Early China

Dragon bones in the medicine shop

In 1899 a Chinese scholar named Wang Yirong, ill with malaria, was sent a prescription that included "dragon bones" — old bones ground up as traditional medicine. Looking closely before they could be crushed, he noticed something no apothecary had thought to explain: the bones were covered in strange, archaic writing. Wang, an expert in ancient inscriptions, realized he was looking at a script far older than any then known. The bones were traced to fields near Anyang, in Henan, where farmers had for years been digging up "dragon bones" and selling them to pharmacies. They turned out to be the discarded tools of the royal fortune-tellers of the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BCE) — and they carried the oldest known Chinese writing, from around 1250 BCE.

These oracle bones are not myths or prayers; like the Linear B tablets of the last chapter, they are working documents — but of a very particular kind. They are the physical residue of divination, the direct record of the Shang kings asking their gods and ancestors questions and reading the answers. Through them we can listen in, word by word, on the religious life of a Bronze Age Chinese court. And what we hear is a religion built on two pillars that would shape Chinese civilization for the next three thousand years: the worship of ancestors, and the idea that Heaven itself judges the conduct of kings.

How writing was born from divination

The method was pyromancy — divination by fire. A diviner took a prepared ox shoulder-blade or turtle shell, applied a hot point to a hollow drilled in the back, and made it crack; the pattern of the cracks was read as the answer of the spirits. Often a scribe then inscribed onto the bone the question that had been asked ("Will the king's hunt be successful?" "Is the ancestor Father Yi sending this toothache?" "Will it rain?"), sometimes the king's own reading of the cracks, and occasionally, later, the verified outcome.

This is a striking educational fact worth dwelling on: Chinese writing appears to have been born in a religious, divinatory setting — not, as in Mesopotamia, out of accounting, nor, as in Egypt, primarily for monuments. The very character for "to divine," bu (卜), is a picture of one of those cracks, and its sound imitates the snap of the breaking bone. And unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs or Sumerian cuneiform, which died out, the oracle-bone script never stopped evolving: it is the direct ancestor of the Chinese characters still written by well over a billion people today — the world's only writing system in continuous use for over three millennia. From its origins, the Chinese written word carried an aura of the sacred.

The Shang cosmos: the Lord on High and the ancestors

At the summit of the Shang spirit-world stood Di, or Shangdi — "the Lord (on) High." Di was a remote, powerful high god who commanded the rain, the harvest, victory and defeat, and the fate of the great city. But here is the crucial peculiarity: Di was not worshipped directly, and ordinary people had no access to him at all. He was too high, too dangerous. He could be approached only through intermediaries — and those intermediaries were the royal ancestors, the dead kings of the Shang line.

This is the heart of early Chinese religion: ancestor veneration. The dead kings lived on as powerful spirits who could intercede with Di on the dynasty's behalf — or, if neglected or angered, could themselves inflict illness, bad harvests, and disaster. The living king's supreme religious duty was to keep this vast ancestral bureaucracy satisfied with a precisely scheduled calendar of sacrifices, and to consult it constantly through the oracle bones. Only the king (with his diviners) could communicate with the ancestors and, through them, with Di. Religious and political authority were one and the same: the king ruled because he alone could reach the powers that governed the world. Around Di and the ancestors stood lesser nature powers — the Yellow River, the sacred mountains, the winds of the four directions, the sun — also given offerings.

One honesty note belongs here. The Shang oracle bones contain no creation myth and no developed mythology of the sort we found in Mesopotamia or Greece. The famous Chinese creation stories — Pangu, the cosmic giant from whose body the world is made, and Nüwa, who fashions humans from clay — are attested only much later (largely in Han-era and later texts), and cannot simply be projected back onto the Shang.

Ritual, the bronzes, and the sacrificed dead

Shang worship was lavish and, by our standards, terrible. Offerings of grain, millet-wine, and animals were presented to the ancestors — and so, on a large scale, were human beings. The great royal tombs at Anyang were furnished with sacrificial victims (often war captives) and with companion burials — attendants who accompanied the king in death, as at Ur in Chapter 3. The intact tomb of Fu Hao, a warrior-queen and consort of King Wu Ding, discovered in 1976, held hundreds of bronzes and jades and sixteen sacrificed humans. Human sacrifice was a routine instrument of Shang religion, gradually declining under the Zhou.

The supreme sacred objects of the age were the ritual bronze vessels — and it is essential to understand that the Shang did not cast their magnificent bronzes to decorate a table but to feed the dead. These vessels held the food and wine offered at ancestral banquets, and their casting (by a sophisticated piece-mold technique) was itself a state-controlled, quasi-sacred industry. Their most famous decoration is the taotie: a frontal, symmetrical monster-mask, all eyes and jaws, belonging to no identifiable animal, staring out from the bronze. What the taotie meant is genuinely unknown — scholars have proposed a spirit-guardian, an apotropaic ward, a shamanic vision, or a purely decorative convention — and honesty requires leaving it open.

