Funeral Rites and Responses to Ghosts and Gods

This chapter traces the evolution of Chinese funerary culture from archaic awe to Confucian ethical theory. It shows how death was first experienced as an accident, then theorised as the soul’s departure to an invisible realm, creating the yin-yang dual-world cosmology. Minute prescriptions—summoning the soul, washing and dressing the corpse, coffining, grave divination, graded mourning attire, sacrifices of repose and tablet enshrinement—are analysed as technologies for negotiating love, fear and social hierarchy. Comparative surveys of inhumation, cremation, sky, water, hanging-coffin and secondary burials expose ecological, economic and doctrinal determinants. It also reveals that Confucian sages re-scripted these rites: no longer mere appeasement of ghosts, they became staged pedagogies of filial piety that “serve the dead as if alive,” anchoring cosmic order and political authority in heartfelt ritual performance.