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TIMOTHY H . BARRETT

SPEAKING UP FOR SUPERSTITION:

A NOTE ON THE ETHICS OF CHINESE
POPULAR BELIEF

Abstract

Most Chinese religious practice and belief in times past, and even
throughout much of the Chinese world today, falls into the still
current category of superstition. Assessing the ethical notions that
tend to obtain within this vast area of religious life is not easy, but it
needs to be done for practical reasons, not least because the legal
consequences of moral actions arising from the body of beliefs
concerned are starting to come before courts outside China itself.
Once the assumptions of a very different worldview affirming the
existence of an unseen spirit world are taken into account, the
deeds of believers in this worldview can be discussed from the point
of view of ethics. Philosophers might do well to pay more attention
to this topic.

This brief note is intended to draw attention to the conception of

morality held by practitioners of the majority religion of the Chinese
past, a form of religion still influential in the Chinese world today,
even though in China itself (as opposed to the United Kingdom, where
the author of this plea is writing) it is not always associated with an
established, officially recognized religious tradition and therefore has
no legal protection, since it is categorized under the rubric of “super-
stition.”1 Notions of morality in this type of religion are not generally
propounded in a form intended for philosophical analysis, so often we
have little choice to infer them from descriptions of practice, despite
the problems this may involve. In specific cases there may be ways of
circumventing the absence of convenient textual sources, but for now
what is offered here is a more general discussion outlining the scope of
this potential area of investigation and drawing attention to its con-
tinuing importance for philosophers, even though the narrative here
draws more on historical than on contemporary sources. Discussions
of religion and morality can legitimately take many forms, but to

TIMOTHY H. BARRETT, Emeritus Professor of Religion and Philosophy, East Asian

History, SOAS, University of London. Specialties: history of religion in China and/of its
reception elsewhere. E-mail: tb2@soas.ac.uk
Journal of Chinese Philosophy 41:S1 (December 2014) 709–722
V
C 2016 Journal of Chinese Philosophy
710 TIMOTHY H. BARRETT

anyone working primarily in the field of history, the first question will
always be how did religious beliefs actually affect ethical thinking?

I. S UPERSTITION : D EFINITIONS , S OURCES , W ORLDVIEW

For China there is much that is written that is normative, telling us

how people should act, but this tends to divert attention away from
the way people lived their lives. This is particularly a problem in dis-
cussing religious issues, in that—as I have argued elsewhere—the
attention of scholars in the Western academic tradition has tended to
be diverted away from the daily practices of ordinary Chinese people
toward those traditions that were more articulate, but actually
involved fewer adherents.2 And in China just as much as elsewhere it
has always been the tendency of the more articulate to denigrate the
behavior of the less articulate, using negatively evaluative language
equivalent functionally to the Western term superstition. This tend-
ency there is certainly very ancient, even if a clear distinction parallel
to the Western opposition of “religion” and “superstition” is not
exactly replicated in our earliest sources; negative evaluations of the
religious practice of others tend to be embedded in more complex
forms of discourse.3
The need to clarify the ethical system of the “superstitious” in
China as a specific category is, however, made plain by the use—in
the language of academic study of religion in China today—of what
is normally taken as a translation (via the Japanese) of the Western
word, that is, the compound mixin 迷信, “superstition.” An introduc-
tion to the study of religion published in 1999 by one of China’s lead-
ing departments in this field uses precisely this term to distinguish
undesirable beliefs-related behaviors from “proper,” recognized reli-
gion—though it also uses the category of “perverted” (xie 邪) or het-
erodox religion, a compound with a verifiably much lengthier history
in China that always justified—and still justifies—strong measures of
control.4 Mixin, for its part, has been subject to control or at least
regulation throughout most of the history of twentieth-century
China, even if this has not been a particularly prominent feature of
the twenty-first century so far.5 Perhaps this will remain the case.
What we can say for sure, however, is that it remains an important
word in China even while the use of “superstition” as an analytical
term in Western academic writing has been demonstrably—though
largely tacitly—abandoned.6
Yet a concise history of the relevant terminology would not
encompass the many ambiguities and shifts in meaning that have
taken place over time, along with the appearance of alternative
 SPEAKING UP FOR SUPERSTITION 711

