Chinese Religion

 

 

 

CHINESE RELIGION

 

Chinese religion was totally animistic whose main plank has always been ancestor worship. All dead ancestors lived on in a nether world and their graves needed constant regular tending by their male offspring which tending included placing food at the grave side every night. This is so universal that we find it from the Easternmost Asia like in Korea all the way back to Italy (Rome) and Spain. It fits well with the awe a father was held in primitive family where the father had the right of life and death powers over all his family. As such he just looked to his family members as an omnipotent god and given the punishments he regularly inflicted for anything displeasing him his ‘subjects’ could not imagine him without being around and watching even after he apparently died. Then any trouble which hit his family members after his death could be explained as the father’s displeasure and he had to be propitiated by more gifts etc.  Neglecting the servicing the grave of the father was regarded a great sacrilege and the cause of many disasters. It is not then surprising that in a pagan religion which is the next phase of religious development the chief god becomes the Heavenly Father with the king as his earthly son and the father of his earthly subjects. This also doubles as the chief god as the god in heaven and the king as the god on earth.  Japan always took its emperors as the son of the Sun (or heaven) as their living gods so long they ruled as did the Egyptians and the Romans. We know about the Christians, don’t we?

Then in and around the 6^th century BCE we find a belt of religious philosophers flourishing from Persia to China; In Persia the prophet is Zoroaster (which we will soon study), in India it is Gautama (Buddha) and in China they are two-  the rationalistic moralist Confucius and the mystic teacher Lao Tse.

 

The story of Confucius is similar to Gautama’s in that both eventually became rationally thinking moral philosophers and avoided theological teachings and controversies. Both however allowed the many of the existing superstitions of their environments which in India  reincarnation and in China ancestor worship represented as the chief examples.

Confucius was a practical philosopher like Aristotle and like him his life ambition was the creation of a perfect society under a perfect king. Since kings were hereditary they needed perfect philosophers like Aristotle and Confucious to deputise them in their reforming and gracing roles. Aristotle had his chance to prove his theory when he was made advisor to the prince of Syracuse; like all idealists he did not succeed for the ruler was more his own man than Aristotle would like. Confucius succeeded far better, for he was not an idealist but a realist.  What is more unlike the very individualistic and squabbling Greeks of Aristotle Confucius was dealing with the extremely formalistic and obedient Chinese. As a result he improved government and as well as the conduct of the people down to their family life and his collected teachings became the chief resource of Chinese psychology and moral education for many centuries.  But as always he could not escape deification and foisting upon him many miracles, mythical adventures and mystical discourses; his paintings and statues became town and family idols prayed to by his believers and propitiated by the penitents.  In other words he was ‘Jesusified’. We remember the same to happen  to the Buddha. 

 

Interestingly he had a contemporary colleague in China, namely Lao Tse.  To him is ascribed another religion which came to be known Taoism. Tao means ‘way’ which makes it partially  synonymous with the Arabic word for religion, namely ‘deen’. The basic principle of Taoism is to identify and pick the golden mean (optimal middle-of-the-road) approach in each situation and achieve best results by reconciling extreme positions by cleverest tactics applied with most charitable intentions. Things and events were balances of two principles, namely ‘Yin’ the female principle and the ‘Yang’ the male principle and all troubles, including illnesses were the results of the imbalances of these two- the cure then passed from re-balancing them; this in fact is the basis of the traditional Chinese medicine to this day.

