Fig 8
The third bronze pictured (Fig 4 and 5) is a lacquered and painted “Hu” vase from about the second/first century BC, and from Sichuan Province, which seems to depict a scene similar to the story told in the poem. On the one side of the vase is a shamaness dancing frantically. You can just about make out long flowing sleeves, much longer than her arms, which exaggerate the power of her dancing. And her dance is accompanied by musicians, you can see playing a variety of instruments, in pairs on the other three sides of the vase. The shamaness goes into a trance state, expressing the sexual contact with the god, and the community is drawn in, playing its part in this ritual of making contact with the spirit world
Fig 9
What was happening for the community in these rituals? What was achieved?
Firstly the rituals were very expressive in attempting to forge a very intimate connection with the world of the gods, expressed sexually. Perhaps this is an symbol of the union that was necessary for harmony in the society. Secondly there is an acknowledgement that this bond will always be fleeting. The god can never be possessed, and although this is a cause of great sadness, particularly, it also serves a protective function in expressing implicitly the importance to the community of not being overwhelmed or engulfed by the world of the gods. In Waley’s translation of the song , quoted above the gods are seen as immensely powerful.
“He harnesses his dragon-shaft, rides on his thunder-wheels,
He carries banners of cloud that twist and trail.”
He is a great threat to the uninitiated. The shamaness bares the full responsibility of keeping the channels open with the other world whilst still protecting the community from being overwhelmed by very powerful forces. Ancient Chinese cities were enclosed by huge walls and the people were constantly under the threat of attack from neighbours and also from wild animals. This was their external environment, which led to a very paranoid mindset. It would have its concomitant internal environment where the soul was subject to similar attacks. One role of the shaman would then be as protector and boundary keeper for the community, providing safety in a very unpredictable, unknown and frightening world.
In the words of the myth of the severence of heaven/earth communication :
“ men lost their reverence for the spirits, the spirits violated the rules of men, and natural calamities arose” until “ the proper place of the spirits and the proper place of men” were reinstated.
Fig 10
During the Warring States and Han Dynasty, many very beautiful pottery dancing ladies and kneeling men in flowing robes were produced, and I take these as representing dancers participating in the sort of ritual for the dead, which I have described above depicted in Fig 4 and 5, or in a prayerful engagement with the deceased. I have, however, found a small bronze figure of one of these men, and reputedly again from Sichuan Province, near the Hubei border, which in contrast to many such figures is not beautiful. This man has several interesting characteristics. Firstly his ears are in the form of a snake, a creature from the underworld, and secondly his eyes are uncharacteristically large and penetrating. I take him to represent a shaman who accompanies the dead on their journey through the underworld - the role of the snake, and a shaman intently focussed on his task. As the "Hu" and this figure are from a similar location, and a similar period, I think they reinforce the thesis I am proposing, that shamanism was alive and well, certainly in the Warring States/Han Dynasty, in this part of China. Thirdly his body is also out of proportion with extremely short legs, and it is likely that he was a dwarf or disabled in some way, a group in society who often became Shamen.
Fig 11
Fig 12
I have some x-rays of this figure (Figs 8 and 9) and one can see there are two breaks. The knee has been broken off at some point in its history, and so has the head.
Fig 13
I suspect that this is not by accident, but rather that this figure was used to enact curses, to maim and to kill an enemy.
Another piece, which seems to belong in this section of the blog, is a belt buckle, again from Sichuan Province, and the Warring states or Han period. it is a very powerful and beautifully modelled example, of a tiger eating a snake.
Fig 14
Again I see this as a piece linked to Shamanism, expressing the old magical religion. Just like the human figure above, this piece is likely to have been used by someone enlisting the help of a Shaman to exert power over people, to do them good, or, much more likely, to do them harm, to put spells on them. I think the belt buckle has a lot to do with revenge and a battle for supremacy, an attempt by one person to take away another person’s, or another tribe's, potency. This religious thinking still goes on today, particularly in certain regions of China like Sichuan, but actually probably over many areas of the country.
Finally a very strange piece, yet again from Sichuan, and from the Ba Shu culture, a culture which is linked to the strange pit finds at Sanxingdui (Fig 11 and 12)
Fig 15
Fig 16
It is not at all clear, as is true of many Ba Shu pieces, such as the Sanxingdui pit finds, what its purpose would be, or even what is being depicted. It is a hollow tube (10 cms tall) with a section marked with dots and lines, surmounted by a head. It seems too narrow to be a staff head. The animal depicted at the top seems to be a composite of a bird with large eyes, a tiger with small "c" shaped ears and very sharp teeth, and a snake? The eyes seem very important in the depiction, as is the case with the Sanxingdui pieces, and indeed the taotie depiction on Shang and western Zhou bronzes. The bird, the tiger and the snake were all central creatures in shamanic ritual. The conflation of these animals seems to indicate quite an early date, as by the Spring and Autumn period more realism in the depiction of animals was becoming the norm.
