A Seat Rather Than an Image

The sinju is not a likeness. It is a plain upright of wood carrying an inscription that identifies the dead person by relationship and title, and its whole function is to give the ancestor somewhere to be during the rite. That distinction is doctrinally load bearing. Confucian ritual thought treats the offering as a meeting arranged at a particular time and place, with the tablet marking the place; outside the rite the tablet is stored, not venerated as a portrait would be. The tablet is set at the head of a table laid with cooked food, fruit, wine and rice, arranged according to conventions about which foods sit on which side, and the descendants bow, offer wine, and withdraw to allow the ancestor to eat.

Household practice has always had a lighter version. Many families do not keep permanent tablets and instead write the same information on a paper slip, the jibang, which is set up for the rite and burned when it ends. The economics are obvious once you consider how many ancestors a lineage accumulates, and the substitution is old and accepted rather than a modern shortcut. What both forms share is that the writing does the work: the identifying inscription is what makes a piece of wood or paper into a seat for one specific person, and a mistake in it is a serious matter rather than a clerical slip.