 

With its wise Confucian dicta and witty Taoist aphorisms native Chinese religion was a great philosophy but, as always, it gradually degenerated into idolatry, ritual and ceremony and also sometimes vilest or silliest magic and also became as polytheistic as Hinduism. As such it developed its own monasticism with the same opposition to wealth, comfort and sex but again with the same hypocrisy and corruption. Temples became terribly rich and the priests and monks terribly powerful and the ban on sex was similarly flouted by homosexuality. Which means all unnatural idealisms are bound to collapse and degenerate into hypocrisy and secret indulgence. This is such a perennial problem that even today it is going on all over the world where paganism is still alive-  most recent scandal (2005) was in Greece; the Greek Orthodox church, perhaps the most obeyed and pampered church in the world was rocked by a combination of scandals ranging from sexual to financial and legal. One accused priest said “If I talk it will be an earthquake”.  Only one priest stole seven million dollars to feather his nest for his approaching retirement the papers said.  Another 91 year-old was caught in bed with a teenager girl.

 

Still another religion of China has been Buddhism brought to China from India through Indo-China and Tibet, of course after being converted into polytheism with all its parapernatlia like a powerful priesthood, a great pantheon of gods topped by huge statues of the Buddha and steeped in impossible myth, ritual and magic.  From then Buddhism travelled to Japan where to this day it co-exists in a mutually inclusive way with the older national religion of Japan, namely Shinto. It is predictably animistic and ancestor worshipping and served by a strong priesthood charging fees and accepting gifts for their sacerdotal functions.

 

Lastly, we must remind our readers that even in the more advanced and refined forms of such paganisms human life is of dubious worth and from killing young ‘unwanted’ children or abandoning them to nature as well as self-mutilation and suicide remain the norm. Whatever reformers like the Buddha or Confucius tried to introduce their legacies were partial and temporary; soon they were converted into crass paganisms as bad as anywhere with their any surviving original elements embellishing the speech and writings of few more enlightened and refined men over centuries. 

 

PERSIAN RELIGION

 

This we left to the last simply because it has a peculiar characteristic which makes it look like the parent of the three present monotheisms, namely, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Of course we are saying this in an academic sense- all true religion comes from Allah, are based on monotheism and moral responsibility here and also beyond death. Slight differences of the myths and metaphors as well as laws only reflect the needs of the times.  It is like the discovery of mathematics:  Indian mathematics used a different and better number system than the Greek, yet the results of their operations were the same.

 

We need not dwell on the religion of the Iranians before Zoroaster. It was a paganism like India’s and Sumeria’s.  Zoroaster was, roughly speaking a contemporary of Gautama, Confucius and LaoTse; he was a priest at a pagan temple. He claimed that he had a vision of god Ahura Mazda, who revealed himself as the only god in charge of creation and all good in existence. Against him was an evil god or spirit called Ahriman who stood for all evil and had always been out to frustrate Ahura Mazda.  This one would eventually win, would destroy Ahriman, resurrect all the dead, judge them and put the good in an earthly paradise following the return of Zoroaster.  This is just a bare summary.

 

The fuller story is improbably mythical; it contains some elements which, with some variation, entered Christianity. To start with, Zoroaster was no ordinary man; his birth was a double miracle, featuring almost a virgin birth. A noble damsel was entered by the light of heaven while a pious priest, while offering sacrifice at the temple was injected with the juice of the haoma plant as a result of his guardian angel’s going into the plant and then returning back into him.  In due course the two married and from the mixture of the holy juice and the heavenly light Zoroaster was born. When grown he withdrew to the wilderness for contemplation and tempted in various ways by the Ahriman (Persian Satan) but resisted, just like Jesus did. Ahura Mazda (Lord of Light) appeared to him and gave him the Divine book Avesta which contained all wisdom and knowledge needed. 

 

He preached the new religion against stiff opposition and persecution; eventually prince Vistashpa accepted him and helped to spread the religion. Zoroaster left this earth when a flash from heaven engulfed him and carried him to heaven, again just like Jesus Christ; what is more he is to return at the end of the time, just like Jesus again. What survived of Avesta (later wrongly renamed Zend-Avesta) is even more dubious than the Old Testament; along with a sprinkling of some brilliant words and maxims and hymns of piety the majority of its contents feature obscure and confused myths including many gods and also ritual and magical prescriptions. Yet and basically speaking the creation of the universe in six days followed by the creation of the first man and woman who lived in a garden from which they were expelled and whose children so angered Ahura Mazda that He destroyed them in a flood, a picture already existent in the older Babylonian religion.  Which shows that monotheism and its story of creation and eschatology have a far more ancient genesis than in the Book of Genesis in the Bible and confirms the doctrine of the Qur’an that these elements are as old as mankind but lost from and rediscovered by them in fits and starts. Allah calls the old books containing the same elements as their last the Qur’an “Zubur al awwalin” (26: 196), i.e, the scrolls of the ancients.

