Religious Discourse Among Cannibals

Some months ago, in the spacious, gracious and lovely main library of the Hawaii State Library System, I was looking for the collected works of Judith Martin, a.k.a. "Miss Manners," a surprisingly and gratefully prolific author.  I found them, all right--but I regret to say that I have not yet read them.  Because, as serendipity, or plain luck, would have it, in this library Miss Manners' instructive and entertaining writings are to be found in a sort of reclusive niche or dog-leg of shelves, directly beneath a small (8 or 9 volume) collection of books on Cannibalism.   Miss Manners will forgive me, I trust, for having forgotten all about her.... 

The history of cannibalism is, so to speak, the history of Mankind, in that the history of Mankind is, sadly, the history of periodic famine. Wherever dearth and starvation have occurred--in Egypt, China, Mesopotamia, Medieval (and Renaissance!) Europe, Ireland--there the variety of cannibalism, called 'Subsistence Cannibalism' has arisen; invariably, horrifyingly, as the grimmest of Grimm fairy tales imply, involving the eating of children. 

But there are other varieties of Cannibalism:  Judicial, Ritual, Opportunistic--and, in China, Gourmet Cannibalism.  Judicial Cannibalism, as formerly practiced in Fiji, meant simply the eating of some part of a condemned criminal in front of him.  Ritual Cannibalism (not without a tinge of gourmandism, perhaps even of sustenance) best describes that practiced by the civilized peoples of pre-Columbian Meso-America.  Opportunistic Cannibalism is practiced by those who, occasionally finding themselves alone and unobserved with a corpse (as when standing vigil at night over the body of a deceased family member laid out in a suggestive manner on a kitchen table), surreptitiously consume a portion of the corpse in a manner not likely to be discovered later; e.g., knocking a hole in the back of the skull and abstracting a portion of the brains, eating them raw--thus transmitting the slow-virus disease kuru among the female population of the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea.

But to China belongs the distinction of having invented, long practiced, and perhaps never given up the culinary art and, no doubt, science of Gourmet Cannibalism.  There was the "king" who in the latter days of the Northern Song gave a monthly feast at which the body of one of his best-looking concubines was served, cooked up in various tasty ways.  To impress upon his convives that they were getting the genuine article--and not some inferior, not-so-good-looking sort of concubine--her severed head would be brought in and shown to them.  What makes this the more shockingly plausible is the custom which prevails to this day in Chinese restaurants--perhaps thought to stimulate the appetite--of displaying to diners, living, about-to-be-consumed animals, at the beginning of a meal.  I once ate a kind of lobster ragoût in a very expensive Chinese restaurant--which ordinarily I would have found delicious--but which turned to ashes in my mouth because I had been "introduced" to my lobster by my nimble, alert, and oblivious waiter, who didn't (important point) notice my gagging.  Until as late as the end of the Qing Dynasty (1912) in China, the blood and body-parts of criminals executed by law were openly and matter-of-factly sold as gourmet specialty foodstuffs.  And today?  Who would know?

So, with these things in mind, I am reading Anthony C. Yu's abridgement of his own translation of The Journey to the West, and I am noticing things which quite escaped my attention when, many years ago, I was reading Arthur Waley's version of the same thing, called by him Monkee. It so happens too, that a year or so ago, I read (by I know not what random impulse) two or three books on the dissemination, sometimes despite obstacles, of Buddhism in China.  One forgets how deeply China and (with the curious exception of India) other oriental societies have been bitten by the Confucian bug.  I had always sort of assumed, with Chuang-tze yucking it up alongside me to confirm me in my misapprehension, that when Buddhism encountered Taoism in China, they both soon realized that they were simply different aspects of the same Middle Way, and so blended into one another to produce Ch'an and Pure Land Buddhism: End of happy story.  But not so.  All along there had been Confucius, Ancestor Worship, and (what is so very important in China) Imperial Absolutism. And this unitary core of Things Chinese has bitterly opposed Buddhism in China from the very beginning; sometimes even getting Buddhism proscribed--with disastrous results for the welfare programs that only Buddhism ever instituted, thereby plunging Chinese society into anarchy; such that, though with much righteous reluctance, the proscriptions had to be rescinded.

Well, all this is summed up and given a lot more in-depth analysis in The Journey to the West than I had ever realized.  Thus, on page 182, the Tang Emperor's official historian, Fu Yi, properly prostrate, addresses a "memorial" to the Throne, saying, "The teachings of the Western Territory deny the relations of ruler and subject, of father and son....They emphasize the sins of the past in order to ensure the felicities of the future.  By chanting in Sanskrit, they seek a way of escape....It was not until the period of the Emperor Ming in the Han dynasty...that priests of the Western Territory were permitted to propagate their faith.  The event, in fact, represented a foreign intrusion in China, and the teachings are hardly worthy to be believed."

The emperor, of course, doesn't reply directly, but he has the memorial distributed among 'the various officials' for 'discussion' (which, as we continue reading, we discover means something rather different--and with different consequences--from 'discussions' envisaged by Western Humanism).  The prime minister, Xiao Yu, at this point, by way of 'discussion,' says, "the teachings of Buddha...seek to exalt the good and restrain evil.  In this way they are covertly an aid to the nation, and there is no reason why they should be rejected.  For Buddha is also after all a sage, and he who spurns a sage is himself lawless.  I urge that the dissenter be severely punished."

Against which Fu Yi snarls back disdainfully, and in Confucian terms perfectly correctly, that "propriety has its foundation in service to one's parents and ruler.  Yet Buddha forsook his parents and left his family; indeed, he defied the Son of Heaven all by himself....Xiao Yu (speaking of present instances) might not have been born in the wild, but by his adherence to the doctrine of parental denial, he confirmed the saying that an unfilial son had in fact no parents."  All straight out of the Analects, and you would think, unanswerable--But,

Xiao Yu folds his hands, and says, "Hell was established precisely for people of this kind." [!?]

Ominously, at this point the emperor seems almost not to have heard what his two major 'discussers' have been saying, and addresses another, seemingly unrelated topic, by asking his Lord High Chamberlain and the President of the Grand Secretariat together, "How efficacious are the Buddhist exercises in the procurement of blessings?"

These two answer, "Blah, blah, blah...It has been held since antiquity that the Three Religions are most honorable, [and] not to be destroyed or abolished.  We beseech your majesty, therefore, to exercise your clear and sagacious judgement."  Which does not sound like much of an answer--But

the emperor is highly pleased: "The words of our worthy subjects are not unreasonable. Anybody who disputes them further will be punished."  Blah, blah...From that time also comes the law that any person who denounces a monk or Buddhism will have his arms broken. 

I rest my case.