Devoting Filial Piety to Celestial Spirits: The Ritual Patterns of Paternity in the Prehistory of Daoist Lingbao Tradition

Abstract

Filial piety plays a significant role in Chinese thoughts and history. However, its meaning and practice were open to interpret and the concrete actions to embody it were subject to change. When it became more and more religious in the Eastern Han, filial piety inspired various religious communities, to embed filial piety in their ritual practice. Therefore, to investigate the practices associated with filial piety beyond the rhetorical devices in Confucian texts provides a unique perspective to observe the interaction between Confucianism and Daoism. This paper begins with scrutinizing the symbolic meaning of filial piety in a jiao ritual in the Daoist Lingbao wufu xu and remarks on its metaphorical usages. Then it traces the concept of paternity, in which filiality intrinsically constitutes an essential part, in the three early religious texts that contain many Daoist characteristics, and analyzes the similar role it plays in aiding the ritual practices in these texts, and points out the different patterns these texts apply to understand the paternity. I argue that religious communities in the Eastern Han consciously used the multivalence of paternity to create a shared world in the rituals that was constantly negotiated with the normative Confucian convention, thus producing a significant milieu from which the Lingbao tradition grew.

「孝」在中國思想和歷史中扮演了極為重要的角色。但是，如何解釋和實踐孝則並無可遵循的固定模式。孝在東漢被賦予了宗教意味，這激發了早期道教儀式中採用「致孝」來定義與神靈的交流。因此，分析道教儀式中關於孝或類似話語，可作為觀察儒道交流的一個角度。本文首先分析《靈寶五符序》卷下醮儀的儀注中「孝」的象徵意義及其在醮儀中的功能。其次追溯在更早的宗教文獻中—《老子中經》、《老子變化經》和出土的「肥君碑」—相似地將信徒神靈比擬為父子的儀式話語，並分析話語背後所採用的不同模式，與所反映的不同社群。最後，本文試圖證明，東漢社會中作為宗教資源的孝的因素被融合在不同的實踐中，這構成了靈寶傳統成長的一個重要背景。