CHANGES IN THE APPEARANCE OF CHINESE BRONZES DURING THE EASTERN ZHOU PERIOD
The appearance of ancient Chinese bronzes gives us a very important window into the world of the early dynasties. During the period of the Shang (approx 1500–1050 BC) and the Western Zhou (approx 1050-771 BC) the decoration on these bronzes was largely depicted in an impressionistic way, which conveyed a mood; feelings of awe, fear, dread, mystery and reverence, and these feelings were particularly evoked by the penetrating eyes of the taotie, always the most compelling feature. This pair of staring eyes was always central to the decoration. Although the taotie was infinitely variable in design, and incorporated a variety of animal representations, it always carried a hypnotic compulsion. Strange animals were depicted around this focus, where an animal head might have two bodies, or a dragon and a bird would be combined into one image. The religious mindset that these people inhabited was to be caught up in the terrifying and numinous world of the ancestors, and ritual bronzes were a vital part of this. This ethos grew out of powerful ancestral myths, to which Sarah Allan gives us a backcloth , in “The Problem of Meaning in Early Chinese Ritual Bronzes” (1990). She outlines how the religious beliefs, at the time of the Shang, belonged to an arena that was beyond this world, where logic of necessity did not apply. In fact to move away from reality was a crucial sign that the sacred was being expressed. Art in the early dynasties emerged from these myths and attempted to express religious truths in a similar language, alluding to reality but radically distorting it, creating a very mysterious world.
The expression of instinctive feeling in Shang art seems to come from a place in the personality where things are largely unprocessed, and the art has a rawness about it. Intellectual reflection seems to have had little place in mediating its impact for the designer of the art, or for the observer. This rawness seems to be integral to its power in conveying the religious beliefs to the people, and sustaining those beliefs in the community.
The Shang myths dominated everything. The ancestors were not only the focus of the people’s religious beliefs but also the focus of the whole community’s life. The world of the ancestors took precedence and priority over this world. Shang palaces were relatively small but a huge labour force and massive resources were devoted to the construction of royal tombs. Even the endless warfare that the Shang kings embarked on, seem to largely be about providing myriad human sacrifices to the ancestors.
But then things changed quite radically during the Eastern Zhou period (771–221 BC). The myths faded into the background. This world began to take on more importance. Royal palaces became vast. Wu Hung in his book “Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture” ( 1995 ) speaking of Eastern Zhou palaces says :
“some of these structures, more than a hundred metres high, helped their owners intimidate and even terrorize political opponents. These palatial buildings contradicted the old ancestral temple in every respect. They did not guide people back to the Origin through a temporal ritual sequence but displayed the immediate power of the current ruler.”
Prestige was the order of the day, and decoration on their bronzes took on more of a this worldly feel, more three-dimensionality of form, and more grandeur. Even though some animals that were portrayed were weird and wonderful, many were depicted in a more naturalistic sense. This was, of course, expressing many changes that were happening in Chinese society and in the religion and culture of the time.
Charles Weber said of these changes :
“It must have been a dynamic situation which existed in China in the early centuries of Later Zhou, as the older feudal system gradually disintegrated which called forth this new, pictorial art.”
Bronze decoration began to break out of its narrow forms, and threw off constraint. The taotie lost its importance, in terms of both its religious and aesthetic power. With the waning of Shang religious traditions, the taotie no longer carried its old hypnotic force to the people of a new era, and I suspect many would have been unsure as to its meaning. With this came the undermining of ritual practices which happened slowly over a long period of time. Keightley comments on this gradual erosion :
“The whole process of divination has become more artificial, more routine, less spontaneous, less dramatic, less important…Man rather than the ancestors, was thought to be increasingly capable of handling his own fate”
Religion had moved from an almost visceral sense of mystery to a more intellectual ambience, and to parading a person’s wealth. I would like to illustrate this with reference to three Eastern Zhou bronzes that have been in my collection for a number of years.
Fig 17
The contemporary culture, at any time in a people’s history, is a continuation of what has gone before, and this holds for a nation’s art too. Many familiar images from the past were retained, but transformed to meet the new era. One example of this is the “bi” disc, of very simple form, which goes back to Neolithic times. Here in fig 1 it appears at the heart of a gilded bronze stand. The “bi” itself has been embellished with striations, enfolded in an outer circle of two dragons, supported by two further dragons at its feet and surmounted by yet two more dragons. A very simple image has taken on considerable complexity, and then has been coated in gold, and in the process the “bi” disc has moved a long way from its original simple form and meaning. It must have had a very different significance for its original owner, a local ruler in Gansu Province, than it had in Neolithic times. Some of the vessel shapes also had a continuity with the past but again had very distinctive changes. The “gui”, a vessel used for sacrificial rice, dating back to Shang/Western Zhou times, became much grander. Rather than simply being a decorated container, it began to be raised up on a collar, mounted on a square plinth, with far more substantial handles than would have been in evidence in earlier times. This gave it a much more powerful presence and it became known as a “fang gui” as is the case with this example from Shanxi Province illustrated in fig. 2. Again issues of prestige took precedence over the ritual cult.
Fig 18
The shifts going on in society over the centuries were also evident from the inscriptions on the bronze vessels. On Shang bronzes the inscriptions were very brief and normally consisted of a simple dedication to a particular ancestor. This began to change in the Western Zhou period and continued apace throughout this dynasty’s time in power, where inscriptions became much longer, and usually recorded the deeds of the owner, in a society where rank and prestige had become dominant. Wu Hung makes a link between these new inscriptions and changing decoration on the bronzes :
“I strongly suggest an intimate relationship between inflating inscription and deflating decoration – two phenomena that together attest to the growing importance of words over images”
This changed again by the time we reach the Eastern Zhou and in this period inscriptions had become comparatively rare. In line with this the “fang gui” in fig 2, has no inscription, but certainly fits with Wu Hung’s comment on the diminishing decoration on the body of the vessel. In this case it simply consists of many abstract whorls and swirls with no obvious meaning.