conceptions of superstition. Zhu Pingyi 祝平一has recently published

some admirably meticulous research discussing the word mixin from
earliest times and especially as used in Christian sources of the
seventeenth century, long before its late-nineteenth-century reap-
pearance, but notes that in those sources it carries different connota-
tions, related to unacceptable behavior rather than to a benighted
frame of mind.7 At the same time, the translation of the Western
term has not been monopolized by the word mixin. The concept of
superstition occurs in a couple of passages in the New Testament of
the King James Bible, for example, where the standard Protestant
translation into Mandarin at least gives not mixin but jingwei guishen
敬畏鬼神, “reverencing the spirits,” and jing guishen de shi 敬鬼神的
事, the “business of respecting spirits.”8 Understood in this sense
superstition would include, one supposes, the beliefs of almost all
Chinese in times past, except for a small and marginal number of
monotheists or true atheists. For to the extent that it is possible to
examine matters of belief historically, even the most educated per-
sons in late-imperial times paid due respect to the spirits, in whose
existence they were obliged to believe thanks to their frequent men-
tion in canonical sources. It was not the existence of spirits that some
found problematic so much as the idea that they could be responsible
for anomalous supernatural events. Or if strange things might some-
times happen, then this was no reason not to trust to normal stand-
ards of ethical integrity in facing them, rather than, for example,
taking an attitude of craven supplication.9 No doubt not everyone
was quite so high minded in practice, but the basic attitude involved
—that normal ethical standards applied as much in dealing with the
world unseen as with the world in which we now live—is one that
informs popular ethical thought, to the extent that it is accessible to
historical inquiry.
For though the beliefs of the majority illiterate population of times
past must remain forever unexpressed by their adherents, we are at
least aware of those norms most frequently expressed and propagated
in writing in the form of publications designed to uphold morality, the
Shanshu 《善書》(Good Books). These have a history of their own,
but one title above all has been identified as having been published
and republished time and again—in the early twentieth century it was
reported that its “editions exceed even those of the Bible and Shake-
speare.”10 Hence its ethical thought—whatever earlier traditions it
may originally have represented, and whatever other ways of thinking
may have existed or continue to exist in parallel—must be seen as now
constituting the mainstream of Chinese belief on the relationship
between the unseen world and ethical matters. This work is the
“Taishang Ganying Pian 《太上感應篇》” (the Folios of the Most
712 TIMOTHY H. BARRETT

High on Retribution Chapter), to adopt the translation of the late

Catherine Bell.11 Despite the origins of this tract in a specifically Dao-
ist environment, it has come to be accepted by a broad spectrum of
religious believers as an aid to promoting popular morality, not least
because it envisages not only incentives for good but also post mortem
sanctions for evil.
These sanctions, it would appear, have a global reach, for as Bell
notes, translations of this work into English have now been made as
part of “missionary efforts outside China,” and small copies of the
original Chinese text are distributed gratis in the United Kingdom for
the edification and guidance of members of the Chinese community
here.12 Though the original work has been identified by scholars as a
work of the twelfth century, its basic message has been enhanced over
time by the addition of illustrative stories concerning the operation of
the retributive principle—and also to be frank about the reasons of its
popularity—by stories illustrative of the intrinsic sacred quality of the
text itself, though this quality, shared with other scriptures, does not
detract from its clear moral message. Further communications from
the unseen judiciary have not been lacking, right up to the present—
one pamphlet published recently in Singapore reveals, for example,
that a recent divine decree has determined that voyeurism, video
recording with a hidden pinhole camera, comes within the general
offence of lust—something the compiler of the Taishang Ganying
Pian does not deal with.13 Its general outline of morality remains,
however, reasonably comprehensive.
But to focus on the rewards and punishments foregrounded in this
type of work would be to divert attention from the broader presuppo-
sitions about ethical life and the unseen world that undergird the mes-
sage of the Taishang Ganying Pian. We will return to the judicial
aspects of popular belief at a later point, but the broader picture may
perhaps best be appreciated by introducing a particularly striking
example. It concerns an individual who was not born into a family
with high status, though high cultural status was what he eventually
achieved. In using the term popular, however, I am not seeking to
imply any view concerning the stratification or otherwise of the Chi-
nese religious scene now or in the past: “popular” in this essay simply
means that we are dealing with a way of thinking that was extremely
widely spread.
In fact, I have long enjoyed prints taken from the paintings of Qi
Baishi 齊白石 (1864–1957), so no doubt this provided the immediate
reason why, in attempting to communicate to a general audience the
way of thinking discussed here, the following passage in his autobiog-
raphy from 1914 seemed particularly cogent: “On the fifth of the fifth
month, I sent a letter by messenger to my old teacher Hu Qinyuan
 SPEAKING UP FOR SUPERSTITION 713

