International Social Science Journal (Chinese Edition)

No.4, 2022

“The Great Virtues of Ghosts and Gods”: A Zoeontological Perspective

(Abstract)

Fei Wu

This paper is an attempt to understand the concept of “ghosts and gods” in traditional Chinese religious and philosophical thought from the zoeontological perspective. First, the paper composes six accounts of ghosts and gods since the Republic of China, arguing that the original meaning of ghosts should come from the understanding of death. In the philosophical tradition of zoeontology, death is not a negation of life, but a stage of life, and thus the attitude towards ghosts represents the place of death in life. In Chinese religious and ritual traditions, the terms ghost and god are often used together, and it is clear from the definition of ghosts in the Book of Rites: Methods of Offering Sacrifices that sometimes ghosts and gods differ only in degree. In contrast to the yang of the human world, ghosts and gods are both yin and have the characteristic of being unpredictable. The gods represent the unpredictability of yin and yang, and the ghosts represent the treacherous and fearful changes. Since all understandings of ghosts and gods come from an understanding of life itself, the question of whether they exist objectively is not a fundamental one. In the Confucian ritual tradition, sacrifice to god as god is present, to serve dead parents as they did when they were alive, and it is the ritualistic and religious function of the ghosts and gods as great virtues that the attitude to life unfolds through the attitude to the ghosts and gods.