Another change in the Eastern Zhou period, described in texts of the time, was that certain bronze vessels began to be prescribed as appropriate for the tombs of specific ranks of nobility. So the tomb of a duke or a marquis would have a similar complement of bronzes to the tomb of another duke or marquis, with broadly similar decoration. This again was a mark of an increasingly affluent society. Gone was any sense of ritual meaning. The transaction had moved away from a human/ancestor transaction. It had become fundamentally a very human affair. Wu Hung illustrates the transition so succinctly in his book “Monumentality”, through picturing a beautiful Eastern Zhou bird shaped bronze vessel with a gold inlay inscription which reads : “The gentleman commissioned this bird for amusement”!
The changing inscriptions and the new written prescriptions give a clue that this fundamental change in society seems to have primarily been brought about by the advent of literacy. Once myths were written down they could be discussed and thought about, rather than simply acted on. People reflected on the myths rather than lived their lives immersed in them. Different versions could be compared, inconsistencies could come to the surface, and perhaps most importantly the many fantastical elements could be brought into question and be eventually discarded. Eastern Zhou intellectuals became increasingly sceptical of the religious beliefs of the past. This resulted in a sharp division being drawn between the many mythic beliefs of the past, which defied reason, and the expression of those beliefs in precious images, in which the people’s artistic heritage was enshrined.
Fig 19
The erosion of mythic content is well illustrated in the openwork bronze vessel shown in fig 3. This is another Eastern Zhou vessel, which shows us how the imagery of one of the Shang myths has been kept, whilst seemingly losing touch with its original mythic content. As I mentioned in my article in “Asian Art” of March this year on shamanism, various animals were thought to function as helpers to the shaman in crossing from this world to the world of the ancestors. One of the ways the animal was seen to facilitate this journey was by its breath, which the ancient Chinese believed was the cause of the wind. The wind took the shaman on his journey. There are a number of examples on bronzes where a human figure, the shaman, has a tiger on either side of him, mouths wide open breathing on him. There are also many references to shamans wearing snakes to produce the wind, but also one particularly revered ancestor from deep in the mists of time, called Pu Ting who wore a green snake on each ear, and in other texts had two tigers beside his head. When we look at the handles of the vessel in fig 3 we see the face of a tiger with a snake behind each ear. It seems likely that some elements have been taken from this much earlier myth of Pu Ting, and transposed on to this beautiful openwork bronze vessel, but the ancestor himself, Pu Ting, is lost, and the myth is now pure decoration. I am only aware of two other examples of this form of vessel, both of which are in the Nanjing Museum, a picture of which can be seen below.
Fig 20
It is not totally clear from this picture, but inside the outer casing of openwork, is an inner lining of bronze. The question immediately arises, as to how the piece was put together? The outer casing was, in fact made, in two halves, joined at the bronze strip where the animal masks are affixed, and were joined together around the inner casing. With the piece in my collection, there is no inner casing of bronze but it is likely that there was an alternative layer of a different material, such as wood, which has since decomposed. One can also see from the detail of the Nanjing piece below, the intricate gold and silver inlay, which on my piece has completely been lost over the centuries.
Fig 21
What else had changed during this period? By 722 BC the Western Zhou king was no longer the supreme ruler and the dynasty broke up into about a hundred vassal independent states, and the rulers of these states were effectively sovereign. Although there was a considerable amount of warfare, in the early years of the Eastern Zhou, it was largely small scale, and diplomacy grew greatly in importance. This meant that the population could grow more easily, there was more leisure time, there was more opportunity for trade, and it was much more possible for wealth to accumulate. It was also the time when great philosophers, like Confucius, began to emerge and sought employment at the competing courts. These factors all played their part in bringing about profound changes in the art of the day.
So what was gained and what was lost in these artistic changes in the Eastern Zhou period? Well obviously what was gained was a greater realism. Superstition began to diminish. The reflective mind was brought to bear, and consciousness and self-consciousness entered the frame, bringing to bronze decoration a very distinctive and sophisticated beauty of its own. Far greater diversity began to emerge in bronze design between the different courts. Attempts began, between different craftsmen, and different patrons, to outdo each other, both in skill of execution and in flair of design, and this led to some amazing examples of bronze vessel.
But was anything lost? My personal view is that a great deal was lost. A word I used for the way the Shang decorated their vessels was visceral. The images, and even the shapes of the vessels, came from a very unconscious place within the human psyche, and this has an impact, still today, on the power and the sense of awe the early bronzes communicate to many who see them. The craftsmen reached to a place in their personalities more full of instinctual feeling, and with less recourse to conscious processes. My sense is, that in much of the best of more contemporary art today, there is an attempt to get back to this visceral place; ie some of Henry Moore’s sculptures or Picasso’s bronzes depicting animals. Perhaps periods of “enlightenment” and intellectualisation in the creative process, for all its advantages, brought a certain straight jacketing to our artistic expression. There seems to me to be much common ground between these strange bedfellows – ancient art and some contemporary art. Maybe there are some attempts to come full circle.
THE IMAGE OF THE BIRD AND THE SUN
Fig 22
Some years ago I acquired a Tang Dynasty (618-906 AD) gilded bronze staff-head pictured in fig 1. It depicts a small bird sitting on top of a round serrated disc, (probably a depiction of the sun) on top of a lotus flower, and connected to a hollowed, engraved and ribbed stem, which holds the upper portion of the original wood of the staff. It comes from the Tang capital “Chang’an”, now Xian, and would obviously have had some importance in the ceremonial proceedings of the time. I began to wonder what was the significance of its design, why a bird, why this type of little bird, why gold, was the serrated disc the sun, and why a lotus flower? Also what kind of ceremony would it have been used for, religious or secular? Who would have carried it in the ceremony? What would its function have been?