 

Although Zoroaster was a monotheist (for Ahriman was ultimately powerless against this sole creator of all existence) he could not stop his later followers from converting the seven Divine qualities he ascribed to God into seven divine persons, headed by the ‘Good Mind’ which corresponds to Logos in Christianity, also called the Holy Wisdom, Santa Sophia. The seven personal gods converted from the seven Divine attributes named by Zoroaster were:

Light (nur), Good Mind (wisdom), Right (haqq), Dominion (mulk/qudrah), Piety (kind justice), Well-Being (Samadiya) and Immortality (Baqa)-  these became the immortal holy ones, who managed the universe on behalf of Ahura Mazda.  As such they correspond to the archangels of the Semitic religions and to the seven saints running the universe according to crasser forms of many mystic traditions where also threes and forties etc. feature. There are also seven ‘devas’, i.e., evil demons whose business is to tempt all human beings all the time.

 

Their leader was of course Ahriman.  But a bit polytheistically it was Ahriman who had created harmful things like snakes, locusts, dark and winter etc. as well as teaching sodomy, every crime and sin.  Later these devils multiplied into millions- Zoroaster was beaten by the polytheistic bias of lesser men which make up the lower classes in all communities.  Fire was worshipped as a god as in the ancient religion and became part of Zoroastrian worship. Yet these extra gods or demigods never became statues or paintings for worship, at least this much the religion remained monotheistic at the bottom. The sun also, like fire, was taken as the symbol of Ahura Mazda and piously feared and respected. But again, a priesthood was maintained as cynically as ever. The temples were lavished with gold, silver, cows, camels, ducks, butter, dates, grapes, grain etc which were then consumed by the priests on behalf of Ahura Mazda and his deputy spirits two whom only the smell was enough.

 

After death a day of resurrection and judgment awaited all and hell, purgatory and paradise were in prospect. Each will be treated according to his faith and conduct while alive; all had to cross a bridge from which the sinners would fall into a raging fire below.  Those with faith and some good works would not remain in the fire too long but would eventually rescued and carried to the Garden.  As such Zoroastrianism in its conceivable original form was quite similar to our more modern Semitic religions among which only Islam could preserve its basic character. To its more credit, Zoroastrianism was heavily moralistic as are its modern followers.  When this Zoroastrian religion of Persia was met by Islam it both fell down from the impact of the younger and purer faith and gave its members to Islam to which they could not object too much.

 

NATIVE AMERICAN RELIGIONS

 

Before we study the Greek religion we may take a quick look at  the native American religions. Depending on the level of civilisation American religions ranged from simplest animistic savagery of small clans and tribes to the sophisticated paganisms of empires like the Aztec and Incas.  These sophisticated paganisms were roughly on par with the Sumerian and Assyrian paganisms. As always human sacrifice and brutality against foreigners and enemies went hand in hand with huge temples with huge stone and wooden gods and the abuses going with them.  Myth and magic ruled all souls and superstition decided most matters for better and worse. When the Spanish conquistadors began their forays into the New World they found its more or less well developed natives as superstitious and barbaric as themselves while naivety was one sided and on the side of the natives.  Armed infinitely better than the natives and with more science and technology on their side the Europeans won almost every battle and punished the vanquished as savagely as they themselves could expect from the indignant and scared natives whom only conversion to Catholicism could save from mortality if not from slavery. In the end American paganisms died out but not before contaminating Catholicism with their own myths and pagan practices.  The Catholicism among the more primitive and poorer sections and regions of South America still retain a lot of the myths and practices of pre-Columbian days as European Catholicism retains a lot of Roman, Greek and Middle Eastern pagan elements wedded to it in an insoluble Catholic wedding.

