Ancestor veneration

The most fully elaborated form is Chinese, and it is organised around the family line rather than around a deity.

The domestic altar holds spirit tablets inscribed with the names of the dead, often for several generations, together with an incense burner and offerings. Incense is lit daily or at intervals. Food is offered at festivals and on death anniversaries, cooked and served as it would be to the living and eaten by the family afterwards. Paper goods are burnt so that they transfer: paper money traditionally, and now paper houses, cars and telephones. At Qingming in spring the family goes to the grave, clears weeds, repairs the mound, offers food and burns paper. At the Hungry Ghost festival in the seventh lunar month offerings are made to the dead who have no descendants to feed them, and that festival is where the logic of the whole system becomes visible: a dead person without descendants is in serious trouble.

The obligation runs downward as well as upward. Failing to produce a son able to perform the rites was traditionally a grave matter, and the practice has accordingly shaped inheritance, adoption, marriage and household structure across East Asia for a very long time.

Japanese practice has a similar shape and different furniture: a butsudan, a Buddhist cabinet holding tablets and a memorial register, and Obon in summer, when the dead are guided home with lanterns and escorted back at the end of it. Korean chesa is more formal and more contested, because Korean Protestant churches have generally forbidden it, which splits families at precisely the moment the rite exists to unite them.

Sources Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors: The Folk Religion of a Taiwanese VillageDavid K. Jordan with Ancestor Worship in Contemporary JapanRobert J. Smith, Ancestor Worship and Korean SocietyRoger L. Janelli and Dawnhee Yim Janelli

Whether ancestor veneration counts as worship has been a consequential question rather than an academic one, and the same institution has answered it in opposite ways at different times.

The Chinese Rites Controversy turned on it. Jesuit missionaries in China from the late sixteenth century argued that the ancestral rites, and the honours paid to Confucius, were civil and social observances expressing filial respect rather than acts of worship, and could therefore be permitted to converts. Dominican and Franciscan missionaries argued the opposite. Rome ruled against the Jesuits in 1704 and again in 1715; the Kangxi emperor responded by expelling the missionaries who accepted the ruling, and the mission never recovered its position. The Catholic Church reversed itself in 1939, permitting the rites as civil honours, which is what the Jesuits had said two and a half centuries earlier.

The question cannot be settled by observing behaviour, because the behaviour is compatible with both readings and because participants themselves differ. Many will say plainly that they do not think anything resides in the tablet and that the rite is remembrance and respect. Others speak of ancestors acting, intervening, requiring and punishing, and consult them before decisions. Both accounts are given inside a single family, sometimes by people kneeling side by side.

The comparative lesson is that the worship-or-honour distinction is a category imported from a tradition that needed one, having a jealous God and a doctrine of idolatry. Applied to a practice built on kinship obligation rather than on divinity, the question can certainly be asked, but it does not necessarily have an answer, and insisting that it must have done a great deal of historical damage.