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Of Tripod and Palate This page intentionally left blank Of Tripod and Palate Food, Politics, and Religion in Traditional China Edited by Roel Sterckx OF TRIPOD AND PALATE © Roel Sterckx, 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without writt...

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Of Tripod and Palate

This page intentionally left blank

Of Tripod and Palate Food, Politics, and Religion in Traditional China

Edited by

Roel Sterckx

OF TRIPOD AND PALATE

© Roel Sterckx, 2005. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6337–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conference on Food and Religion in Traditional China (2004 : Cambridge, England). Of tripod and palate : food, politics, and religion in traditional China / edited by Roel Sterckx. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6337–1 1. Food habits—China—History—Congresses. 2. Food—Political aspects—China—Congresses. 3. Food—Religious aspects—China—Congresses. I. Title: Food, politics and religion in traditional China. II. Sterckx, Roel, 1969– III. Title. GT2853.C6C66 2004 394.1⬘2⬘0951—dc22 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: October 2005 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction Roel Sterckx One

Moonshine and Millet: Feasting and Purification Rituals in Ancient China Constance A. Cook

vii 1

9

Two

Food and Philosophy in Early China Roel Sterckx

Three

When Princes Awake in Kitchens: Zhuangzi’s Rewriting of a Culinary Myth Romain Graziani

62

The Offering of Food and the Creation of Order: The Practice of Sacrifice in Early China Michael Puett

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Four

34

Five

Eating Better than Gods and Ancestors Robert F. Campany

Six

A Taste of Happiness: Contextualizing Elixirs in Baopuzi Poo Mu-chou

123

Feasting Without the Victuals:The Evolution of the Daoist Communal Kitchen Terry F. Kleeman

140

Pleasure, Prohibition, and Pain: Food and Medicine in Traditional China Vivienne Lo

163

Seven

Eight

96

vi

Contents

Nine

Buddhist Vegetarianism in China John Kieschnick

186

Ten

Buddhism,Alcohol, and Tea in Medieval China James A. Benn

213

Eleven The Beef Taboo and the Sacrificial Structure of Late Imperial Chinese Society Vincent Goossaert

237

About the Contributors

249

Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Contributions to this book were presented, in various stages of gestation, at the conference “Food and Religion in Traditional China,” hosted by the East Asia Institute and the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, in April 2004.The event was made possible through generous support from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the British Academy, the Society for the Study of Dietary Culture (Taipei), and the Wing Yip & Brothers Charitable Trust. A toast of thanks and appreciation is due to all those who contributed to the meeting and this volume. First of all I would like to thank the authors. Their enthusiasm and cooperation before and during the publication process, amidst hectic institutional and other commitments, were truly exemplary. The book has benefited from comments by Robert Chard, Christopher Cullen, Glen Dudbridge, Geoffrey Lloyd, Michael Loewe, and Marco Ceresa. Fongyee Walker and Sungwu Cho assisted in the smooth running of the Cambridge meeting. For assistance along the way, I owe a debt of gratitude to David McMullen, Joe McDermott, and my colleagues in the Chinese section in the Faculty of Oriental Studies. At Palgrave,Toby Wahl and Heather Van Dusen provided expert support. John Moffett and Ang Chengeng provided assistance with work on the final proofs and index. Editorial work was supported by a publication grant from the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Cambridge University. Roel Sterckx Cambridge,Autumn 2004

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Introduction Roe l Ste rc k x

Food and foodways provide an effective lens through which to illuminate human life. Its role in ancient and contemporary societies has been the subject of study by scholars working in a variety of fields over the past few decades. Studies that examine food as nutrition or explore the economic and technical aspects of food production through themes such as famine, land use, health, and poverty reflect a long-standing interest by historians and archaeologists in the material aspects of food in ancient societies.Today, historians studying the role of food and commensality in societies in the past increasingly acknowledge an intellectual debt to pioneering sociological and anthropological work.1 The results have been rewarding: the biocultural relationship of humans to food and eating is now firmly implanted as a valuable tool to explore aspects of a society’s social, political and religious make up. For Graeco-Roman antiquity, work on what Peter Garnsey has coined the “food and non-food uses of food” has yielded results hardly digestible in one comprehensive bibliography.2 Likewise, an increasing number of studies on food, cuisine, and eating in medieval and early modern Europe have seen the light in recent years (Carlin 1998, Bober 1999, Scholliers 2001, Effros 2002); and enduring biblical scholarship on sacrifice and food taboos has recently been supplemented with comprehensive studies on foodways in the Islamic world (Feeley-Harknick 1994;Van Gelder 2000a, 2000b; Kueny 2001). When asked to identify one aspect of Chinese culture that has characterized so much of the cultural capital it has fostered within its own borders and beyond, a preoccupation with food would no doubt rank among the most likely answers. To quote the late Chang Kwang-chih: “That Chinese cuisine is the greatest in the world is highly debatable and is essentially irrelevant. But few can take exception to the statement that few other cultures are as food oriented as the Chinese” (Chang 1977, 11). Indeed few societies have put more emphasis on the central role of food preparation and food consumption in both a secular and religious context. For many today, the globalization of Chinese culture still begins with the stomach (Wu and Cheung 2002).

