The religious beliefs of the Shang dynasty (), the second royal dynasty of China, centred on a pantheon of deities comprising deceased ancestors, nature spirits, and a high power known as Di. These spirits were held to influence the weather, the harvest, warfare, and the health of the king, and were approached through divination and sacrifice. Almost everything known of these beliefs derives from oracle bone inscriptions of the Late Shang period (), supplemented by archaeological remains and by later texts of uncertain reliability.
Ancestral spirits dominated Shang worship both in number and in the frequency with which they were addressed, and were organised in a hierarchy determined by generational seniority. Beside them stood nature powerschiefly the Mountain Power Yue and the River Power Heand a group of ancestor-like figures known to modern scholarship as the "Former Lords". Above or apart from all of these was Di, the only member of the pantheon who received no sacrifice.
The nature of Di is one of the most contested questions in the study of Shang religion. Interpretations range from a supreme deity comparable to the Judeo-Christian God, through an identification with the legendary Emperor Ku, to the argument in favor of a generic nature of the term. Cosmological views locate Di in the pattern of stars at and around the north celestial pole. The binome shangdi, the name under which the deity is known throughout later Chinese religion, seldom appears in Shang records.
Shang cosmology set the king at the centre of a world ordered by the 'four directions', and construed natural and human events as balanced pairs of oppositesa habit of thought that that has been characterised, on the evidence of the paired divination charges of the Shang king Wu Ding, as a metaphysics of yin and yang. Totemic readings of the religion, associating the royal ancestors with birds or with a myth of ten suns, have been influential but rest largely on later texts. The pantheon itself was subject to changes, as over the two centuries covered by the inscriptions, Di and the nature powers appear with steadily decreasing frequency until, by the final reigns, divination concerned itself almost exclusively with a regularised cycle of sacrifices to royal ancestors.
Overview
Sources and limitations
The Shang religion did not rely on any scriptures to narrate its faith. Modern scholarship instead understands it through oracle bone inscriptions, which act as the main textual evidence, together with archaeological remains of ritual activities. The sinologist David Keightley preferred to describe the tradition attested in these texts as "religiosity" rather than "religion", owing to the limited scope of what they reveal of Shang subjective experience.
Several constraints follow from the nature of this evidence. Shang inscriptions record matters whose divination mattered to the ruling elite, so that features they reveal cannot, in a straightforward way, be assigned either to a state religion or to lineage and personal practice. They contain no narrative or expository writing; therefore, spirits that they name are not associated with any stories, and the pattern of worship is left without a stated rationale. Interpretation, as such, depends on later traditions of uncertain application. Inscribed oracle bones also constituted only about one-tenth of the corpus excavated at the last Shang capital, with uninscribed ones for divination recovered from widely dispersed sites, indicating that the literate record represents only a narrow portion of religious practice.
Interpretations of Shang belief may also encounter limitations from traditional Chinese notions of cultural continuity. Because the Shang furnish the earliest written evidence from China, features of later Chinese religion are often sought in their inscriptions; the Shang state meanwhile was preceded and surrounded by cultures of comparable complexity, and elements of later tradition may descend from these rather than from the Shang.
Pantheon structure
The Shang articulated a pantheon filled with deities of various origins, particularly ancestral and natural. Following Keightley's classification, its members are commonly grouped into six categories of "Powers": pre-dynastic kings, dynastic kings, heir-producing royal consorts, the Former Lords, the nature powers, and the High God Di. The first three constitute the core royal lineage; the remainder stand in uncertain or no relation to it.
Despite featuring a wide and diverse range of deities, Shang religion was dominated by ancestor worship, with core tenets of belief centred on relationships between the living and the dead. Divisions between these categories are less sharp than they appear. The River and Mountain Powers are listed in series with Former Lords and pre-dynastic kings in single inscriptions, and are treated in worship in ways that parallel ancestral spirits, leading some scholars to propose that the Shang construed nature powers as remote forbears of the royal line. Nor were functions clearly divided, with control over natural phenomena attributed to Di, the nature powers, the Former Lords, the pre-dynastic kings and at least one dynastic king alike.
Whether Shang religion was bureaucratic, or at least proto-bureaucratic, is disputed. Keightley posited a bureaucratic stance, on grounds of the depersonalisation of the spirits, the rationalisation of the pantheon, and the routinisation of divination. Eno accepts that divination grew increasingly routinised and that the ancestral pantheon was ordered by strict seniority, but rejects the description of the pantheon itself as bureaucratic based on several observations no more than ten inscriptions depict Di commanding other spirits, and a hierarchy resting entirely on ascriptive traits of lineage, without division of function, is in his view dissimilar to a bureaucracy. Sarah Allan similarly declines the characterisation of the exchange between the king and his ancestors as contractual, at least for the earliest period.
