Les fonctionnaires et le divin : luttes de pouvoirs entre divinités et administrateurs dans les contes des Six Dynasties et des Tang
Authors: Levi Jean 
Published: March 2010

The Officials And The Gods

Power Struggles Between Deities And Administrators In Six Dynasties And Tang Tales

Edward Schafer has shown that not only religious specialists but often provincial administrators offered themselves up for ritual exposure to bring rain in periods of drought. Lévi examines the theme of the sacerdotal functions assumed by local officials who confronted supernatural powers in their constituencies. Both their duty to protect the local people from calamities (thought to be controlled by the gods) and their duty to educate them by supervising their cults motivated these officials. The majority of the tales Lévi cites are to be found in the Taiping guangji; frequent references to the Fengsu tongyi and the Hou Hen shu show that this concept of the civil cfficial's powerful role in the world of the gods had already taken shape by the end of the Han (2nd cent. A.D.).

I. Repression of supernatural forces and local deities

1. Struggle against supernatural forces

Throughout the tales Lévi analyses officials have the power to suppress obnoxious cults. The cult of the virtuous official then often takes the place of that to the supernatural object or person venerated before. Thus the governor and hydraulic engineer Li Bing is deified and his cult replaces the cult of the vanquished river god. In other instances, an official's warning is enough to remind a local god of his duties toward the community.

2. Eradication of cults

The destruction of shrines dedicated to "excessive" or "irregular cults" (yinsi) and the founding of schools often constituted a part of an official's duties. Such acts were not simply the action of an agnostic educator but, rather, the victory of a superior spiritual force over lowly and/or demonic genii. The tale of Di Renjie (of van Gulik fame) whose invisible official escort of gods protects him against the vengeance of the spirits he chastised illustrates this point. The tales of offended demons who await the end of an official's term of effice to take revenge against the man who suppressed them show that this spiritual power did not derive from the official himself but from his office.

The means of combatting sprites and spirits are the official orders and proclamations of the imperial administration (the very documents which the Taoists adopted in their similar crusade against the popular cults). An administrator may not, however, proceed against the local cults out of a personal prejudice against them; such agnostic literati, like Zong Dai, often become the victims of the deities' wrath. An official's place in the human hierarchy gives the official power over spriritual beings inferior to him in the supernatural hierarchy. His police function toward these beings can be efficaciously used only in the name and for the benefit of the community concerned.

II. Agents of Government and Agents of Religion

On the social level, the tales of conflict between officials and gods surely reflect a competition between state officials and the specialists of religion.

1. Officials against sorcerers

The locus classicus of this type of tale is the Shiji story of the hydraulic engineer Ximen Bao who abolished human sacrifices to the Yellow River by sacrificing to the river god the whole crew of sorcerers responsible for the cult. The unresponsive silence of the river in which they drowned was taken as proof of the god's inefficacy. Similarly, in another tale, Li Bing seizes upon the river's silence as a pretext to abolish the annual sacrifice of two "brides" with elaborate dowries (no doubt collected by the instigators of the cult) to the god of the Yangzi. But this tale continues with a theatrical battle between Li Bing and the river god, both in the shape of green oxen. It was only with the help of his subordinates that Li Bing could triumph over the frightful power of the god. In both episodes, irrigation work entails the suppression of a cult which, in turn, results in a battle with the god. The real issue is the confrontation between the official and the shamans who perpetuate cults which oblige the population to costly offerings such as these "marriage arrangements" for the river god.

2. State Officials as Agents or Object of Cults

The official dethrones deities and eliminates their human priests in his jurisdiction by manifesting powers superior to them and thus victoriously becomes their substitute. He is the virtuous administrator in whose honor the people build shrines even within his lifetime. The prefect Luan Ba and, much later, Di Renjie, both appear drunk at the imperial audience, and both justify their behavior, saying that the inhabitants of their provinces arc offering wine in the local temples dedicated to them. As a god, Di Renjie continues for centuries to protect his subjects from calamities and wars, at one point persuading a supernatural envoy to seek his victims elsewhere.