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The most original contributions to the study of food culture as a biocultural phenomenon in China were initiated by anthropologists (Ahern 1973; Chang 1977; Anderson 1988; Thompson 1988). Much of their work was motivated by interests in the study of kinship as reflected in mortuary practice, sacrificial religion and community rituals. More recently the focus of enquiry has broadened to include the role of food as a marker of social identity or modernity in contemporary China and the Chinese diaspora ( Jing 2000; Farquhar 2002;Watson 2004). It is in a pioneering collection of essays published in 1977, directed by Chang Kwang-chih, that the anthropological questioning of food culture amalgamated with an evaluation of food semantics in Chinese historical sources, both texts as well as archaeological evidence.Around the same time encyclopedic surveys compiled by Shinoda Osamu, Hayashi Minao and others brought together invaluable data for the material and economic history of food in a diachronic and/or synchronic perspective. Chang’s volume has remained the main introductory text on the subject in the English language to date. It combines a descriptive account of food habits and attitudes toward food within a sociohistorical context from the Shang period through the end of the Mao era.Although its methodology, thematic organization (a chronology), and use of sources reflect the state of the field three decades ago, it will no doubt remain a foundational collection of data on Chinese food culture. A number of scholars, mainly in China and Japan, have continued to explore culinary history from a technological and economic perspective.3 In the meantime, as the bibliographies appended to the essays in this volume suggest, new sources have become available for the study of food culture and the intellectual approaches adopted to examine both transmitted and newly recovered sources have evolved. The past few decades have witnessed the discovery of numerous hitherto unknown textual and archaeological materials excavated from tombs across China. To give due account of the variety and sheer quantity of new texts and objects would require several separate volumes. In addition, interpretative work on food culture in cognate disciplines and focused on other civilizations, past and contemporary, has inspired scholars of China to channel their attention to the subject beyond cataloguing its material and technological history, although great advances continue to be made with respect to the latter (Huang 2000).To highlight just a few significant developments, students of early China have now at their disposal detailed tomb inventories, sacrificial and divinatory records and, most recently, have even been alerted to the discovery of a Western Han gastronomic cookbook. Steady advances in Dunhuang studies have allowed scholars of medieval China to compare social life and habits in the western periphery with those of heartland China. Scholars of Chinese Buddhism have gained an interest in the material aspects of life both among monastic and lay communities. Likewise, historians of Chinese medicine no longer rely solely on the transmitted medical canon for their analyses but have embraced a great variety

Introduction

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of sources including mantic texts, calendars, religious texts and anecdotal literature. Chang Kwang-chih concluded the introduction to his pioneering volume with the observation that, as far as food culture is concerned, “continuity vastly outweighs change in this aspect of Chinese history.” This continuity, Chang noted, was self-explanatory and a proof of “the changewithin-tradition pattern of Chinese cultural history” (Chang 1977, 20). Scholars today are generally more reticent to discuss China as a timeless and monolithic civilization, both in terms of its cultural geography as well as its social stratification.Yet few scholars today would dispute that Chinese food culture shows material as well as conceptual continuities that stretch over centuries (although the mushrooming fast-food culture in Chinese urban areas today might soon convince the skeptic of the opposite). A meticulously stage-managed Chinese banquet today still echoes some of the precepts and rules of etiquette set out in ritual codes traceable to early imperial times; food offerings are still central to Chinese religious practice. The aim of this book is to explore some of these continuities in Chinese food culture not so much by examining the material history of food and eating but by exploring ideas about food, cooking, banqueting, and diet within the social and religious context of the communities in which certain foods were consumed or eschewed. In broad terms, the authors in this volume were invited to address the role of foodways in China’s religious traditions and reflect on the ways in which the culinary arts, food, food sacrifice, and eating influenced philosophical and religious perceptions and the ritual setting in which such ideas were expressed. As editor, I have hovered between the bogus and real cook in Lüshi chunqiu: “If a cook adjusts and blends dishes not daring to partake of them himself he may properly be considered a cook.When a cook adjusts and blends the dishes and then eats them himself, he cannot be considered a real cook” (Lüshi chunqiu,“Qu si” ). No theoretical or methodological framework was earmarked to guide our inquiry other than, where possible, we would refrain from digressing into an account of data on food production, food technology, and the biology and economics of nutrition. Each author approaches the subject within her or his period or field of expertise based on a personal selection of representative sources that bear on the subject.The menu on offer is, therefore, partly chronological and partly thematic. It presents studies dealing with China from the Bronze Age through the classical, medieval, and late imperial periods, while at the same time assessing food culture in China’s main religious traditions: “Confucian” ancestor worship and sacrificial religion, religious Daoism, and Buddhism. The offering of sacrificial foodstuffs, the banqueting of guests, and the ritual distribution, preparation, and consumption of food and drink were central to the social, political, and ritual structure that characterizes premodern (and to some extent contemporary) Chinese society. What unites late Shang and Zhou bronze vessels with Buddhist dietary codes or Daoist immortality recipes is a poignant testimony that culinary activity governed

