagues who accompanied me during different phases of my project, I thank Rebecca Wanzo, Colin Burnett, Tobias Zürn, Jacqui Shine, Srdjan Smajic, Nicole Eaton, Victoria Smolkin, Wenshing Chou and Margaret Tillman for making the arguments, structure, and prose of the book much more effective (and tolerable) than they might have been otherwise.
Special words of gratitude are due to Miranda Brown, without whose thoughtful advice and graciousness Heaven is Empty would not have been possible, and David Spafford, who, as a mentor, colleague and friend, has inspired and helped me in so many ways over two decades that it would be impossible to provide an exhaustive account here.
I shall never be grateful enough to Professor Michael Loewe, who after a long day of conferences was so kind to spend his dinner time casting light on many questions I had on Emperor Wu of the Han.
As for my time as a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, many are the teachers to whom I am intellectually and personally indebted. Michael Nylan painstakingly guided me from the confusion on my early days in the U.S. through the early phases of an academic profession in Han studies. David Johnson, in addition to introducing me to the richness of Chinese popular culture, provided invaluable feedback on my final manuscript. By pointing out structural analogies between Chinese and Greco-Roman historiography, Carlos Noreña was the first to encourage me on the path of comparative history. Erich Gruen, Mary Elizabeth Berry, and Patricia Berger still represent models of intellectual rigor and compassion that one day I hope to emulate as a teacher and scholar. I am also thankful the Department of History, the Center for East Asian Studies, the Haas and Quinn foundations, and to Jennifer Nelson of the Robbins Collection at UC Berkeley for supporting me at different stages of my project.
Among the teachers I had in Italy, I am especially grateful to Paola Nardella, Claudia Santi, Corrado Pensa, Arcangela Santoro, as well as the late Piero Corradini, Daniela Tozzi Giuli, and Paolo Daffinà who, in different roles and at different institutions, passionately introduced me to historical and cultural aspects of the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean and of Inner and East Asia. A special mention goes to Chiara Peri of the Jesuit Refugee Service in Rome, where, as a volunteer, I started to grapple with the many aspects of the thorny question of interculturality.
I finally thank my families in Italy and Taiwan and my wife Lidan for the unconditioned love and support showed throughout this long process.
Filippo Marsili
Taipei, July 2018
Author’s Note
Heaven is Empty addresses theoretical questions that are of interest to the broader readership of world history and history of religions. I have therefore decided to depart from customary practice in Sinological studies and move the original Chinese passages that form the basis of my arguments from the body of the text. The interested reader will find the passages, along with their related philological questions, in the endnotes.
Introduction
An Empire without a “Religion”
I heard a saying that “he who knows the “heaven” of Heaven may make himself a king, but he who does not have this knowledge may not. To the king the people are Heaven, whereas to the people food is Heaven.
—Li Yiji, “The Mad Scholar” 1
Monotheisms and Globalizations
In the past few decades, discussions on the role of religion in shaping the interconnections of politics, society, and culture have acquired a particular urgency. Since the end of the Cold War, after 9/11, and even more so with the surge of IS, religion has come to occupy a central position in discourses on the most sensitive aspects of globalization. 2 Popular media, public intellectuals, and academics regularly address religion either as the main cause of conflict or as the potential basis for a harmonious intercultural dialogue. In either case, most analyses tend to reify religion as if it were an independent historical subject endowed with agency, and—more or less explicitly—regard it as the foundation stone of collective cultural identities. In other words, once it is redefined more broadly as an essential component of “culture,” religion constitutes a pivotal factor in the study of group attitudes toward politics and institutions, social distinctions, economic behaviors, gender relations, and sexuality. These ideas are so ingrained in Mediterranean and Euro-American worldviews that even openly secular or atheist authors tend to articulate their arguments within ethical and epistemological parameters that reflect the unitary and totalizing bias of monotheism. 3
Turning to the comparative study of ancient civilizations, the recent surge of China as a world power has prompted a new generation of scholars of antiquities to juxtapose Augustan Rome (27 BCE–14 CE) and Qin-Han China (221 BCE–220 CE) as two crucial phases in the trajectories of Western and Eastern civilization