To start to explore this, my mind went back to the Shang Dynasty (approx 1500–1050 BC), and one of the central myths of the early bronze age in China, which Sarah Allan describes in great detail in her book “The Shape of the Turtle”. The myth I’m referring to is the myth of the ten suns making their way across the sky in daily sequence, and I will describe it very briefly. In the Shang period it was believed that there was a “Fu Sang” (or mulberry) tree in the east in which ten suns perched, and each day one sun rose, and made its journey to the “Ruo” tree in the west. The “Ruo” tree had water at its base, which the sun would enter, and begin its journey through the underworld back to the “Fu Sang” tree, then join the queue till it was its turn again to make the journey across the sky giving rise to a ten day week. The water, joining the two trees, was called the Yellow Springs, and this may have been named to reflect the yellow loess from which many springs bubble up in the Anyang area, the site of the capital of the late Shang Dynasty. It also, of course, has an association with the golden colour of the sun. There were slightly different versions of the myth. The ten suns were sometimes thought of as birds, or birds were thought to be carrying the suns, or birds were thought of as being inside the suns. Mythically the suns and the birds were closely linked together. When the Zhou came to power (1050 BC), they believed in only one sun, and this was accommodated in the myth by the story of Archer Yi, who shot nine of the suns/birds from the sky, leaving only one.
So what might this myth have to say in relation to the gilded bronze staff-head? Could the serrated disc be a representation of the sun? There seems some significance in the juxtaposition of this golden bird and the sun-like disc, on which it sits. Is there a link between this ceremonial staff-head and the Shang myth? It is hard to say at this juncture, but it makes me more curious as to what role the bird and the sun played, in the traditions of the Tang? I will come back to this.
My thoughts then went back much further in China’s history, to three inscribed jade “bi” discs in the Freer Museum (fig 2), which originate from the Liangzhu culture (approx 3,500-2,500 BC) on the eastern coast of China, and which bear images with certain similarities to the staff-head. All the jade images are small and eccentrically positioned, and do not contribute to the shape of the object, nor have any significant decorative value. These observations strongly suggest that these images were solely in place because of the importance of their meaning to the Liangzhu people. The jade inscriptions have three things in common :
1) a realistically drawn bird, very similar in appearance to the bird on the staff-head.
2) a stepped structure which could be an altar probably indicating the religious significance of the image.
3) a circle on the front side of the altar which most probably represents the sun. Similar images have actually been found distributed over a large area of the eastern coast. of China.
There are also other details on the jade inscriptions which are quite curious. In the second of the three images a bird’s tail is added to the sun motif along with two flanking bird’s heads with hooked beaks. This even more emphatically links the bird with the sun echoing the Shang myth. In the first image the bird has a curious round spot on its shoulder, and this is repeated in some later works of art. An example of this is another piece from my collection, (fig 3) which has a similar shoulder spot and is from the Warring States period (475-221 BC). It is a finial, probably from the canopy of some form of chariot, and interestingly the bird also has a hooked beak, as in the second image from the Freer Museum jades. I began to wonder what this shoulder spot signifies? Maybe it also has a link with the sun? In the third image on the Freer jades there is an oval design with two vertical lines which replaces the sun motif, but this transforms the image into the Chinese pictograph for the sun, again reinforcing the notion that we are indeed dealing with images of the sun. There thus seems to be a strong tradition of related images, involving a bird and a representation of the sun, which span a huge period of Chinese history and this seems to be quite central to early religious beliefs.
Fig 23
So what connection is there between these ancient images and the staff-head? Is there a link between the Shang myth, which seems to have roots in an even earlier time, and the religious or secular influences in Tang society? Perhaps the place to start is to get a sense of what Chang’an was like as a city at the time of the Tang, and who were the prime movers in terms of influence? The sheer size of the city, thought to have been the largest in the world at that time, with a population of about two million, was perhaps its greatest source of wonder. It drew people from far and wide and was a great centre for trade and intellectual and religious debate. But the three prime influences, at the heart of the echelons of power, were Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, and I want to look at each of these in turn to see if they throw any light on what the function of the staff-head might have played.
Lets begin with Confucianism, as the Confucian ethic was the single most important factor in determining the structure and style and values of Tang Dynasty life. Confucius’s teachings formed the basis for the official examinations, which controlled entry into the higher ranks of Tang government administration, and these were based on four ancient classical writings, the “Yi Jing” the “Shu Jing”, the “Shi Jing” and the “Li Ji”. The first two go back to Shang Dynasty times, commenting on ancient divination practices from that period, and the mythical rulers of pre-dynastic history, “Yao” and “Shun”. These works, of course predated Confucius (born 551 BC), and he has been seen as editor and commentator on these classics, in his conversations recorded in the Analects. His philosophy which concerned the ordering of society, and man’s humanistic qualities and virtues, developed through education, particularly the ancient texts. This was given a public face in the Tang period by a multitude of rituals and ceremonies, so it is very possible that images from the Shang Dynasty, like the sun and the bird, would have played a considerable part in the Confucian rituals in Chang’an, by virtue of their ancient roots. The imagery, however, would almost certainly have been transformed in meaning, and stripped of its mythological significance. This idea is given a certain weight by the fact that the myth of ten suns or one, seems to be alluded to in the teachings of Mencius (372-289 BC), one of Confucius’ closest followers. He quotes Confucius, affirming the Zhou belief that there is only one sun saying :
“Heaven does not have two suns; the people do not have two kings”.
This quotation also occurs in the Li Ji, one of the four ancient classics and would have been well known to Confucian scholars in the Tang period. He also refers to the Yellow Springs which of course are associated with the sun myth. It is interesting to ponder whether Mencius is associating the sun with the king in some way?