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not only human relationships but also fermented the communication between humans and the spirit world. Cooking, the offering and exchange of food, and commensality were among the most pervasive means of social and religious communication in traditional China. Food culture provides a good case study that helps us break down the enduring preconception that Chinese religious practice can be meaningfully elucidated when seen as belonging to one of the so-called three great traditions articulated above. As several chapters in this book show, such pigeonholing is artificial at best. Since religious thought and devotional practice were intricately tied to the social and political relationships that structured human activity, alternative foodways did not superimpose themselves as revolutionary innovations that gained social acceptance merely because of doctrinal imperatives. Food and eating united or divided human society, the realm of the ancestors, and the spirit world. Yet the motives underlying particular food choices were complex since feasting or fasting implied abstaining from or celebrating ideologies, virtues, and social aspirations that often had little to do with religious conviction. Ancestral worship and sacrifice had been the mainstay of socioreligious and political life in China since the late Shang period.They would continue to assume a central role despite the emergence of the great medieval institutionalized religions of Daoism and Buddhism that offered paths to salvation that no longer solely depended on ancestral approval or the mediation by a feudal lord, emperor, or lineage elder. For centuries, meat and blood sacrifices, communal banquets and drinking gatherings, and ritual food exchanges had been at the heart of the social fabric of pre-imperial and early imperial society. It proved to be a substrate of religious practice that would inspire debates on the role of food and sacrificial worship in China for centuries to come. During the Bronze age, as Constance Cook describes, sacrificial food offerings were part of an intricate symbolical gift-economy. Presented in mortuary feasts both inside the tomb and above the ground in the ancestral temple, they served to accompany the dead on their journey from the corporeal world into the afterlife and reaffirmed lineage hierarchies among the ancestors in the eyes of the living descendants. Such sacrificial rites forged new or affirmed existing relationships among the living descendants. Sacrificial rites, as Michael Puett argues, were also used to purposefully create fictitious ancestral and spirit hierarchies and construct genealogical continuities among otherwise unrelated humans and natural phenomena. The sacrificial food exchange and the prominent role played by officiants and ritualists involved in the preparation and execution of the required culinary procedures reverberated beyond the sacrificial altars and, as I explore in my paper, furnished metaphors for the art of government. One example is the emergence of the typecast minister-cook as sage adviser in political discourse. So deeply engrained was the vocabulary of ritual sacrifice that by Warring States times, according to Romain Graziani, adepts of self-cultivation

Introduction

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had started to interiorize much of its imagery into their alternative therapies for physical self-cultivation and spiritual enlightenment.The alcoholic spirits of the altar had been transformed into quintessential energies that had to be sought within one’s body and one’s self.That a tradition insisting on the importance of nourishing the physical and moral self with refined cosmic energies would profile itself against a contemporary culture heavily preoccupied with saturating spirits in tombs, temples, and shrines, illustrates how religious food culture had become fertile ground for contesting voices and the development of spiritual alternatives. Indeed several contributors in this volume emphasize that culinary regimes in China were not necessarily adopted for intrinsic or, what Robert Campany calls, “internalist” reasons such as the physical benefits associated with a particular diet or a prescriptive moral code that denounces or promotes the consumption of certain foods on doctrinal grounds. More often food choices were inspired by external values.According to Campany, seekers of immortality in early medieval China abstained from grain-based cuisine partly because they sought to oppose a cluster of cultural values and institutions associated with grain, most notably, the ideal of a grain-based agricultural and sedentary civilization whose cultural values they sought to transcend by living in mountains and ingesting natural herbs and substances from the wilds. Poo Mu-chou takes this further and argues that the quest for elixirs of immortality in early medieval China can only be understood against the background of evolving medical ideas and, what he terms, the social psychology of the period. Vivienne Lo examines how the culinary arts influenced medical perceptions of diet and how alimentary philosophies that had dictated the diets of rulers and sages were used to justify or denounce certain medicinal usages of food. Religious Daoism and Buddhism instigated major changes in Chinese religious food culture. Both denounced blood sacrifices and both prescribed the adoption of a dietary regimen as an aid to spiritual salvation.Yet advocates of cuisines of transcendence and Buddhist vegetarianism needed to invoke continuities with the past in order to propose new dietary regimes and rituals.Terry Kleeman shows that the Daoist communal kitchen ought not to be seen as a radical departure from the village based sacrificial banquet, but rather as a transformation of a traditional lineage-based communal sacrificial ritual dominated by elites into a rite that stressed a more inclusive form of comm...