Shidian

The Analects records Confucius as famously reluctant to speak of spirits and the afterlife, telling a disciple to keep a respectful distance from ghosts and gods and to focus instead on serving the living well. It is one of the small ironies of Chinese religious history that within four centuries of his death, Confucius himself had become the object of a state cult carrying formal sacrifice, ritual music and a fixed liturgical calendar. The process began modestly, with local sacrifices at his home in Qufu maintained by his own descendants, but escalated sharply once Emperor Wu of Han adopted Confucian classical learning as the basis of imperial ideology in the second century BCE, giving the state a strong interest in honoring the tradition's founder with the same ritual apparatus used for ancestral and state cults.

Subsequent dynasties expanded the honor further: Confucius received posthumous royal and then, under the Yuan dynasty, an even higher title, and temples dedicated to him, called wenmiao or Confucius temples, spread to every prefecture and county seat in the empire, each required by law to perform the sacrifice on a fixed calendar. What began as filial commemoration by his own family became, by the time the practice reached its classical form under the Tang and Song, an instrument of state orthodoxy performed by magistrates as a condition of office.

The classical Shidian liturgy follows a fixed sequence: officiants purify themselves and the temple hall in advance, spirit tablets bearing the posthumous titles of Confucius and his most honored disciples and successors are set on the altar, and set offerings of grain, wine, meat and silk are presented in a prescribed order accompanied by yayue, an elevated ceremonial music performed on bells, stone chimes, zithers and drums that was itself considered a Confucian moral technology, thought to cultivate harmony in those who heard it. A formal dance, the bayi wu or eight row dance, with rows of eight dancers each holding a pheasant feather and a flute, was historically reserved for the highest ranks of sacrifice and performed at the grandest Confucius temples.

The rite survives today in modified form: Taipei's Confucius Temple stages a well attended public Shidian each September 28, Confucius's traditional birthday and now Teachers' Day in Taiwan, with descendants of the Kong lineage and government officials in attendance, and comparable ceremonies continue at temples in mainland China, South Korea and Vietnam, though the scale, music and dance vary considerably by site since the rite lost its imperial state backing in the twentieth century and each location has preserved or reconstructed the liturgy independently.