Though Confucianism was the guiding philosophy in practical affairs in Tang society, it had nothing to say about man’s curiosity about the supernatural. To cater for this need, people turned to Taoism, which was the only Chinese philosophy which approached what might be called a religion. Like Confucianism, Taoism arose out of the intellectual ferment of the late Zhou period, but dismissed the ethical concerns of Confucianism, and concentrated on nature, and the forces of the universe. At first sight Taoism might seem even more fertile soil for the imagery enshrined in the staff-head, but I’m not sure this is the case. Taoists saw man as a small ephemeral part of nature. Man and nature were forever changing, and only the “Tao”, the grand design of the universe, was constant. This meant that Taoism and Confucianism were diametrically opposed. The Confucian belief in placing man’s search for order, benevolence, righteousness, propriety, virtue, learning, knowledge, and humanity at the centre of things, was of no import to the Taoist, and was even seen as destructive. The opposition of the two faiths is clearly expressed in a Taoist statement like: “When the great Tao is abandoned, benevolence and righteousness (two of the central Confucian tenets) arise”. Confucianism fills the vacuum when Taoism is rejected. The true Taoist would thus be quite resistant to having anything to do with the Confucian elite, the affairs of State, or any form of ceremonial, as this would compromise his beliefs by putting man at the centre of things. One of Taoism’s greatest writers, Zhuang Zi, was offered a ministerial position and wrote :
“Go away! Do not defile me! I would rather enjoy myself frolicking in the mire than be haltered to the ruler of a State. To the end of my life I will never take office. Thus I will remain free to follow my own inclinations.”
In the light of this it is highly unlikely that the staff-head would have had any ceremonial links with Taoism. However, in the free thinking environment of the Tang court, Taoism still very much had a place, and its importance was recognised, even though it largely rejected the structure of the Confucian dominated hierarchical system.
The third major influence in Tang society was Buddhism, and no other foreign ideology made such a lasting impact on Chinese society. This was really because the Chinese were confronted, for the first time, with a religion promising eternal bliss and salvation. This was tremendously popular in its appeal and soon began to have an impact on all strata of society. By the fifth and sixth century, and above all by the Tang Dynasty, Buddhist monks had become very much part of the establishment by becoming political and military advisors to the government. This cemented a strong connection between the Buddhist religion and the state. It was possible for this to happen because in the higher echelons of society there was a thirst for a more other-worldly religion, with more pageantry and colour to brighten up the dryness of Confucianism. This interweaving of the two belief systems began to have ramifications, and Buddhism became much more visible in an environment dominated by Confucianism. One manifestation was in art, where symbols like the lotus flower, a distinctively Buddhist image, began to appear very frequently. The lotus flower appears on the staff-head, holding the bird and the sun, and so it is important to understand its meaning in the Buddhist tradition. The lotus flower lives in water and in the morning it rises to the surface and the flower opens. It stays open throughout the day and then when evening comes it closes and sinks into the water again, rising yet again the next day The lotus is seen as emerging from the slime and corruption of the underworld, it grows up through the purifying water to emerge into the sunlight, and this is seen as a metaphor of the individual moving towards enlightenment through birth, suffering, death and rebirth. emerging into paradise or Nirvana. The Pure Land Sect of Buddhism predominated in Tang China, where faith and good conduct were rewarded by rebirth in the Western Paradise of Amitabha Buddha.
The image of the lotus flower obviously has a close link to the Shang myth of the ten suns tracing their paths through the sky in turn, to the “Ruo” tree in the west, then travelling underground through the water to rise again into the “Fu Sang” tree in the east at the dawning of the new day. If however we explore the Shang myth further, the parallels with the Buddhist image of the lotus, and the beliefs of the Pure Land Sect, become even more significant. The sun-bird myth also seems to have associations with beliefs about an individual’s birth, death and rebirth in the Shang culture.
Firstly birth – “Xihe”, the wife of “Di Jun”, ancestors of the Shang, were believed, through their union, to have produced the sun birds as offspring. This creates a metaphorical link between the suns birds and the people of the Shang. This is made more explicit in the “Shi Jing” where it states:
“Heaven commanded that black bird
It descended and gave birth to the Shang”
This bird that gave birth to the Shang was the same as the bird of the suns.
Secondly death - According to Sarah Allan, the first reference to the Yellow Springs, the underworld regions to which the ten suns travelled, is in a Han Dynasty text where Duke Zhuang of Qing, who had been wronged by his mother, swore to her that they would not meet again until they reached the Yellow Springs, ie the land of the dead. The text goes on to imply that if you dug deep down into the earth anywhere, you would reach the Yellow Springs. This therefore links the journey that the sun birds made through the underworld with the journey the Shang people would make at death.
Thirdly rebirth – The passage through the Yellow Springs then led to a new cycle of life for the suns, as indeed it was believed to do for the people. The kings and their relatives particularly, were buried in very deep tombs to ensure that in death they entered the Yellow Springs and were equipped, with ample provision of food and wine to sustain them on the journey to rebirth in the world of the ancestors. The ten sun myth thus almost certainly arose because of the preoccupation of the Shang with death and what happened after death. This gave the Shang people some security in the face of their mortality.
Fig 24
On a fragment of pottery from the Yangshao culture (approx 5000-3000 BC) is depicted a three-legged black bird, laying an egg inside a light coloured disc, obviously representing the sun. This is perhaps the earliest representation of the sun-bird myth, and it is from this egg that the ancestors of the Shang were believed to have emerged. Why the bird has three legs is somewhat of a mystery, but Sarah Allan suggests one possibility, in that the Shang calendar was based on a ten day week and a thirty day month. Thus each sun would appear three times a month. This three-legged bird seems to be very present again by the time we reach the earliest bronze age site so far discovered at Yanshi Erlitou, where seven three-legged undecorated bronze wine vessels called “jue” were found. “Jue” is the name of a small bird as well as a three-legged ritual vessel. It resembles the shape of a bird with a beak and a tail (fig 4 is an undecorated but beautifully formed “jue” from the Shang Dynasty). This type of vessel came to have a particular importance for the Shang in terms of provision for the journey through the underworld, again creating a link between the journey of the sun bird and the journey of deceased members of the community.
Returning now to the Tang staff-head, I am wondering what transformations these early beliefs had gone through over the centuries, and also how they were affected by Buddhist influence when we reach the Tang Dynasty? Whatever had happened, it seems likely that the staff-head would have had a role in ceremonies to do with rites of passage from life to death and subsequent hopes of rebirth, and this gives us an interesting window into how interwoven Buddhism had become with traditional Chinese beliefs, both in the blending of images on the staff-head, and the mythological content of the two belief systems. One might wonder whether the pre-eminence of the Pure Land Sect of Buddhism was a factor which enabling Buddhism to fit together with established Chinese mythology?
Who might have carried the staff? A likely candidate may have been the Confucian/Buddhist equivalent of the shaman, who in the early dynasties supervised the transitions between this world and the world of the ancestors. Both Confucianism and Buddhism had tremendous reverence for the past, and sacrifices to the ancestors were certainly a regular part of Tang Dynasty life. Would this have been a role that a Buddhist monk would have been suited to perform? If this was the case he would have brought pageantry and colour to the ceremony, in a very different way to the shaman of old?
Finally I’m taken back to the quotation from Mencius I mentioned earlier :
“Heaven does not have two suns; the people do not have two kings”
It left me wondering, and this is pure conjecture, whether the image of the sun and the bird had a specific link in the Shang psyche with the life, death and rebirth of the king. If this was the case it could mean that the staff had a place in rituals which were linked either to sacrifices to royal ancestors, or funerals/sacrifices concerning members of the Tang royal family, and their journeys in the afterlife. We may never know for sure, but certainly this staff-head has encouraged me to try to bring together various threads from the mysterious world of ancient China.
A PANTHEON OF ANIMAL ANCESTORS
In this article I would like to make an attempt to paint a picture of the role that a number of animals may have played in early bronze age religion in China. I want to try to draw on threads I’ve woven in previous articles, and as a starting point I would like to begin with the elephant
Fig 25
Some years ago I acquired a bronze chariot fitting dated from the Western Zhou Dynasty (1050-771 BC) and reputedly excavated in Shanxi Province. It takes the form of an elephant (fig 1), an animal rarely depicted on early Chinese bronzes. It set my mind wondering what the significance of the elephant was in ancient Chinese culture and I first went to an article by Xiong Chuanxin entitled “Zoomorphic Bronzes of the Shang and Zhou Periods” appearing in “The problem of Meaning in Early Chinese Ritual Bronzes” ed. Roderick Whitfield. Xiong Chuanxin puts forward a case that certain animals were totems of particular tribes. This means that each tribe had a belief that they were descended from a particular animal. I alluded to this in my last article in September, with reference to the belief of the Shang Dynasty (1500-1050 BC) that they had originally come to birth as a nation as the offspring of a black bird; the Shang people’s totem. I quote from the “Shi Jing”, an ancient classical text :
“Heaven commanded that black bird
It descended and gave birth to the Shang”
Xiong Chuanxin suggested that for each tribe an animal was considered their “totem” ancestor, and this animal was revered by the tribe, and gave it an identity, and a common faith, expressed in the art they left behind. Perhaps we can begin by asking if the elephant was the totem of a particular tribe or tribes? He quotes from records known as the Mengzi, which speaks of the Duke of Zhou annexing fifty states and it says :
“He drove the tigers, bears, leopards, rhinoceroses to the distant wilds and the Empire rejoiced”
This refers to specific tribes in the Yellow River area which had these animals as their totems. He also suggested that these totemic links are to be seen in ancient pottery where, for instance, human headed fish (fig 2) were produced to express the belief that the tribe’s ancestors were fish.
Following this argument through, Xiong Chuanxin suggests that the animal mask or “taotie”, which forms the focus of decoration on Shang and Western Zhou bronze ritual vessels, is a combination of such animals as the tiger, the ox, and the ram, which were totems from a number of tribes which had been conquered and then had become part of the Shang or Western Zhou empire.
There seems to me a problem with this view, as the totem of the Shang was known to be the bird, and although the bird does influence the shape of the earliest bronze vessel, the “jue”, as I mentioned in my last article, and although the bird is sometimes used as part of the decoration surrounding the “taotie”, it does not seem to be the central focus of the “taotie” itself. This puts a question mark, for me, as to how far we can assume that animal representation on early bronzes does relate to tribal totemism?
Returning now to the elephant, as I said earlier its depiction on bronzes is rare, and the instances of its use are by no means localised to one area of China. In the exhibition “China : 5000 years”, put on by the Guggenheim Museum in 1998, there are three examples of Shang and Western Zhou bronzes which are decorated with, or in the form of, the elephant. The first is a Shang “zun” wine container (cat 25), powerfully modelled as an elephant with decoration in high relief also depicting images of elephants. This piece was found in Hunan Province. The second piece is a Western Zhou “lei” wine vessel, (cat 31) with elephant trunk handles excavated in Sichuan Province, far from the centre of Zhou power, and in fact near Sanxingdui. The third is another “zun”, again Western Zhou Dynasty (cat 37) found in Shaanxi Province. The elephant is thus appearing in early bronze art over a wide area of China and this would also tend to support the notion that we are not dealing primarily with the totem of a particular tribe. However, perhaps the best way to proceed is to examine, in considerably more detail, some other occurrences of the elephant being used as decoration in ritual bronzes, and see if this reveals more about its place in early religion.
The most striking example is probably the amazing finds in the pits at Sanxingdui in Sichuan Province dating to about 1300-1200BC. Central to these finds must be the enormous bronze standing figure, (overall height including the base 262 cm), the base of which is composed of four elephant heads. Each head faces a corner with the trunk curled up at the bottom. Their eyes slant, as do the eyes of the figure, and the eyes of a number of the strange human-like heads, which were also found in the pits. The elephants on the base have very small ears, but interestingly the ears of the figure itself are very large, as are the ears on some of the heads discovered, and they have a certain resemblance to an elephant’s ears. Also many elephant tusks were found in one of the pits, and the large figure may well have carried an elephant tusk in his enormous hands. These powerful bronzes probably originally stood in a public building, such as a temple or palace, depicting a spiritual world which would have had tremendous import to the people involved. Here it seems likely that the elephant was indeed a totem defining the tribe. The link between the human figures and the elephant is certainly suggestive of a belief that the tribe saw themselves as descended from the elephant.
The elephant is also depicted on a number of enormous bronze bells or “nao” found in Southern China and dating to the later part of the Shang Dynasty. They are discussed in some detail in “Studies of Shang Archaeology” (Ed : K.C. Chang). Eleven examples have been unearthed in Hunan Province of which three have elephant decoration, and others have tiger or fish depicted. The fact that there are three different species present, on eleven bells found close together seems again to bring into question the likelihood that the elephant is the tribal totem, from which the tribe believed they were descended. So what other function might the animal decoration have?
These large “nao” were believed to be used for military purposes and one possibility is that the sound of the “nao” may have resembled the power and tone of the elephant’s roar, or indeed the tiger’s roar. If this was the case then it would seem an appropriate decoration before or during a battle. The problem with this theory, however, is that a fish seems an unlikely candidate to strike terror into a tribe being attacked!
What alternative explanations might there be? Well one suggestion is that these images may have shamanic roots, and I would like to pick up some of the points I made in my first article in March. The Shang people believed that when the shaman made his spirit journey to meet with the ancestors, he needed an animal to help him on that journey. Certain animals were particularly powerful in enabling the shaman, and I wrote at length about the role of the tiger in helping the head shaman, the king, on his journey to meet with the ancestors. It may well be that a powerful animal, like the elephant, had a similar role in facilitating good contact with the ancestors, and what more important place for enlisting support than on the field of battle. However, we are still left with the problem of the fish, and we need to get a clearer idea of how the fish was seen in Shang society to help with the larger picture.
In Han Dynasty (206BC-220AD) tomb art, the world beneath the earth is depicted as being inhabited by turtles, dragons and large fish-like creatures. This is the world of the “Yellow Springs”, the place where the body would descend in the afterlife. I quoted in my last article in September, the Duke of Zhuang of Qing, who had been wronged by his mother, saying “we shall not meet one another until we reach the Yellow Springs” ie. in the afterlife, the place of the dead. So the fish is associated with the journey to the world of the ancestors too. (NB the fish/man image in figs 2) In this context the fish depicted on the bells, like the elephant and the tiger, may have also been seen as providing an auspicious link with the ancestors, enlisting their help in the battle. This shamanistic link seems to me the most likely basis for the representation of the three animals on the bronze “nao”. If this is the case, it makes me wonder what the role of the shaman was on the battlefield, and who, in the tribe, was responsible for sounding the “nao”.
Fig 26
There seem to be two strands of thought in this exploration so far :
1) The elephant as a totem from which the community is descended.
2) The elephant as one of a group of animal helpers for the shaman on his journey to meet with the ancestors.
The distinction between them seems a little blurred. The Shang were descended from the bird, and so presumably could not be descended from the elephant. What is the difference between a totem and an animal helper? I’m wondering if this confusion can actually give us some valuable insights into how the roots and the practice of Shang religion are related.
Sarah Allan, in her book “The Shape of the Turtle” believes that the elephant may have had a special meaning for the Shang people. “Di Jun”, one of the mythical ancestors of the Shang, and his wife “Xihe” gave birth to the sun-bird from whom the Shang people believed themselves to have originated. The sun-bird has thus been seen as their totem. However, in Shang mythology, the brother of “Di Jun” was called “Xiang”, which means elephant. In the light of the earlier discussion this leads me to wonder if the Shang saw themselves as, not only descended from the sun-bird, but also as being related in some mysterious way to the elephant. Could it be that the sun-bird, the elephant, and maybe the tiger too, were perhaps a kind of pantheon of animals, who were seen as mythological parents to the nation, probably involving some kind of hierarchy, and maybe also involving other animals; a group of totems rather than just one. If this was the case, these revered animal ancestors may then have become the helpers that the shaman would turn to in journeying to make contact with the community’s human ancestors. The various totems are then the mythical animal ancestors from which the human ancestors are descended. So what better route to travel, to make contact with the human ancestors, than with one of the animal totems as a guide. This seems a possible way of thinking about both the ancestral roots and the day to day shamanic practice of the early dynasties.
