Empowered by Ancestors provides a narrative of how rituals for honoring ancestors were redesigned and reimagined during the Song period by scholars and the imperial court amid dynamic and contentious intellectual and political forces. The author, Cheung Hiu Yu, focuses on ritual discussions regarding the architecture of the imperial temple, which was the symbol of authority and legitimacy of the ruling house. Cheung highlights pivotal moments when controversies erupted over spatial arrangement, orthodoxy, and practice. Cheung's book shows the cyclical nature of how state consolidation of authority coincided with increased debates and production of textual records on state rituals. Cheung argues that by examining the roles played by scholars associated with New Learning (xinxue 新學) in the debates on imperial temple rituals, his book reveals a much more complex relationship between state-elite and state-society than had previously been known.
The book is divided into three sections comprising seven chapters. Section one provides the early history and details of ancestral rituals. Section two covers debates in the Northern Song period, and section three delineates how the temple rituals transformed and became a part of nonimperial ritual practices in the Southern Song.
In chapter 1, Cheung surveys ancestral rituals from the Shang period, when spatial and calendrical structures, such as the Five-Ritual cycle and the quadrate order of sifang 四方, were already embedded in rituals (p. 16). From the Shang to the Zhou and then the Han dynasty, Cheung examines various debates on rituals texts. The most significant debates involved the ritual of zhao 昭 and mu 穆, which refers to the parallel setting of ancestral sequence with the primal ancestor at the center in the imperial temple. This involved the placement of spirit tablets according to seniority and hierarchy. Moving from the Han to the Tang period, debates arose over past interpretations of the ritual process, correct offerings, the timing of the ritual ceremonies, and even the number of temples dedicated to ancestors. As dynasties rose and fell, capitals shifted to different cities, and ancestral rituals along with other forms of state rituals were redesigned.
Chapter 2 examines how the new Song court reviewed the liturgical details of rituals from previous dynasties and devised the Ritual Code of the Kaibao Era in 971 CE. The subsequent adoption of a merit-based interpretation for ancestral temple arrangement because of the fraternal succession of the emperors Taizu and Taizong in 998 CE set in motion debates about succession and ritual details. The decision to relegate to a lesser position, that of honoring primal ancestors based on seniority and filiality, would set the stage for further debates when Wang Anshi tried to launch the New Policies in 1069.
Section two contains chapters 3–5, detailing the 1072 controversy over the Song primal ancestor in chapter 3, the 1079 zhaomu debates and the Yuanfeng ritual reforms in chapter 4, and the New Learning (xinxue) contribution to the ritual debates of the imperial temple in chapter 5. Cheung examines the details and contextualizes these controversies within larger intellectual debates and scholarly trends of that period, shedding light on complex factionalism, and overlapping positionalities in intellectual and political spaces.
Section three contains chapter 6 on Zhu Xi's writings of the imperial temple and chapter 7 on how the discourse of temple rituals moved from state to local spaces in the Southern Song. Chueng coins the word “socialization” to describe that process of different versions of imperial temple rituals being adopted in clans and lineage ritual manuals (pp. 159–82).
Cheung's scholarship provides clues for illuminating the nature of ancestral rituals still prevalent in southern China and diasporic Chinese communities. This book contains details for differentiating and understanding the roots and the differences between temple rituals practiced for political reasons of legitimacy and authority, versus local family ancestral shrines set up for filial piety and the perpetuation of family ties across oceans. The intellectual rationale and embodied practices of ancestral rituals provide structures for diasporic groups far away from centers of power. Cheung's detailed discussions of various debates on imperial temples serves to challenge the essentialization of “Chineseness” in ancestral rituals. Cheung's evidence shows nothing is unchanging or enduring in rituals. There are no pristine “Chinese” ancestral rites.
It is noticeable that Cheung does not discuss the significance of Buddhist or Daoist liturgical texts and rituals on these debates. This reader also wondered whether Liao and Jin ancestral rituals ever entered into these conversations in the Song. This book will be of interest to scholars working on rituals, state-elite relations, and lineage-clan ancestral practices.
