Worship of ancestors and worship of heaven

The Shang Dynasty (see historical map of China) (1554-1045 B.C.), established in eastern China where Confucius's ancestors came from,  was one of the earliest dynasties of historical records.  Kept largely on tortoise shells or cattle bones that had been used for divination, these shells and bones serve as evidence of some of the first written records in Chinese history, and today, not all words on these bones have been deciphered.  The deciphered part of the ancient Chinese language offers valuable information not just on the language, but also  religious, political and social practices of the Shang Dynasty.

            1. Religion in the Shang Dynasty.

The king belonged to a political system that was part of the natural universe, as shown in the indication of each day with a combination of the words indicating stems and branches of heaven and earth. The worlds of the living and the dead were continuous, and the living could consult the advice of the dead, especially their ancestors, through divination. In contrast to Judaism and Christianity, where the teachings of God were revealed through scriptures, divination as a form to know the ancestors or even god's views appears to be more uncertain.  Divination in a way resembles the ancient Greeks' communication with their deities, which, while acknowledging the authority and power of the latter, did not develop a systematic moral relationship between the humans and the deities. God (or di/ti ) in the Shang Dynasty was a vague, not anthropomorphic reference, with no stories associated with it. The role of king in conducting divination showed one justification of his rule was his power of religious communication with the ancestors and god(s).

            2. Ancestral worship, kingship, and di/ti (god)

Divination showed the role of the king as a priest seeking advice and drawing his authority from his ancestors and god(s). The worship of ancestors and gods in a way resembled ancient Rome, where similar practices existed.  They are an indication of an agricultural society's strategies of coping with tradition and uncertainties, often with an outcome that was uncertain in itself. It is interesting to note that sometimes the Chinese ancestors were assigned a greater role of hosting god than the living emperors, which says something about the power relationship between the emperors and their ancestors.

      3.The convergence of tian (heaven) and ti:

According to Sinologist Benjamin Schwartz, the idea of ti or god was given a greater moral explanation in the later centuries, by merging it with another term, Tian, or heaven.  Tian, initially standing for a cosmic order, was later equated with god or (shang) ti.  Heaven's authority played an active role in human life and seemed to serve both as an active conscious will or as the source of universal order.  But ultimately, it was about the human moral conditions.  The Chinese attributed heavenly rules to innate human virtue, but the good order represented by heavenly rules was not preserved. (Benjamin Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Harvard, 1989), p.51)

The purpose of this conflation was primarily to serve a moral/ethical function.  The different aspects of Heaven were to serve the purpose of laying out an ethical goal, i.e. the gap between what is and what ought to be, to be implemented by the humans.  Often, in religion, such as the Hebrew Bible, such a gap is illustrated as the gap between the divine legislator and humans, but in the Chinese case, it is presented as an order that ought to be rooted immanently in the sacred biological ties of the family.  Although Heaven is the "emanator" rather than "legislator" of the normative order it must nevertheless be deeply concerned with the actualization of the order.  Heaven throws its support to the party that seems likely to actualize that order in society in the form of a mandate.  This contrasted with regarding Heaven as an impersonal cycle of order and disorder. (Schwartz, 52-53)

Chou dynasty rulers, for instance, used the concept of mandate of heaven to justify their moral righteousness: The Mandate of heaven was passed on to the ancestors of the Chou Dynasty, so the Shang Dynasty ancestors were unwilling to intervene on behalf of the Shang Dynasty, hence the small state of Chou was able to win over Shang.

4. Worship of heaven and worship of ancestors: some historical changes.

Although there was continued worship of ancestors in the Chou Dynasty, the latter, like their living descendants, were participants in the religious ceremonies, instead of having the religious rites subordinated to them.  In contrast, heaven remained transcendent. (Schwartz, 49-50) 

5. This further leads to the connection between rites and heavenly rule:

...Heaven in giving birth to human beings  also implants in them the patterns of order which ought to govern their behavior in their relations with each other and with the spirits.  Thus the patterns of ritual and other modes of behavior which govern the human order, and perhaps also the cosmic order beyond, themselves emanate, as it were, from Heaven. (Schwartz, p.50)