The cult of worthies: A study of shrines honoring local Confucian worthies in the Sung Dynasty (960-1279).

摘要

This thesis examines the dramatic spread of local shrines honoring recently deceased, exemplary men. Founded in government and private schools and Buddhist monasteries, they were distinct from ancestral temples and the state-sponsored Temples to Confucius and represent a new level of communal and individual religion in Confucianism. Worthies' shrines had no place in the classical Confucian tradition. To legitimize them, Sung Confucians reinterpreted canonical ritual texts and established informal criteria for enshrinement. This thesis argues that changes in these criteria and in the qualities that defined worthies reflect the changing goals and self-conceptions of the Sung elite. As the elite turned its attention from national government to local society, retired literati known for their local activities replaced nationally renowned military heroes and court officials in the shrines.; Beginning in the late eleventh century successive elite groups, critical of the government, appropriated the shrines to disseminate their own political views. The shrines soon honored the persecuted members of these groups and became an institutional expression of Confucian martyrology. Up to the thirteenth century, one criterion of enshrinement was a connection between the worthy and the location of his shrine. When the Learning of the Way (Tao-hsueh) movement of Neo-Confucian adopted the local shrines as its own, it broke with this criterion and developed an empire-wide network of shrines honoring five of its founders as national, not local, worthies who had succeeded to the transmission of the true Confucian Way (tao-t'ung). By 1241, the success of this movement convinced the emperor to enshrine these five men in the imperial Temple to Confucius, the symbolic locus of state orthodoxy. The court thus signalled its acceptance of a Neo-Confucian ideology that had long been established in local elite society. This work examines 115 years of court debates leading to this momentous decision, which we now see as the first step in the rise of the state orthodoxy that would last until 1905.