Chapter 7 Instantiating the Genealogy of the Way: Spirit-Writing in the Construction of Peng Dingqiu’s Confucian Pantheon
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Abstract
This article reframes existing scholarship on self-identified Confucian spirit-writing altars by shifting their origin from the mid-nineteenth to the late seventeenth century. It does so by examining Confucian discourse in the spirit-writing corpus of Peng Dingqiu 彭定求 (1645–1719). Best known as the editor of the Quan Tang shi 全唐詩 (Complete Poetry of the Tang), Peng also produced the largest surviving archive of spirt-altar communications from the early Qing dynasty. Of the twenty-spirit altar deities with whom he communicated, among the most prolific were prominent Confucians from the Song and Ming dynasties. This article examines these communications by Confucian spirit-altar deities in the context of the Kangxi emperor’s endorsement of Cheng-Zhu Learning. It demonstrates how spirit-altar communications preceded Dingqiu’s anthologization of the historically attested works of several of these spirit-altar deities in his frequently reprinted Rumen fa yu 儒門法語 (Model words of the Confucian school, preface 1697). Rather than treating the “thought” of Confucian spirit-altar deities in isolation, the article also considers the Daoist ritual training Dingqiu brought to spirit-writing and the private academy space in which he repeated performed a penance ritual received via spirit-writing with students from the nearby official county school.