The wu, and the question of shamanism

Beside the king and his diviners stood another kind of religious specialist: the wu (巫), spirit-mediums attested from the oracle bones onward and associated with communicating with spirits, healing, exorcism, dream-reading, and above all rain — in a drought a wu might be exposed to the sun or even burned in a rite meant to force the spirits to send water. How to classify them is one of the liveliest debates in the field. K. C. Chang argued influentially that early Chinese kingship was itself shamanic — that the king was the paramount shaman, and that the whole apparatus of bronzes, divination, and animal imagery served ecstatic communion with the spirit world. David Keightley and others pushed back hard, arguing that the Shang theocrats look less like ecstatic soul-flight shamans on the Siberian model than like bureaucratic mediators managing an ancestral hierarchy through orderly ritual. A middle position notes that the Chinese evidence more often describes spirit-possession — a deity or ancestor entering the medium's body — than the autonomous soul-journey of the classic shaman. The clearest literary window is later and southern: the Nine Songs (Jiu Ge) of the state of Chu, ecstatic hymns in which a medium woos and is entered by a god, preserving a mediumistic tradition the northern oracle-bone record only hints at. That this dimension of early Chinese religion is real is not in doubt; whether "shaman" is the right word for it is exactly what scholars dispute.

The Zhou revolution: the Mandate of Heaven

Around 1046 BCE the Shang were conquered by the Zhou, a people from the west, and with them came one of the most consequential religious ideas in world history — an idea invented, in part, to solve a political problem. If the Shang kings ruled because they alone communed with Di and the ancestors, how could the Zhou justify overthrowing them?

Their answer reshaped Chinese thought. The Zhou elevated Tian — "Heaven" — as the supreme power, partly merging it with the older Shang Di but transforming its character: Tian was less a personal deity than an impersonal, moral, cosmic order, an all-seeing sky that cares about justice. And they proclaimed the Mandate of Heaven (Tianming): Heaven grants the right to rule to a dynasty so long as its kings govern with virtue (de) and for the people's welfare — and withdraws that mandate when they become corrupt and cruel. The Zhou argued that the last Shang king had grown so tyrannical and debauched that Heaven had stripped him of the Mandate and conferred it on the virtuous Zhou. The king became the Son of Heaven (Tianzi), Heaven's steward on earth.

The brilliance — and the danger — of this doctrine is that it is conditional and revocable. Unlike a claim of unconditional divine right, the Mandate of Heaven ties the legitimacy of every ruler to his moral conduct: misrule, and the resulting disorder, natural disasters, and rebellion are read as signs that Heaven has turned away. For three thousand years, down to the twentieth century, every Chinese dynasty justified itself, and every rebellion against a failing one, in these terms. It is a theory of politics as, fundamentally, a religious and ethical relationship between Heaven and the ruler.

Law and the moral order

Early China, like Greece, had no divine law-code delivered by a god. Its ordering principles were different and became the backbone of all later Chinese ethics:

- Li — ritual, ceremony, and proper conduct: the correct performance of rites (to ancestors, at court, in the family) was believed to keep human society and the cosmos in harmony. Order flows from doing the right things in the right way. - Xiao — filial piety: reverent devotion to one's parents and ancestors, the root virtue of a religion centered on the family dead. - De — virtue or moral power: the quality in a ruler that secures and keeps the Mandate of Heaven.

Heaven, in this system, is a moral auditor: it watches the ruler's de and responds to human conduct with order or calamity. This fusion of cosmology and ethics — the conviction that the moral behavior of rulers and the physical harmony of the world are directly linked — is early China's distinctive contribution, and it set the stage for Confucius, who in the next era would look back to this Zhou ideal of li and virtue as the cure for a collapsing age.

The textual record

Our sources are of two kinds. First, the contemporary inscriptions: the Shang oracle-bone script (jiaguwen) and the bronze inscriptions (jinwen) cast into Zhou ritual vessels, which record investitures, gifts, and dedications to ancestors. These are primary, unfiltered evidence. Second, the transmitted classics, compiled and edited over later centuries but preserving Zhou-era material: the Book of Documents (Shughing), the Book of Odes/Songs (Shijing), the Book of Rites, and the divination manual the Book of Changes (Yijing / I Ching). These are indispensable but must be read critically — they often present an idealized Zhou order, and their dates of composition and editing are debated.

What the ground shows

The archaeology is spectacular and, crucially, it complicates any simple story. The Shang capital at Anyang (Yinxu) has yielded the oracle bones, the royal tombs, and the bronze foundries. But early China was not a single monolithic culture. The site of Sanxingdui, in Sichuan, produced (from around 1200 BCE) astonishing bronze heads and masks with jutting eyes and a huge bronze "spirit tree" — an entirely distinct ritual tradition, contemporary with the Shang but unmentioned in any text, with no oracle bones and no obvious connection to the Anyang world. Sanxingdui is a standing reminder that the "early China" of the textual tradition is only the part that wrote — and that other, now-silent religious worlds flourished alongside it.

