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Abstract
This dissertation examines attempts in medieval China (c. 190–960) to situate popular festival customs in history. I argue that writers in this period combined competing models of cultural change to emphasize the creation of cultural cohesion, claiming that shared ritual origins had produced common ritual practice. I explore these issues from two perspectives, textual and thematic.
The first is festival calendars. Conquest, capture, and family connections perpetuated a closed transmission of calendar composition from the third to the early seventh centuries, wherein unfolded a conversation on the role of customs in forging both local identity and imperial cohesion. Drawing on the classical template of the “Yueling” chapter of Li ji, Zhou Chu’s Fengtu ji, Zong Lin and Du Gongzhan’s Jing-Chu suishiji, and Du Taiqing’s Yuzhu baodian frame relationships between local and imperial contexts reflective of concurrent moves towards political reunification. Central to their visions of cultural community were theories of ritual genealogy. One model posited unified classical origins, reserving for sages of antiquity the agency to generate or codify ritual. Another proposed the homogeneous diffusion of recent innovations, crediting far humbler actors with the capacity to create new cultural forms.
A historicizing paradigm new to this period was that of festivals of biographic commemoration. There were two distinct species of this. Death commemoration appeared in the second century and quickly generated etiologic tales for a great many festival customs. Many were related to the need to placate and harness restless ghosts produced by unnatural deaths. It assigned generative agency to a diverse cast of the dangerous and downtrodden, from ancient demi-gods to luckless women, children, and officials. The second category was a range of commemorations of critical events in the life of the Buddha. In medieval sectarian Buddhist writings, these were multivalent and polysemous. But in other circles, the single image of birth commemoration captured the imagination. The Tang dynasty imperial state responded with the institution of the Emperor’s birthday festival. This reinvented historical commemoration as veneration for the living; but similarly served to create a ritual community around a cult of personal biography.
