The Cosmo-political Background of Heaven's Mandate

Abstract

A preoccupation with cosmology and the correlation of celestial events with terrestrial activity dates back to the very beginnings of Chinese civilization. The existence of such a mindset is shown by archeo-logical discoveries from the Neolithic as well as the early Bronze Age. The belief in heaven-dwelling high gods like Shang Di and Tian also had antecedents in the pre-Shang period. In addition, analysis of scientifically verifiable accounts of planetary massings from the second millennium B.C. suggests that important cosmological and astrological notions took shape much earlier than previously thought. On the basis of this evidence it now appears likely that such conceptions are intimately connected both with influential later beliefs about a Mandate of Heaven, which asserted heavenly intervention as the cause of change in temporal governance, and with later Five Elements speculative schemes, which claimed to discern a preordained phenomenological pattern in the dynastic succession. The cosmicization of experience in the archaic period to which the evidence points and the vehement reassertion of Heaven's Mandate by the Zhou dynasty founders together confirm the epoch-making historical role of the Shang-Zhou transition in decisively reaffirming “patterning oneself in Heaven's image” (xiang tian象天) as the fundamental metaphor in Chinese political legitimation.