The believer's lens

In the Shang world, the living and the ancestors formed one continuous household, and the dead remained powerful members of the family who could bless or blight their descendants — so the central religious act was to feed and consult them through sacrifice and divination. Above the ancestors stood Di (or Shangdi), the high god who governed harvest, weather, and war, approached not directly but through the royal ancestors, who interceded. The king's unique power was precisely this access: he was the pivot between the human and spirit worlds, and his diviners cracked ox-bones and turtle-shells with heat to read the ancestors' will in the fractures. When the Zhou overthrew the Shang, they reframed the whole cosmos with the Mandate of Heaven (Tianming): Heaven grants the right to rule to the virtuous and withdraws it from the corrupt, so that dynasties fall justly and the moral order of the cosmos is bound to the conduct of kings — an idea that would anchor Chinese political religion for three thousand years.

The skeptical lens

Early China is unusual in that its earliest religion is known from primary documents of the rite itself — the oracle bones, the actual records of Shang divination, unmediated by later editors — which makes the Shang ancestor-and-Di cult exceptionally well attested, even as the later transmitted texts that describe it are read more critically. The great scholarly debate the chapter flags is over the wu (spirit-mediums) and whether early Chinese religion was fundamentally shamanic: K. C. Chang's influential thesis of shaman-kings communing with the spirit world stands against Keightley's picture of a sober bureaucratic cult of divination, and the evidence genuinely underdetermines the answer. The Mandate of Heaven, likewise, is transparently a piece of political theology — a doctrine that conveniently legitimized the Zhou conquest — however sincerely later held. History attests the divination, the sacrifices, the ancestor cult, and the Mandate doctrine; the reality of Di and the ancestors' power is recorded as the belief that structured a civilization, not a finding.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Few traditions in this archive make sacred encoding as central as early China, where the reading of signs was the religion.

The sacred character. As we saw, Chinese writing was born in divination, and it never lost that aura. The written character was treated with reverence for millennia (paper bearing writing was not to be casually discarded), and the continuity of the script — oracle-bone graph to modern character — gave the Chinese a sense of the written word as a sacred inheritance. The act of writing was, from the start, close to the act of contacting the divine.

Reading Heaven's cracks. Shang divination was itself a decoding system: the heat-made cracks in bone and shell were treated as a script written by the spirits, which the trained diviner learned to interpret. Divination was not a marginal superstition but the central technology of Shang statecraft — a way of turning Heaven's will into readable signs.

The Book of Changes. Out of Zhou divination grew the most sophisticated of all Chinese encoding systems, the Yijing (Book of Changes). Its core is a set of 64 hexagrams, each built of six stacked lines that are either broken (— —) or unbroken (—). By casting and counting yarrow stalks, a diviner generated a hexagram, and consulted the text attached to it and its changing lines. It is, in effect, a binary map of cosmic situations — a code of sixty-four archetypal patterns of change. An honesty note, per the standard: the divinatory core (the Zhouyi) dates to the early Zhou, but the famous philosophy usually read into it — the systematic doctrine of yin and yang and the elaborate cosmological commentaries (the "Ten Wings") — was added much later (Warring States and Han periods) and should not be projected back onto its Bronze Age origins.

Round Heaven, square Earth. The Chinese worked sacred meaning in jade, the hardest and most precious of materials, from Neolithic times. Two ritual jade forms are especially charged: the bi, a flat disc with a central hole, and the cong, a tube square on the outside and round within. Later ritual texts associate the round bi with Heaven and the square cong with Earth, encoding the ancient Chinese cosmology of a round heaven arching over a square earth. (Honesty requires noting that this neat Heaven/Earth reading comes largely from later texts, and the original meaning of the Neolithic jades is not certain — but the ritual sacredness of jade is beyond doubt.)

The center and the four directions. The Shang conceived their world as a cross: the king and his capital at the sacred center, surrounded by the four quarters and their winds — a cosmological geometry that placed the ruler at the pivot between Heaven and the human world.

Connections

Early China is the great study in contrast for this era. Developing in relative isolation from the Near Eastern and Mediterranean world, it produced a religion strikingly unlike the others in this archive: with no creator god, no anthropomorphic pantheon rich in myth, and no separate priesthood — instead, an impersonal moral Heaven, a spirit-world of ancestors, and a king who was priest, diviner, and Son of Heaven in one. Where Israel (Chapter 7) was moving toward one transcendent God and Greece (Chapter 8) toward a family of vivid Olympians, China built its sacred order around the family dead and the moral scrutiny of Heaven. Forward, everything here flows into the next era's Axial Age: Confucius will make the Zhou ideal of li, xiao, and virtue the basis of his teaching; Daoism will draw on the older nature-cosmology and the way (Dao) of Heaven; and the Yijing's lines will be philosophized into the full yin-yang system. The Mandate of Heaven, meanwhile, will outlast every dynasty that invoked it.

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch09.html · a comparative library of the sacred.