ABSTRACT

This chapter surveys the development of religious thought, namely new ways of thinking about ritual and justifying religious innovation, in early China. The waning political power of the Zhou royal court resulted in the decline of the authority of the ritual system associated with it. New rituals, designed by religious innovators, began to emerge, challenging established ways of interacting with the divine realm. Alarmed by these challenges, elite thinkers who saw themselves as guardians of the old ritual system of the Zhou were forced to create new ways of theorizing religion and explaining ritual efficacy. Drawing on a variety of transmitted and excavated textual sources, the chapter analyzes this lively debate as a dispute between two conflicting modes of religiosity: a practical model associated with a mechanical approach to ritual utilized by religious innovators to justify the invention of new practices, and an alternative mode advocated by the old guard, which redefined the category of ritual via a moral and cosmological framework and stressed the need for a complete sense of religious piety and devotion to a fixed body of ritual practices.