only to see the messenger hurrying back with the sad tidings that he
had passed away seven days ago. Words could not describe my sorrow.
Hu was not only my teacher but also my bosom friend. How could I
not help feeling a sense of extreme loss and debt unrepaid? I went
over my old paintings and took out the ones that he had liked, about
twenty of them, mounted them myself, put them in a paper box that I
specially made for the purpose—and burned them in front of his
coffin.”14
Just in case the reader has not seen Chinese observances directed at
the departed, it should be explained that burning transfers material
from this world to the world unseen. Typically this involves simulacra,
burning paper money or credit cards or other goods—something that
can be discussed as a form of religion, or at least of sacrifice. So did Qi,
an unsophisticated man who was originally a carpenter, waste his labor
out of ignorant superstition? Many of his Chinese contemporaries no
doubt would have said yes, and many more in our own time—espe-
cially in view of the very high prices now commanded by Qi’s works,
which can fetch tens of millions of dollars in some cases. But despite
the earlier efforts at controlling superstition alluded to above paper
money for the dead still sells in every Chinese supermarket, including
in the United Kingdom even notes denominated in pounds, for the
Chinese deceased here. And Qi’s act of reciprocity (to use L. S. Yang’s
term), I believe, still makes sense to many who accept the basic pre-
mise concerning the continuity of individual existence between seen
and unseen worlds.15
That the spirit world is populated chiefly by former denizens of our
world, hierarchically stratified in power and influence like us, is an
axiom that can be traced back long before imperial times in China,
even if the inscrutability of that world meant that anyone was free to
reimagine the basic picture at will. This produced some variety over
time. For early, pre-Buddhist China, however, Stephen Bokenkamp
has summarized one very widespread view in a fashion designed to
illuminate an overall orientation that remains, despite all subsequent
changes, in some degree still valid for many even now: “There was the
subterranean Yellow Springs, where commoners were believed to
labour, as they had in life on the banks of the Yellow River, governed
by those who had governed them before. This labour was not punitive,
but rather a continuation of their lives above ground.”16 This notion of
the continuity of hierarchy between this life and post mortem exis-
tence certainly lasted throughout the imperial period, for as Vincent
Goossaert observes of late-imperial China “it was common among
officials to believe that they would be nominated as a City God after
their death”—in effect like Bokenkamp’s peasants continuing a role
and status first held in life.17
714 TIMOTHY H. BARRETT

Though the normal approach by ordinary living Chinese to the enti-

ties populating the spirit world was simply to keep on good terms with
departed family, as the best-known inhabitants of that world, there
were those—especially in the times of social turmoil following the era
of Confucius—who aspired to advance their status through a direct link
with the henotheistic power at the apex of the unseen system.18 But I
doubt that this course commended itself to the majority. Equally, the
notion of the Dao, and in Buddhism conceptions of the absolute as a
greater something within which we live and move and have our being,
whether in this world or the next, allowed perhaps all spirits to be cut
down to size, but not in effect for the average man or woman in the
paddy field. And in Buddhism it was certainly held that the hierarchy
of gods in the spirit world was—like all existence—not immutable; that
gods could be replaced like officeholders in a bureaucracy once their
allotted span was up. Indeed the Buddha himself had enjoyed the key
post of king of the gods no less than thirty-six times.19
Thus, as the above summaries by experts on the history of religion
suggest, just as relationships of reciprocity between teacher and stu-
dent or filial duty from child to parent do not change from realm to
realm, relations of subordination remain the same too, and also oper-
ate between the different realms. This has always been perfectly
explicit: it was noticed for example a quarter of a century ago that
medieval mandarins, who could claim the authority of the emperor,
did not hesitate to tell minor local spirits what to do.20 Even recently
in Taiwan people could still recall that the district imperial magistrate
used on assuming office to visit the shrines of the earth gods whose
jurisdiction was geographically more limited than his and symbolically
assert his demand for due assistance with three taps of his baton.21 So
in this conception of power relations a big man may boss a small god,
even if usually it is the other way round.
But note that for the smooth operation of the whole system a rela-
tive degree of this-worldly stability was required. A certain level of
ambiguity could be tolerated: local spirits, like local militia leaders,
might be accommodated as promoting the public good, or else
suppressed-like subversive bandits, as expedient, by the central
authorities. Yet in times of complete turmoil it could be that author-
ity within the whole system was reenvisioned: a new empire was her-
alded that replaced the seen and unseen imperial hierarchy and took
upon itself the role of arbiter of religious acceptability, usually dis-
playing the power of the new order by cracking down hard on reli-
gious localism. To my mind this explains both the great Yellow
Turban uprising of the late second century CE and the Taiping Rebel-
lion of the nineteenth.22 It is pointless to ask whether these were
political or religious movements: concepts of authority in China did
 SPEAKING UP FOR SUPERSTITION 715

