Page 352 - The Golden Age of Chinese Archaeology: Celebrated Discoveries from the People’s Republic of China

Pan Cheng employed several turtle and milfoil a combination of new sacrificial pledges and re-
diviners, each of whom possessed his own divina- quitals of pledges made in previous divinations.
tion materials; for example, Gu Ding's turtle plas- The excavated Chu divination-sacrifice records
tron is called Long Treasure. The turtle diviner Fan bear witness to the vitality of religious belief and
Huozhi is named in another divination-sacrifice practice among the Warring States elite. Contrary
record from Wangshan Tomb i (also at Jiangling), to the conventional wisdom that a kind of intellec-
showing that diviners provided their services to tualized humanism espoused by the philosophers
an array of clients in the region around the Chu had supplanted their active belief in the world
capital at Ying. 5 of spirits and demons, the manuscript evidence
Excavated Chu divination-sacrifice records all reveals the elite engaged in daily religious activity
follow the same basic formula. The exact date is and details the spirits worshiped by them. Manu-
first, with the year identified according to signifi- scripts such as these truly shed new light on early
cant Chu events for that year. In the translated Chinese civilization. DH
entry, the Gongsun Yang from Qin who pays his
respects to the King of Chu might be none other 1 Excavated in 1978. An excavation report on Tianxingguan
Tomb i has been published by the jingzhou Prefecture
than the famed Shang Yang, the Qin minister who Museum: Hubei 1982, 71-116.
reorganized Qin government in the mid-fourth 2 For further discussion of the excavated Warring States
century BCE. If this identification is accepted, the divination-sacrifice records, see Harper 1998 and Li Ling
1990, 71-86. Much of our present knowledge of this type
date of the Tianxingguan tomb should be closer of manuscript comes from the reproduction and tran-
to the middle than to the end of the century. The scription of the divination-sacrifice record from Baoshan
Tomb 2 at Jingmen, Hubei province, published in Hubei
divination itself proceeds in two stages (as num-
1991,1:364-369.
bered in the translation). In the first stage, the sub- 3 I must emphasize that this translation is tentative pending
ject of divination is stated — the words in quotation the full publication of the Tianxingguan manuscripts. For
marks represent the statement uttered aloud at the this translation, 1 have relied on the transcription of the
two slips, nos. 8 and 5, prepared for this exhibition by
original event. The act of divination follows. When Peng Hao of the Jingzhou Prefecture Museum, as well as
the diviner uses milfoil stalks, hexagrams are written on a preliminary reconstructed facsimile prepared by
Wang 1989^ Peng Hao has noted that slip no. 8 was
in the text (the hexagrams in the excavated divina-
originally broken, and it is not certain that the lower
tion-sacrifice records are written as numbers, not as section of slip no. 8 has been restored correctly. I enclose
solid and broken lines). Then comes the diviner's this part of the translation in double brackets.
4 Li Ling 1995-1996, summarizes the archaeological and
prediction based on examination of the turtle plas-
textual data concerning the supreme deity Grand One
tron or hexagrams. And the prediction includes in popular religion of the Warring States, Qin, and Han
the recommendation for a ritual expulsion to avert periods. Among the other spirits named, the Director
of the Life-mandate and the Lord of the Earth are well-
any spiritual or demonic harm that might befall
known in received sources; Great Water may be a Yangzi
Pan Cheng. River spirit.
This leads to the second stage, which entails 5 This section of the translation placed in double brackets
a second divination to verify which spirits are to represents what is written on a third bamboo slip not
is based
on Wang Minqin's
exhibited here; the translation
receive what sacrifices. The statement concerning facsimile and transcription and is tentative.
sacrifices is followed by the diviner's prediction 6 For the reproduction and transcription of the Wangshan
divination-sacrifice record, see Hubei i995b.
(invariably, the proposed sacrifices are judged by
the spirits to be auspicious). The offering of sacri-
fices is a two-part process. Initially, sacrifices are
"pledged" (dao) to the spirits pending positive signs
of spiritual assistance; subsequently, the sacrifices
are actually given, thus "requiting the pledge"
(sai dao). Any entry in the manuscript may include

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