The idea of a pantheon of animal “parents” to the Shang people, with particular reference to the elephant and the bird, might be supported by a wonderful exhibit in the “Mysteries of Ancient China” exhibition at the British Museum in 1996. The catalogue is edited by Jessica Rawson and the exhibit is No. 47, a Shang Dynasty ivory vessel “bei” excavated near Anyang. It is simply a hollowed out elephant tusk with turquoise inlay and a handle in the shape of a bird. Elephant and bird take their place together. Jessica Rawson comments on the fact that the bird in this Shang piece is very similar to a powerfully cast bronze bird’s head from Sanxingdui, also in the exhibition (cat 29). The bird appears on a number of the pieces discovered at Sanxingdui, which is roughly contemporary with Anyang culture. This makes me wonder if the bird and the elephant are part of a pantheon of animal ancestors or totems for both the Ba Shu people of Sanxingdui, and the Shang at Anyang. The tiger has also been represented powerfully on the bronze art of Sanxingdui. An extraordinary bronze tiger also with a turquoise inlay, was found there, as was a “zun” with tiger heads in high relief, and beneath the heads in low relief are bodies which have a certain human-like appearance. The pantheon grows, as does the sense of a link between the different cultures.
Although the finds in the pits at Sanxingdui are so extraordinary, and unlike anything that has ever been found before, I have begun to wonder whether they have more in common with Shang and Western Zhou discoveries, and indeed Shang and Western Zhou beliefs, than might at first appear. Are there undiscovered pits at Shang sites, containing hoards of ritual objects with similarities to the finds at Sanxingdui? Are we dealing at Sanxingdui, with finds that simply served a different function within a similar religious framework, but still ritually expressing the same pantheon of animal ancestors, who also acted as animal helpers to the shaman in either community? Time will tell.
Fig 27
I would like to end where I began, in the first article back in March, with a bronze “ge” or ritual dagger again from the area around Sanxingdui (fig 4). The first “ge” had a shaman with raised arms on the hilt and an ox on the blade, found intact but with a number of other ritually broken “ge” in a dried up river bed. The second “ge” (fig 4), was reputedly from a tomb, and depicts, on the blade, two elephant heads facing one another, above the small hole. On the hilt is a face with certain similarities to the face of an elephant, with two large slanting almond eyes, also very reminiscent of the eyes of the large bronze figure and the bronze heads from the pits at Sanxingdui. Even the tapering blade seems shaped like an elephant’s trunk, in contrast to the blade of the “ge” which featured in the March article. It looks as if “Xiang” may be turning up yet again in fig 4, perhaps as the shaman’s animal helper, in whatever ritual this “ge” was used for, and as one of the Ba Shu people’s central totems. Could it even be that the enormous bronze figure, excavated at Sanxingdui, is none other than a representation of “Xiang”?
Fig 28
Fig 29
PRESENT DAY SHAMANISM IN SICHUAN PROVINCE
On January 26th 2007, the Times Newspaper published an article entitled "Ghost brides are murdered to give dead batchelors a wife in the afterlife". A gang had been arrested in Shaanxi Province, who were preying on the superstitions of rural farmers, who were eager to ensure that their dead son'was provided for with female company in the afterlife. The article reports that "it is not uncommon, in rural parts of China, for a family to seek out the body of a woman who has died , to be buried alongside their son after the performance of a marriage ceremony for the deceased pair". The killing of the woman is just one further step down that path.The article also discusses the important Chinese festival of Tomb sweeping, when families visit the graves of their ancestors. The spirit is believed to live on in the afterlife, and the families burn offerings of paper money, and models of houses, cars and other luxuries for the dead's enjoyment in the afterlife. Where Shamanism fits into this particular scenario is not entirely clear, but the practice from the early dynasties of burying the retinue of aristocrats and kings, often alive, to provide for their needs in the afterlife, orchestrated by Shamans, seems alive and well in these parallels in the 21st century.
I want to continue by discussing one small grouping, the Qiang people of Sichuan, where Shamanism is still very much alive. The Qiang people are one of fifty six ethnic groups living in China today, a nomadic people in the mountainous regions of north west Sichuan. Their history goes back to the Shang Dynasty (16th - 11th century BC), as witnessed by references to them on the shoulder blades of oxen and the plastrum of turtle shells, which were used for divination by shamans of the time. Some were assimilated over the centuries, but about 200,000 have remained independent to this day. Emma zevik from Harvard has done considerable fieldwork with Qiang shamans, called duangongs, of which there are about twenty still alive. Traditionally the Qiang live in homes more like fortresses located in extremely harsh terrain, often set into cliffs. But there is also a move to the city, with increasing numbers settling in the capital Chengdu.
The religion is based on animism, the worship of gods of nature and the spirits of the ancestors, where sacrifices are offered to placate, much as was the case in the early dynasties. The spirits of the ancestors are thought to be very close at hand, residing in the family home. The duangongs, are seen as in regular touch with the gods and the spirits, they are believed to be able to prevent and heal diseases, and through divination are able have knowledge of the best dates for all the important events in the community's life. In short there seems little to distinguish them from the shamans of old in Shang Dynasty times. There do seem to be minor differences, however, in the way that duangongs function when compared with the shamans of old, primarily in that duangong do not enter a trance when communicating with the spirits or gods. Emma Zevik says "the duangong of today has become a living museum - a container of Qiang history, displaying the Qiang language, dress, beliefs, customs, epics, songs and dances".
If you would like to contact me : malcolm.rushton1@virgin.net
My other blog is : "Shamanism in ancient Chinese bronzes"
Coming shortly : "Fertility and shamanism in ancient South American cultures"
Some of the pieces seen here, plus many others not photographed are for sale.
Fig 3 (3.2 in x 3,2 in)