High God Di
The head of the Shang pantheon was Di (), the 'High God'. The Shang sought to understand the will of this deity through the practice of divination using oracle bones. It is unknown whether Di is mentioned in Shang bronze inscriptions.
Attributed powers
The Shang believed that Di exercised authority over both the natural and human worlds, which included controlling the climate, influencing the harvest, and overseeing the outcomes of battles. Di expressed approval or disapproval over the everyday actions of humans, and was thought to be capable of either providing aid or sending down disasters. Inscriptions record Di bringing an end to a city and determining whether the Shang would receive support in attacking an enemy people.
Di has commonly been understood as presiding over a hierarchy of spirits, including former humans and nature deities, all of whom were under Di's control, and as the only power able to issue commands (). Both parts of this account have been scrutinised in light of existing inscriptional evidence. Eno finds an articulated command structure largely absent from the inscriptions, noting one text in which the River Power orders rain, and observes that where Di is said to order rain or thunder, what is commanded appears to be a natural phenomenon rather than a subordinate deity. John C. Didier identifies He, Huang Yin and Yi Yin as further spirits able to ling rain and secure good harvests, and notes that nature powers and Former Lords were petitioned for rain in the same terms as Di.
A small group of inscriptions refers to the "Five Adjutants" or "Five Ministers" () of Di, and one to "Di's envoy Wind". Didier interprets the former as subordinate spirits transmitting Di's messages to the human world, possibly associated with the five classical planets. Eno regards the evidence as too slight to establish a divine bureaucracy, the phrase being attested on only a handful of bone fragments, two of them in ambiguous contexts.
Absence of worship
While the Shang conducted rituals to ensure Di would not harm them, there is no evidence that they made sacrifices to Di as they did to other spirits, implying a significant distinction in how Di was perceived. Di is in this respect anomalous: alone among the spirits, Di appears to have needed and desired no sustenance.
Three explanations have been offered. The traditional view, associated with Hu Houxuan, holds that Di was too exalted to receive offerings directly, and that sacrifices reached Di through an ancestral intermediary acting as "helpmate" (). Eno objects that the evidence for this practice derives from Zhou and later texts rather than from Shang inscriptions, and argues instead that di was a generic term and therefore an inappropriate way of naming the object of a sacrifice. Didier holds that Di received no cult because it was "a single and impersonal council of godliness" rather than a god possessing a single consciousness.
Identity
The identity of Di has been the subject of debate. Didier attributes the persistence of a singular, monotheistic reading in Western scholarship to two influences: the pyramidal hierarchy of deities that emerges in Chinese thought from about the 4th century BC, some six or seven centuries after the fall of the Shang; and the expectations of Christian missionaries from the 17th century onwards, who sought to identify Di with the God of the Bible.
As supreme deity
Some scholars proposed that the Shang conceived of Di in a manner similar to the Judeo-Christian God. This reading predates the discovery of the oracle bone inscriptions and rests principally on the use of the term di in early Zhou texts such as the Shijing and the Shangshu, in which Di appears as a semi-abstract anthropomorphic deity substantially identical with Tian.
As Emperor Ku
Some theories identify Di with the legendary Emperor Ku, the third of the Five Emperors mentioned as preceding the Shang in Sima Qian's Shiji (). Emperor Ku could be the same as a Shang spirit whose ascribed name may read as Kui, addressed as "High Ancestor" in at least four Shang inscriptions. This might prove to be useful for the Shang king, who accordingly was seen as sharing portions of the High God's power, and would in effect universalise the ancestral worship of the royal Zi clan.
This identification is subject to various obstacles Di issues orders and sends down approval while Kui does not, and Kui receives cult while Di does not; Kui is also invoked in series with other powers in a way suggestive of a horizontal relationship rather than an apex. Keightley has objected more generally to any account making Di a composite of Shang ancestors, on the grounds that Di could act against the Shang, such as by ordering enemy attacks.
As a collective reference
Eno argues that Shang religion did not conceive of a high god as such, and that di functioned solely as a generic or corporate termdenoting not "God on High" but "the gods" or "the god", whose referent was understood from the context of a given divination. He advances four grounds: the absence of sacrifices to Di; inconsistent usage of the term, including a set of inscriptions in which Di appears in sequence with named royal ancestors; the apparent use of di as a plural, parallel to collective nouns such as and ; and its use as an honorific, in which di replaces fu (, 'father') in naming the deceased father of a reigning king. He concludes that di denoted whatever portion of the pantheon was being treated as its apex in the context of a given divinationthe whole pantheon, a part of it, the lineage founder, or the reigning king's father.