Sinju, the Ancestral Spirit Tablet

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.

The grandest use of the tablet is at Jongmyo in Seoul, the shrine that holds the spirit tablets of the kings and queens of the Joseon dynasty in long low halls built to accommodate a dynasty as it accumulated. The royal ancestral rite performed there is still carried out annually, with its own orchestral music and its own choreographed dance, and it is one of the few court ceremonies anywhere that has run more or less continuously in a recognisable form. UNESCO proclaimed the rite and its music in 2001 and it was later inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, which places the state ceremony under the heading of heritage as well as of religion.

The household end of the same tradition has moved a great deal more. Jesa was for centuries a duty of the eldest son in the main line, tied to inheritance, land and the ordering of a lineage, and the number of generations to be commemorated was itself a matter of rank and dispute. Twentieth century urbanisation, smaller families and the movement of women into paid work all pressed on a rite that requires a great deal of cooking. Korean Christian families divide over whether the rite is worship or remembrance, with Catholic practice generally accommodating it and many Protestant churches not. The result is that a single object type now sits inside a state ceremony, a contested family obligation and, for some households, nothing at all.