Debating the Spirit in Early ChinaTo Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China. Michael J. Puett

Abstract

MichaelJ. Puett's To Become a God is an important contribution to study of early Chinese religions, and it offers dense, ambitious, radically novel, and utterly fascinating reinterpretations of major religious and philosophical works of early China. Puett can be counted among a number of scholars of early China who, over past decade or so, have come to take pride in their efforts, convincing or not, to dismantle several of most seemingly foundational pillars for study of early Chinese thought, including textual classification (Confucian, Daoist, Legalist, etc.), geographic and cultural difference, and role of myth and shamanism. Puett pursues these trends to an extreme degree in attempting to overturn many of even more basic assumptions held by modern scholars in regard to early China. He argues that worldview of early China is best characterized not by an essential harmony between humans and nature, but by a theistic and agonistic dualism producing a similar tension with world that, in West, gave rise to ethical rationalization. To Become a God is Puett's attempt to demonstrate that this worldview reveals a fundamental tension between humans, on one side, and spirits and deities, on other, in which humans strove to separate their spirits from their bodies to become gods controlling all other spirits and natural phenomena. Puett claims that it is only by recognizing this tension that we can come to understand central motivation underlying thought of early China: I will attempt to provide a full historical study of relations of humans, spirits, and cosmos from Bronze Age to early Han. ... Once we move away from a commitment to seeing a lack of tension between humans and divinities as a guiding theme in early China, we may discover a rich, and perhaps more troubled, world of debate concerning humans, divinities and sacrificial practice than previous analyses have accustomed us to expect from Chinese texts (pp. 24-25). Puett quickly adds rejoinder that the recurrent references in secondary literature to 'schools of thought' in early China-such as Con-