Luan Ba figures as a Taoist immortal in the Shenxian zhuan; another virtuous official, Xu Sun, became not only an immortal but, centuries later, the legendary founder of an important Taoist cult, the Jingming Dao (on which, cf. Akitsuki Kan'ei, Chūgoku kinsei Dōkyō no kenkyū, Tokyo, Sōbunsha, 1978, passim). Xu Sun as well as Li Bing progressed in their divine careers to the official title of Zhenjun, perfect prince, which indicates that they left the realm of popular religion and renounced the right to bloody sacrifices (at least in the Taoist scheme of things).

The step from local protector-saint into the hierarchy of the Taoist pantheon is a major one. Such a step does occur, however, in the context of the assimila- tion of popular cult figures by the Taoists. Tales of antagonism between officials and Taoist priests or immortals abound, but even they reveal a certain complicity that unites both the official authorities and the orthodox, duly legitimized Taoist perfected — against the gods of the profane. In literary fiction, the Taoists appear quite often as colleagues of the officials, and it is true that the Taoists' attitude toward the gods is quite distinct from that of the sorcerers. The latter are the servants of the popular gods whereas the former consider themselves their masters. The Taoists control the gods for the good of the community as well as for their own benefit, since their liturgies gain them merit which eventually confers immortality. This undoubtedly explains why the hagiographies of virtuous officials and those of Taoist perfected are (more often than not) so extraordinarily similar.

One theme common to both is the often dramatic and pitiless repression of heterodox popular deities, soil gods, demons and their cults. Even the supernatural bureaucracy participates in this crusade, mostly in the shape of deceased officials who continue their career in the other world. And woe to the profane sorcerer who permits the people to consider him a Taoist master and aspires to enter a Taoist paradise. After roasting in hell, he is restored to life upon promising to never again officiate for gods who demand bloody sacrifices.

Conclusion

On the ideological plane, a certain continuity exists between two spheres which, in the Western world, are governed by very different laws: the sphere of men and that of the gods. Like the Taoist specialists of the supernatural, the administrators exert control over transcendent realms. Their official documents play the same role as the Taoist imprecations (zhou) and talismans (fu) which, indeed, are nothing but imitations of bureaucratic formulae.

The task of the model official is to replace heterodox cults with schools and temples to Confucius. Were it not for the religious authority which the mirabilia tales attribute to the officials, one could interpret this simply as a rivalry between a local clergy and a lay central administration. In addition to the fact that the institution xue = "school" originated in a sacrificial context (for this, cf. Jean Lévi, "Le silence du rite", in Le Temps de la Réflexion VI, 1985, pp. 75-80) and the fact that the ceremonies in honor of Confucius seem like the official counterpart of the Taoist jiao liturgy, the local administrator also takes positive liturgic action whenever his constituency is menaced by drought or other calamities. Even if sorcerers participate, this liturgy is designed by literati ritualists at court, and its grand priest is the local official. When the order of the universe is endangered, the old myths are reactivated, and the head of the community offers himself in sacrifice for his people, as did the holy kings of antiquity. In the daily routine of his office, the prefect performed sacrifices to the territorial gods, an action which exemplified the religious jurisdiction of the central government over the community.

The role of the official representative of the imperial authority was to impregnate the local people's customs and the physical landscape itself with the power of the Way, to contain the forces of anarchy, and to expel the demonic influences lurking in village communities. He is a kind of exorcist — a theme which Jean Lévi has studied in detail in his doctoral dissertation: Aspects du mythe du tigre dans la Chine ancienne (Paris, 1979; unpubl. ms.). The tales of the expulsion of tigers suggest points of comparison between officials' hagiographies, the accounts of renewal of a dynastic era, and the rites that initiate the new year.

We have seen that the divinization of the virtuous official occurs not only in mirabilia tales but also in official hagiographies and in the actual cults. The temples erected to officials become permanent places of sacrifice enjoying imperial benediction. The hierarchical titles such officials continue to receive in the course of their supernatural careers — like those they received while in office — are dispensed officially by the human emperor. The real bureaucracy of men and the fictive bureaucracy of the gods are thus intimately linked, with the former always retaining control over the latter. There is no qualitative difference between this system and that of the Taoist promotion of saints. The Celestial Masters also perform a double role: with their divine science they safeguard the order of society and they aspire to official positions in the hierarchy of the immortals. Imperial officials and masters of the Tao are perhaps but two different faces of the same priesthood in China.