not and perhaps do not observe the distinction, given the continuity
of relations across the seen/unseen divide.
The authority of the emperor, at the apex of the visible hierarchy,
certainly gave him the confidence to pronounce on matters that most
Western monarchs from early modern times might hesitate to consider
within their competence. I have always found most instructive a case
noted by Sir Alfred Lyall (1835–1911), a distinguished administrator
of the British Raj and minor poet, who took up a perusal of the Peking
Gazette to find out how his Chinese colleagues dealt with the religious
issues that had once been his responsibility in India. A certain Tibetan
incarnation had behaved so badly in Manchu eyes that he was forbid-
den in 1845 to reincarnate himself, yet an investigation of 1876 deter-
mined that he had nevertheless done so. With perfect aplomb it is
decided that in view of good conduct while in the reincarnation pre-
ceding that which had provoked the decree of 1845, this ecclesiastical
dignitary’s obstinate reappearance should be condoned to the extent
that he should be allowed to take up the religious life, though not the
trappings or titles of his status.23 It is perhaps unfortunate, as Tim
Brook observes in a recent book on a cartographic mystery, that the
person of the emperor as embodiment of the state has been replaced
by the concept of the inviolable territory of the motherland, for as the
Dalai Lama has found, the authority exercised in this new name is
rather less flexible.24

II. T HE E THICS OF S UPERSTITION : A P RACTICAL P ROBLEM

We should turn, however, from such high affairs of state to consider

the implications of this worldview for those of us who have not
achieved the high karmic standing of His Holiness and his colleagues.
The matter is not merely a theoretical one, for those whose moral life
is dictated by this sense of the unseen are now—as the presence of
Chinese funeral money as well as copies of the Taishang Ganying Pian
both attest—dwelling in British society, as no doubt in all parts of the
globe with substantial Chinese populations. Indeed as of March 10,
2014, within the jurisdiction of English law, if no other jurisdiction, the
ethical claims of karma as understood in a Daoist or non-Buddhist
Chinese context have been recognized as providing a protected char-
acteristic in the face of dismissal from employment. Specifically, a
claimant against unfair dismissal who had told his employer that he
could not engage in an unethical practice because “I practice Taoism
and it’s fair to say that I’m very scared with what we call ‘KARMA’”
was supported by the judicial decision of an employment tribunal.25
716 TIMOTHY H. BARRETT

Whether this straw in the wind has any significance globally seems
as yet impossible to say. But even so, surely we should all try to see
how the ethics of such a system operate for those who view reality
thus, rather than—as many missionaries were apt to do—assume that
“ancestor worship,” to use their term, was governed simply by terror
of the unseen. Some certainly seemed in the heyday of China missions
—and even since then—to have had an interest in promoting a terror
of the torments of hell, and for that matter not only in China: hell has
not lacked in Europe for example for artists willing to depict future
punishment in the most lurid terms. To some the idea of future punish-
ment may seem coercive, but if so one must point out that such punish-
ment in the generality of societies is not left to some form of divine
prerogative. Whether in China or beyond our ethical autonomy in this
life tends to be affected more immediately by the dictates of others,
most conspicuously by the laws enforced by the state or other sources
of authority. Fear of the torments of hell may have their place in social
control. But humankind does seem robust enough not to allow ethical
autonomy to be entirely subverted by the propagation of notions of a
future, more inexorable justice.
And recent studies seem to suggest that the conception of ethical
life associated with the popular Chinese view of the spirit world is not
as authoritarian and inhumane as has often been assumed. Paul Katz,
introducing two decades of his own research on “divine justice” cites a
recent study by Tim Brook and others: “The world of the dead does
not so much recapitulate the world of the living as propose what the
world of the living could be if it had the rationality, order, and system-
atic moral logic that are imagined to govern the world of the dead.”26
Yet the two worlds exist side by side for, he concludes, “… one funda-
mental aspect of Chinese legal culture is the belief that the judicial
mechanisms of this world can interact and even overlap with those of
the underworld.”27 The reason why this can be so lies in the continuity
of the actors involved, in that all are human: even the ones elevated to
divine status are no different, for their status is just that of the man-
darin elevated to office; they are not qualitatively a different sort of
entity. There may be other lesser spirits in the unseen world, such as
potentially troublesome animal spirits that attempt to arrogate human
status, but it was and is the task of responsible human authorities (or
those who would be seen as such) to patrol this activity and rectify it.28
The transition from man to god is based on moral criteria, especially
those of community service, as Alessandro Dell’Orto remarks in the
case of the local gods of the soil whom he studied: “During my stay in
Taiwan I came to realize that the relationship between people and
gods seemed to be based on the widespread concept that it has to be
mutually beneficial.”29
 SPEAKING UP FOR SUPERSTITION 717

