High Gods, Low Gods, and Morality in Ancient China: Developing New Methods, Answering Old Questions

Abstract

Does the pantheon of supernatural agents in early China include beings that the cognitive science of religion would recognize functionally as high gods? Most sinologists—experts on Ancient China—answer in the negative. However, cognitive and behavioral research on religion gives reason to doubt their scholarly judgments. We first frame this study in terms of previous sinological research about supernatural agents, then introduce the concept of a high god from within the framework of the cognitive and behavioral sciences of religion. We hypothesize that supernatural beings that are candidates for high god status— Tian 天, Di 帝, and Shangdi 上帝—will bear stronger associations with punishment and reward than will lower supernatural beings. By quantitatively measuring the association of Chinese characters in several conceptual categories—including high gods, low gods, reward, and punishment—we operationalize this hypothesis and test it with a database of over 5 million characters from 96 classical Chinese texts dating from the pre-Warring States period (475-221 BCE) to the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE). Contrary to the majority opinion of sinologists, but confirmed by the results of testing our hypothesis, punishment and reward have a stronger relationship to certain Chinese supernatural beings that the cognitive science of religion can confidently identify as high gods.