Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.5, 2014

The Ritual of Entertaining the Gods at Sacrifices and the Composition and Evolution of Fu-style Texts

(Abstract)

Jiang Xiaoguang and Xu Jie·

The development of fu-style poetry has a long history, including “fu recited by the blind,” “fu as one of six poetic techniques” and “fu describing objects”. It originates in the odes presented on the occasion of sacrifices at the ancestral temple. The composition and evolution of the long fu of the Han Dynasty, the literary glory of its age, were closely related to the ritual of entertaining the gods as guests when offering sacrifices in the ancestral temple. Firstly, the offering of objects and elegiac address at the ancestral temple were not only the source of the name fu, but endowed this style with its lasting association with the ancestral temple and with ritual and propriety; secondly, the system of reporting to departed sovereigns in this ritual and the rhetorical language used there affected the structural mechanism whereby the main feature of the fu style was rhetorical; thirdly, this ritual revolved around “the sacrificial object” and had “virtue” as its main purpose, and the triad of “the sacrificial object,” “rhetorical language” and “meaning” influenced the rhetorical methods of the fu style, namely expressing emotions by means of the description of objects, directly stating what was meant, and conveying meanings between lines; and fourthly, the praise to the gods and the observance of virtue in the ritual were the religious source of the “more persuasion than satire” in the fu style. The admonition and reformation derived from “reflecting on misfortune and fortune” displayed in the Western Han fu and the “display of virtue” and the “show of might” deriving from the “observation of might and ritual” (观威仪) displayed in Eastern Han fu were the two most important forms in the tradition of satire and persuasion in fu-style texts.