Thus, a detailed account of how morality of this sort works in prac-

tice, based in part on interviews, points out that reconciling the some-
what complex list of possible faults that may be dealt with post
mortem published in works on popular morality such as the Taishang
Ganying Pian, and the decidedly forbidding scale of punishments also
promulgated as prepared for the guilty is a matter mediated by judges
who have themselves all lived in our world and have been promoted
not for legal expertise but for something more subtle—a sense of jus-
tice.30 A British judge is, thus, not able to determine what punishment
someone who feels that they have infringed the published code is
likely to attract—a matter of some moment when a believer has taken
a conscientious stand against a course of action and suffered the this-
worldly consequences—since he or she will not be able to assume
from such public documents what the equivalent unseen authority,
provided with a perfect knowledge of all the circumstances, thanks to
the watchful eyes of the spirits, might decide.
That the great empire of the spirits place Great Britain under
observation and exercise their authority here and wherever Chinese
communities may be found may seem surprising, but there may be
precedents and analogies. We have seen that the authority structure
as a whole may at times be open to challenge from a rival empire,
but where this-worldly authority simply does not accord with what is
posited for the world unseen, no conflict exists. In Taiwan in Japa-
nese colonial times and since the arrival of Republican government,
and so no doubt in other lands under foreign governments, and
maybe—despite the best efforts of the present Chinese government
to sustain a Manchu-style authority over incarnations—even in the
People’s Republic, too, the great imperial gods, it seems, once went
and still do go about their business officially neglected, but thus in
effect unimpeded.
Admittedly the famous missionary to the Miao, Samuel Pollard
(1864–1915) records how on March 28, 1912, a Yunnan newspaper
published an article describing how the Jade Emperor, after reports
from the kitchen god of the establishment of a Republic in our world,
had been prevailed upon—for fear of a similar movement against his
majesty—to retire to the Western Heavens, following which Laozi
had been elected president and had formed a cabinet including “two
Buddhas, the Goddess of Mercy, the head of the Taoist sect, and
Jesus.” This agreeable innovation, whether a mere journalistic spoof
or not, seems at all events not to have caught on. And Pollard in any
case recounts the tale precisely because it encapsulated for him the
human scale of the unseen administration to Chinese eyes: “This is but
one instance of how Hades is considered to be merely a replica of this
present world.”31
718 TIMOTHY H. BARRETT

Now the ultimate sanction for this entire moral structure may and
probably in the intuitions of many does lie with some power above
and beyond all hierarchies, with the all-nurturing Dao or with some
absolute yet compassionate level of Buddhahood. But for humankind
there is not much to be gained by pondering the ultimate source of
morality. What is immediately important to know is this: that from top
to bottom the moral universe is predominantly one of persons who
either are or have been human beings—if there are exceptions they
are “minor and trivial.”32 Even the highest gods were once human—it
is well known that the Jade Emperor was not the top god of high antiq-
uity, but has achieved that position in the last millennium or so. As for
Yama, a Buddhist recruit to the role of chief of the unseen judiciary,
he has according to the Buddhist view introduced above presumably
been a human being for quite a few incarnations.33 It may of course be
conceded that many stories assert that even the gods can make mis-
takes—or more usually their clerical underlings, who can like their
sublunary counterparts even lose entire files—though the unseen
imperial system has its own checks and balances to smooth out such
errors.34 To those accustomed to monotheism, an omnipotent as well
as all-seeing deity might seem a better proposition.
But the system I have attempted to describe, though decried as
superstitious, does have one outstanding advantage. By bringing
everything within a human compass, morality becomes intelligible,
and its operations, even if in a sense invisible and hence inscrutable,
reassuringly are deemed to derive from the working of minds like
ours. An interpersonal ethical code that works in visible human soci-
ety, either that espoused by the followers of Confucius or some prag-
matic variant thereof, is also viable in the world beyond, with no need
for any reorientation toward some wholly other power on a different
scale. Someone attempting to live a good life in such circumstances
might, as in the case of Qi Baishi, undertake some actions surprising to
those unacquainted with this aspect of the traditional Chinese outlook.
Yet Qi was in his way, one feels, a good man.35

