Page 267 - A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols BIG Book

A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols 260
‘ Heaven and hell are in men’s minds’: this is the key-note of the Chinese
attitude to the world beyond, which we find cropping up again and again throughout
Chinese history. In later stages of Confucianism, funeral procedures and ancestor worship
were developed to a degree where genuine auto-suggestion followed as a matter of
course. ‘Through fasting and meditating on the life of the deceased, obsessive
concentration on his appearance, the sound of his voice, his habits, the filial mourner is
brought to such a state of mental receptiveness that often he almost sees his dead father
and hears his voice’ (Richard Wilhelm). In any case, it is not easy to distinguish, where
the Chinese are concerned, between ceremonial behaviour, on the one hand, and genuine
feeling expressed as feeling, on the other.
The uncertainty which Confucius connected with the concept of life after death – a
concept which made ancestor worship a duty, an uncertainty which adumbrated free
thinking (Richard Wilhelm) – left the broad masses untouched. Many Chinese, not
content with simply venerating spirits and deities, sought closer contact with them.
A rich field of activity opened up before the various sects and occult movements.
Times of political upheaval, e.g. the Boxer Rebellion, brought these movements floods of
converts: e.g. the Fox Movement, which involved the worship of ‘the third father
Hu’, as Hu the Fox was manifestly able to heal the sick and offer help in other crises of
everyday life. Then there was the Swastika Society, which devoted itself to charitable
ends, and which still has today its adherents in South-east Asia.

The ‘White Lotus’ sect

Until the thirties of this century, China swarmed with sects such as these and with occult
groups. Some were highly ritualistic, like the ‘Dragon-flower sect’ (long-hua), whose
antecedents can be traced back to the ‘White Lotus Society’ of the Ming Dynasty: