The Settlement Everything Later Argues With

Under the Han a set of arrangements was made that later Chinese religion never entirely got out from under. Confucian learning was made the basis of appointment to office and of the state's ritual programme, which turned a school of thought into an establishment with careers attached. The correlative cosmology of yin and yang and the five phases was worked into an official synthesis in which the seasons, the directions, the colours, the organs of the body and the affairs of government were all read as parts of one system, so that a flood or an eclipse could be interpreted as a comment on the conduct of the court.

Derk Bodde's study of the Han festival year shows how thoroughly that scheme was built into the calendar of observances the state maintained. The great sacrifices to Heaven and Earth took the form the Han gave them, and the ruler's role in performing them was fixed then. Sources of Chinese Tradition collects the texts in which the synthesis was argued. What matters for the atlas is that nearly every later Chinese religious development, Daoist, Buddhist or Neo Confucian, positioned itself with respect to this settlement, accepting parts of it and contesting others, and that the vocabulary of the debate was fixed in the Han as much as its conclusions were.