III. C ONCLUSION

To sum up, then, the morality of superstition may be open to criticism

on economic grounds, though criticism of expenditure on the world
unseen that might be more helpfully deployed on behalf of the living
has been going on in China for about two and a half millennia, and no
doubt will continue far into the future, as similarly in other societies.
The ethics of superstition, however, in themselves are less open to crit-
icism, in that the conception of the unseen world as essentially
 SPEAKING UP FOR SUPERSTITION 719

populated by persons who were formerly human puts ethical behavior

in relation to those persons very much on the same level as the this-
worldly ethical behavior enjoined on followers of Confucius, which is
why in practice those followers had no difficulty in accepting the exis-
tence of an unseen world. The same may be said of those who pre-
ferred the way of Daoism, and even Chinese Buddhists—some more
sophisticated Buddhists may well have pondered the combination of a
strong ethical tradition of thought with a central belief in the main-
stream Buddhist tradition in “self-less persons,” but for most the mes-
sage of karma entailed precisely the same response in any case to the
denizens of both seen and unseen realms.
One factor that might be seen to be an important difference between
the beliefs of the educated and the superstitious in times past might be
the belief of the former that the latter were controlled in their behavior
by fear, specifically fear of punishment in another life. But if there was
(and is) fear, it was (and is) conditioned by the experience of hierarchy
in this life, and indeed in no small measure by experience of the belief
in the Confucian tradition from at least Xunzi onward that coercion
was a legitimate way of shaping human conduct. Alongside fear, more-
over, in the view of recent scholarship introduced above, the hope of
justice loomed—and, it seems, looms—equally large.
Just one final caution is necessary. Some recent scholarship has dis-
cussed the existence of what has been termed “Unruly Gods,” powers
in the unseen world whose actions seem subversive or antinomian: the
well-known figure of the Monkey King would be one such example
who has certainly attracted worship in recent times.36 One way to
understand this would be to see such figures as creations of the popu-
lar mind covertly criticizing the hierarchies of this world by applauding
their subversion in the world unseen—a notion that certainly occurred
to one outside observer of imperial China—rather than as reflecting a
wish to live in an antinomian universe.37 But even so it would seem
that for some at least among the lower orders at a very fundamental
level the key concept in dealing with the unseen was and is to this day
power or efficacy rather than morality.
Cults devoid of moral content but apparently offering supernatural
assistance to those on the fringes of society are not unknown even
now, and may perhaps once have been widespread in parts of China
beyond the influence of the educated elite.38 An awareness of this con-
ception of unseen power as potentially amoral perhaps underlies
much elite writing about the supernatural, adding the spice of anxiety
to their “strange tales.”39 Perhaps, too, this lingering awareness still
stirs tacit, atavistic memories of a less civilized populace—and hence
stimulates ongoing efforts at control. But the very allure of this alter-
native, amoral view of supernatural power derives surely from its
720 TIMOTHY H. BARRETT

marginality—from its alien presence at the edges of an unseen China

that for the most part was believed by high and low to be a better
ordered, more just version of the one that has persisted for so long in
our own world.
And whatever the future of the real China, this alternative version,
for all the changes of the twentieth century, seems set in some fashion
to accompany it for some time yet to come. Given that indubitable
fact, surely more consideration should be given to the ethical conse-
quences for the many millions whose conduct is affected by an aware-
ness of that realm. The foregoing remarks make no claim to advancing
our understanding of the issues raised by what many have chosen to
call superstition; rather, the hope is that by describing the problem,
others better qualified to discuss ethical matters may be prompted to
add to the rather small number of studies that have been devoted to
this area so far.40 How long will philosophers remain content to leave
this field only to historians and anthropologists?

UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
London, United Kingdom

E NDNOTES

1. The legal situation in China is briefly introduced in Pitman Potter, “Belief in Control:
Regulation of Religion in China,” in Religion in China Today, ed. Daniel L. Over-
myer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 11–31; note p. 14 for the five
recognized religions.
2. T. H. Barrett, “Chinese Religion in English Guise: The History of an Illusion,” Mod-
ern Asian Studies 39, no. 3 (2005): 509–33.
3. T. H. Barrett, “Superstition and Its Others in Han China,” in The Religion of Fools?
Superstition Past and Present, Past and Present, Supplement 3, eds. S. A. Smith and
Alan Knight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 95–114.
4. Chen Linshu 陳麟書, Chen Xia 陳霞, eds., Zongjiao Xue Yuanli《宗教學原
理》(Beijing: Zongjiao Wenhua Chubanshe, 1999), 505–506, 529, and especially 546.
For a useful discussion of the terminology of heterodoxy, see the appendix by Kwang-
Ching Liu to Kwang-Ching Liu and Richard Shek, Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 477–89.
5. A good account of the earlier phase of this history is now to be found in Rebecca
Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). For the acts of iconoclasm that accom-
panied the fight against mixin throughout the twentieth century up to the Cultural
Revolution of 1966–76, see Fabio Rambelli and Eric Reinders, Buddhism and Icono-
clasm in East Asia (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 89–128. Vincent
Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), 232, 237, bring the story up to date.
6. Note the account of the shift in scholarship concerning classical civilization in Europe
on pp. 72–73 of Richard Gordon, “Superstitio, Superstition and Religious repression
in the Late Roman Republic and Principate (100 BCE –300 CE),” in Smith and Knight,
The Religion of Fools, 72–94.
7. Zhu Pingyi, “Pi Wang Xing Mi: Ming-Qing zhi ji de Tianzhu Jiao yu ‘Mixin’ de Gou-
jian 辟妄醒迷：明清之際的天主教与迷信的构建,” Zhongyang Yanjiuyuan Lishi
 SPEAKING UP FOR SUPERSTITION 721

Yuyan Yanjiusuo Jikan《中央研究院歷史語言研究所集刊》 84, no. 4 (2013): 695–

751.
8. Acts 17:22 and Acts 5:19 respectively, consulted in a “Shangti” edition of the ‘Kuoyü
Bible’ (Hong Kong: The Bible Societies of Hong Kong, 1967).
9. For more details of the opinions of the leading thinkers on this topic on the eve of the
modern era, see Leo Tak-hung Chan, The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts: Ji Yun and
Eighteenth-Century Literati Storytelling (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press,
1998), 77–110.
10. Teitaro Suzuki and Paul Carus, T’ai-Shang Kan-Ying P’ien (Chicago: Open Court
Publishing, 1906), 3.
11. Bell, Encyclopedia of Taoism, 948–51. This summary draws in part on her earlier
work, notably Catherine Bell, “Printing and Religion in China: Some Evidence from
the Taishang Ganying Pian,” Journal of Chinese Religions 20 (1992): 173–86.
12. Eva Wong, Lao-Tzu’s Treatise on the Response of the Tao: T’ai-shang Kan-ying P’ien
(New York: HarperCollins, 1994). I am not sure who is responsible for distributing
the copies in Chinese that can be found for example at Chinese supermarkets—the
twenty-four-page booklet bears a post-face (ba 跋) dated 1974 by its annotator Li
Maoxiang 李茂祥 on p. 21, followed by an appended preface to a reprinting of 1959.
13. Sheng-yen Lu, The Decree of Lord Yama (Singapore: True Buddha Publications, n.
d.), 10.
14. T. C. Lai, Ch’i Pai Shih (Hong Kong: Swindon Book Company, 1973), 53, with modifi-
cations. Hu Qinyuan 胡沁園 (1847–1914), a Hunanese, had become Qi’s mentor when
the latter was about twenty or so. For the context of this quotation and of the argu-
ment I elaborate from it here as originally used in my valedictory lecture, see T. H.
Barrett, Three Things I Learned about China (London: Minnow Press, 2013), 20–24.
15. Yang Lien-sheng, “The Concept of Pao as a Basis for Social Relations in China,” in
Chinese Thought and Institutions, ed. J. K. Fairbank (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1957), 291–309.
16. Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Ancestors and Anxiety: Daoism and the Birth of Rebirth in
China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 36–37.
17. Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 28.
18. Michael J. Puett, To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in
Early China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
19. K. R. Norman, “The Buddha’s View of Devas,” in Collected Papers, II (London: Pali
Text Society, 1991), 1–8.
20. Jean Levi, Les Fonctionnaires Divins: Politique, Despotisme et Mystique en Chine
Ancienne (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 235–69.
21. Alessandro Dell’Orto, Place and Spirit in Taiwan (London: Routledge Curzon 2002),
190.
22. Barrett, “Superstition and Its Others in Han China”; Thomas H. Reilly, The Taiping
Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 2004).
23. Sir Alfred C. Lyall, Asiatic Researches (London: Watts & Co., 1907), 92–93.
24. Timothy Brook, Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Car-
tographer (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 3.
25. Yumang v. Emerald Global, Ltd. (Unreported, London Central Employment Tribu-
nal, March 10, 2014), paragraph 29, and cf. paragraphs 30, 49, and 50.
26. Paul R. Katz, Divine Justice: Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 4, quoting from Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and
Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2007), 126.
27. Katz, Divine Justice: Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture, 59.
28. Benjamin Penny, The Religion of Falun Gong (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2012), 107–108, 127–28.
29. Dell’Orto, Place and Spirit in Taiwan, 199—he then rather spoils his account (and he
is not the only one to do so) by referring to promotions to the divine as “metaphors”;
722 TIMOTHY H. BARRETT