 

GREEK RELIGION (AND THE ROMAN, ITS EXTENSION)

 

Greece began as a civilised country when Babylonia and Egypt were already mature and on the way down by a long process of decline.  One of the ancestors of Greece was Crete where civilisation had begun much earlier. Greeks as we know them descended from a mixture of these Cretans, then Aegeans, Dorians and Illyrians and many more invading or passing races.

 

Early Greeks were animists worshipping an infinite population of spirits beginning with their ancestors whose graves they honoured and serviced daily. All impressive natural features like mountains and natural forces like wind were gods as were some animals, especially the bull, the cow, the pig and the goat.  Underlining all these diverse gods or spirits (because at this primitive level the two roughly meant the same thing) each family had a god, they kept a fire alight at all times to honour the god and shared their food and wine with it at each and every meal by sprinkling some into or near the family hearth.

 

When their civilisation became more settled and urbanised the tribal distinctions still survived. Each tribe and town adopted their own god, kept a fire alight at all times to its honour and regularly celebrated its glories. In war their god led them, their flags featured it. Reports of miracles proliferated when the god appeared at the head or over the army and in fact the god fought to victory on their behalf. This compares well with the Jewish beliefs and claims related in the Old Testament about their Yahveh.  Only lately in the Old Testament Yahveh becomes the only and transcendental God without however losing his racist prejudice for the Jew. “A man’s god is only as big as his mind” said the philosophers.

Much later when Greeks became one nation despite remaining as city states like Athens and  Sparta their theology advanced to feature major gods common to them all despite the fact that city gods survived. Among the latter were Athena the goddess of the Athenians and Demeter the goddess of the Eleusians. Gradually these coalesced into what is called the Olympian gods. Mount Olympus is the major mountain of Greece; it is a spent volcano and came to become the holiest natural feature of ancient Greece. The chief and sky god Zeus lived there and other gods were his sons and daughters and the females also his wives.

 

Interestingly Greeks had the most anthropomorphic theology among all classical peoples; Their Olympian gods all were men and women and we now see them in the museums of the world in the form of very handsome persons often set in marble.  Most male gods, excepting their father Zeus are clean shaven and almost always naked in the extreme. This nakedness also is frequently depicted in Greek sculptures and paintings of common men which may indicate that many Greeks went about as they were born from their mothers so long as weather permitted.  They apparently totally lacked our sense of shame about our bodies so much so that we have a story of great Socrates  consummating his marriage in the street in full day light while his guests and other citizens looked on.  It must be no wonder then that the Western nations could never settle with a sensible sexual morality, having been torn between the totally shameless Hellenic attitude towards sex and the Christian attitude of total satanisation of it.  The fruits therefore ranged from the most radically forced celibacy imposed by the removal of the sexual organs (as many monks, like Origen, resorted to) to wildest mass free sex among Christians to this day on occasions like the traditional may pole celebrations and today’s New Year’s. The last invaded another regular occasion - the weekend when revelries and debaucheries are indulged in dancing halls and even in the dark corners of the streets.  Many ‘unwanted’ pregnancies result from all these and a few months later most must be terminated by an abortion.

 

To this day sex remains the most basic sin among Christian believers while the Christian believers remain the most susceptible to sexual seduction or indulgence.  Over the ages sex scandals in churches recurred with unabated frequency and ‘holiest’ or highest church leaders offended no less then the village priest and the bored housewife and also the nuns. Things became too bad at times by becoming too frank-  popes and cardinals displayed with pride and pampered with luxuries their several bastard children without either shame on their part or blame on the part of the public.  While criticising and ridiculing Islam for polygamy and concubinage the Christian clerics enjoyed envied prestige among their flocks and peers for keeping mistresses some of whom were their house matrons chosen from among nuns or even the wives of other men which wives bore children both for the husband and the holy father. For their part kings did the same; they bedded the wives of their lords who often consented to or offered it (to gain favours). Not only the kings produced many bastard sons and daughters who were known to the public but also some of such bastards succeeded them to the throne with the blessing of all concerned. 

 

Additionally kings routinely ravished women and girls they could corner, like a maid servant serving in the palace. Lesser lords were no less Casanovas; not only they womanised like their royal lord but many over many centuries had a strange right to deflower all virgins married in their realm;. only then the bride could be sent to the bridegroom. This was when Christianity was the unchallenged master of the Europeans.  This so called right was termed ‘Le Droit de Seigneur’.  In other words, this vast spectrum of abuse and promiscuity was West’s answer to Islam’s polygamy and concubinage.  Which was the more responsible and honourable let the  readers judge and who should criticise and look down on whom can be seen thereof.  Sex is too natural to man to be denied both expression and satisfaction and a good sign that a religion is good for us is its realistic view of sex with its utmost care for contented family life and well looked after genuine offspring.

 

To go back to the Greek religion we must add that each god had many shrines and temples where the believers made pilgrimages, offered gifts and sought solace as well as solution to their problems and cures for their illnesses. One example may be the cult of Aesculapius, the god of medicine.  Sick people would visit his shrine, offer gifts and be instructed by the resident priest how to go about the obtainment of the cure. He or she would fast, pray etc and then sleep at the shrine; the cure could then be revealed by the god who would visit the believer in a dream. Other gods looked after other needs of their worshippers; Poseidon the sea god (named Neptune by the Romans) looked after the seamen while Demeter attended to the needs of agricultural produce. Around these gods many myths and legends revolved; like ordinary men and women they could be both noble and mean, brave and cowardly, well and ill and fight wars and conspire plots. Deception, slaughter, imprisonment, theft, rape and incest among gods  were common. Sometimes men and gods interacted similarly. Morality was hardly the main speciality or claim of gods; so were they for most Greeks. Greek mythology and histories took especial interest and pride in skilful lies and deception of rivals and enemies and honouring a word never took a higher ground than methods of beating an enemy or rival by any and every unscrupulous means. This has also been the case with many Old Testament stories; Isaac cheats Ishmael of his first-born status as does Jacob when he cheats his brother Esau. Yahveh approves all such deceits and blesses the deceivers.  

 

The moralisation of gods and their slow evolution into a single supreme and transcendent God took a few centuries. Of this development Plato (5-4^th C. BCE) was the top exponent and from him onward monotheism became the common ground among the spiritually oriented philosophers.  Plotinus (3^rd C. CE) modified Plato’s theology which then became ‘Neo-Platonism’.  As such it became the rage among many mystery religions; Christianity was among them and in Islam many Sufis took to it with such admiration that they could bend the Qur’an and use weak and even forged hadiths to make it the mainstay of their Islamic spirituality.  The main Muslim partisans of this theology were called the ‘Ishraqiyyun’, their philosophy as Israqiyya, i.e, ‘Enlightenment. More of this and the Neo- Platonic theory itself when we come to Islam’s spiritual history at the end.

 

Romans, culturally speaking, were the admirers and pupils of the Greeks and their pantheon and other religious beliefs and practices followed on the Greek precedents. Basically they changed god’s names and for example, Aphrodite the goddess of love became Venus while Artemis became Diana. The Roman version was more imperial though; the emperor, like in all paganisms was a god and the chief priest, the pontifex maximus. Roman temples were more majestic, the priesthood more developed and influential and rites and rituals more impressive as well as better ordered. As such it passed its many forms and formalities to its successor Christianity and to this day they live on in the Catholic Church.