The Religious Custom In Spring And Autumn

The religious custom in Spring and Autumn was inherited from that of Shang and West Zhou. And it also opened the religious custom of the Warring States Qin Dynasty and Han Dynasty. Investigating the religious custom is important not only in studying the ancient religion but also in studying Chinese traditional culture.This thesis is based on Zuo Zhuan. I also referred to many other books of that time. There were some achievements in archaeology employed as attestation .My intention in this paper is to reveal the religious culture ,to analyze the belief action concept custom of religion, to study the effects of religion and the relationship between religion and the other forms of culture, to look into the successive relation from the original religion to Spring and Autumn religion, and so on.The god system consisted of Tian and ancestry gods and nature gods in Spring and Autumn. Tian was the greatest god who had regimental power volitional purview and the right to give moral answer. The belief in Tian could help to protect the social order. But it could break the social order, too. Tian was changed with its personality getting weaker and weaker. From then on the connotation of Tian almost means the laws of society and nature.The ancestry gods were familiar to the people in Spring and Autumn, which was different from Tian and the nature gods. So people gave them extraordinary worship and commemorated them more solicitous. The people in Spring and Autumn divided nature gods into two groups: the gods of the sky and the gods of the land. The former included the sun, the moon, comet, rain cloud thunder and so on. Every state of that time worshiped their famous mountains and rivers that werecalled "Wang" by people. The Yellow River was bigwig among these gods of the land. She and Ji that were commemorated in Spring and Autumn came out in the middle of the West Zhou. She was prototyped from the worship to the original land, while Ji's prototype was Zhou's founder-Ji who had nothing to do with grain. The commemoration of the land gods and the agriculture gods showed the fundamental characteristic of Zhou that was combined with the agriculture and the patriarchal culture. The people in Han Dynasty defined She and Ji as the land and grain gods, which were the traditional definition of them from then on.The religious actions in Spring and Autumn mainly were commemoration and augury. Commemoration was the basic modality of the religious belief. And it also was the direct connection between the gods and human beings, while the divination was an indirect one between them.In this paper,divining, vowing, cursing, blessing and believing in the ghosts and gods were all treated as the religious custom which were based on religion or had something to do with gods, for they were not the actions or modalities of the adoration of god. They were only the way of reviewing, communicating and conveying information among people.Systematic concepts of the god emerged in Spring and Autumn. The basic concepts were that the god was bright, honest and fair, that he blessed the good and punished the bad . Atheism was heresy, which was produced by the religious thinking. It advocated that man was the master of Tian ; that Tian and human had nothing to do with each other ;that propitiation and atrociousness were dependent on people's behavior; that the ghosts was made by human .And it also discussed the connection between human beings and Tian the strength which determined man's fate. The obvious weakness of Atheism was that it did not question the existence of the ghost.The religion had a close relationship with politics authority of clan and ethic in Spring and Autumn. We can find the relationship especially in their religious actions and religious concept.The real purpose of the throng commemoration was not only to unify thepeople in a tribe but also to publicize and exalt the filial character by the holy ceremony and standard actions. In the solemn ceremony of commemorating theantecedents, the piety to antecedents upgraded to be a virtue-"filial...