for some this may be the case, but for most, I believe, no metaphor is involved: these
promotions are “just so.”
30. This important point is made admirably clear in one study that does take the ethics of
this belief system seriously, namely Erin M. Cline and Ronnie L. Littlejohn, Taishan’s
泰山 Tradition: The Quantification and Prioritization of Moral Wrongs in a Contem-
porary Daoist Religion,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 2, no. 1 (2002):
117–40.
31. Samuel Pollard, The Sam Pollard “Omnibus” (State College and Niton: Woodfield
Press, n.d.), 451–52, from his posthumous final book, In Unknown China.
32. Thus Benjamin Penny, summarizing the position of nonhuman spirits in the world
view of Falun Gong, which in this regard draws on north Chinese folk belief: see his
The Religion of Falun Gong, 128.
33. Katz, Divine Justice: Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture, 41.
34. For a lost file, see Donald E. Gjertson, Miraculous Retribution: A Study and Transla-
tion of T’ang Lin’s Ming-pao Chi (Berkeley: Center for South and Southeast Asian
Studies, 1989), 138: this monograph provides an excellent account of what was
believed concerning supernatural justice in the seventh century. Katz, Divine Justice:
Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture, 59.
35. Or so one is inclined to conclude from his works, despite the rather unflattering
account of him in Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete (London: Hamish Hamilton,
1984), 375–79.
36. This phenomenon is well analyzed in Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China, eds.
Meir Shahar and Robert P. Weller (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996).
37. Note the opinion of V. M. Alekseev, cited on p. 192 of Helmut Martin, “Literature of
the Ming and Ch’ing,” in Soviet Studies of Premodern China, ed. Gilbert Rozman
(Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1984), 183–95.
38. See on this Robert P. Weller, “Matricidal Magistrates and Gambling Gods: Weak
States and Strong Spirits in China,” in Unruly Gods, eds. Shahar and Weller, 250–68.
39. This anxiety over moral danger and the supernatural is well caught—from a slightly
different perspective—in Glen Dudbridge, The Tale of Li Wa (London: Ithaca Press,
University of Hawaii Press, 1983), 61–66.
40. The translation by Suzuki and Carus noted above, endnote 10, now more than a cen-
tury old, does take the ethics of its text seriously enough to discuss them, even though
the discussion is somewhat colored by the then-contemporary environment of com-
parative religious studies—for example, (p. 6) it avers that the mythological back-
ground to the arguments of the text “can be characterized as superstitious by those
only who know nothing of comparative religion,” though some parts it allows to be (p.
5) “not free from superstitious notions.” This contrasts markedly, for example, with
the work of the missionary translator James Webster who unreservedly condemns
Daoist religion in toto, as “a mischievous superstition,” citing also his predecessor
James Legge to the same effect: see his The Kan Ying Pien (Shanghai: Presbyterian
Mission Press, 1918), 4. The article by Cline and Littlejohn (endnote 30), represents
an impeccably up to date approach, but so far apparently not one that has been much
imitated.
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