Empowered by Ancestors

By focusing on the Imperial Temple, this book explores the making of ancestral ritual norms by looking into the ritual debates in the imperial courts of Song China (960–1279). It argues that court ritual debates empowered the Song scholar-officials (shidafu士大夫‎) with the cultural authority to confront the state and reshape society. In particular, the two discourses of filial piety and political merits played crucial role in Song court ritual debates over the Imperial Temple. Both discourses had a tremendous influence on the ancestral practices of later societies. In addition, this book offers a new perspective to examine the intellectual dimension of Song factionalism, in which the ritual interests of Song scholar-officials were more associated with their scholarly backgrounds than their political stances or affiliations. In the Song ritual discourses of the Imperial Temple, scholar-officials rendered a separate intellectual identity that transcended the boundaries of not only factional politics but also the strictly defined “schools” (xuepai學派‎) of Song scholarship. In terms of intellectual identity, Song scholar-officials are more eclectic than historians have previously thought, if ritual interest is taken into consideration. From this perspective, the book examines Song scholars’ ritual discussions on the Imperial Temple, especially those scholars who have been conventionally categorized with the New Learning (xinxue新學‎) school and the Learning of the Way (Daoxue 道學‎) fellowship.