The system of ritual developed out of the form that political dominance had taken during the previous Western Zhou period, during which the Zhou kings, based on their capital in the Plains of Zhou in the Wei river valley, Shaanxi province (modern Xi’an), dominated the political scene after their conquest of the eastern Shang dynasty in about 1045. The Zhou kings were the heads of the principal clan, the Ji, and they parceled out the walled encampments and lands they had conquered to the heads of lineages closely related by blood, those that had been created by segmentation from the main clan line, or to those who assisted them in gaining supreme authority. The system was integrated by the heads of the lineages participating in the sacrificial and ritual system of the Zhou center and cemented by continuing marital ties and presentations of items of symbolic and ritual value in a cycle of gift-giving (Cook 1997). Relative rank was determined by the nature of the blood relationship between the head of the lineage and the Zhou king, and the members of the system referred to each other by their kin terms, such as “maternal uncle,” “nephew,” and so on. It was the ritual obligation of the participants to request permission of the Zhou king to engage in offensive warfare and to report the results of the campaign to him. Permission had to be asked for one state’s armies to pass through the territory of another on the way to attack a third state. The system was therefore hierarchical and based on the structure and ranking of the extended patrilineal clan. Those peoples who lived either beyond the reach of the Zhou, or who lived as tribes in the interstices between the Zhou settlements, were assimilated to the system by fictive kin relations, although in time there were a number of examples of intermarriage between the Zhou aristocrats and the families of the chieftains of these non-Zhou tribes. Peace and order were maintained by this system of ritual exchange. Some indication of the extremely elaborate rules that had to be followed by ambassadors employed in interstate exchanges can be found in one of the three Confucian ritual texts, the Yi li, but since the record of the Yi li may represent a later idealization of these rites, it is beyond the scope of the present chapter to analyze them here (Steele 1966: 189-288). Those who refused to offer traditional gifts, who rejected the overlordship of the Zhou king, or were outside of the exchange cycle, like numerous native peoples in the southeast, could be attacked without excuse and without limit. Nevertheless, random killing within the system, without justification, could bring down retribution on the perpetrator. One story, recounting the circumstances of the death of King Xuan of Zhou, who died in 782, illustrates this point:
King Xuan killed Dubo, but he was guiltless. Three years later King Xuan gathered the many lords to hunt in the royal game preserve. At mid-day, Dubo arose by the side of the road, and wearing a scarlet jacket and hat and wielding a scarlet bow and arrow, shot King Xuan, hitting him in the heart and splitting his sternum, so that he died (Shaughnessy 1999: 348).
No matter how King Xuan actually died, the Zhou people believed that a person who died of unnatural causes could become a ghost and threaten the living, and those with greater charisma, or de, in life had more power in death. The dead ancestors lived on in the Zhou world, or, rather, just below the surface, and could always cause difficulties to the living: they had to be appeased and supplicated by continual offerings of alcoholic drinks, grain, and cooked meats prepared in bronze vessels.3 What we see here is the beginnings of the notion that the taking of life, if done at all, had to be done with justification. These were the beginnings of morality in war that culminated in the creation of the notion of “righteous warfare” (see below).
Zhou central political power began to wane in the last century or so of the Western Zhou period. This decline culminated in their defeat at the hands of a coalition of rebellious vassals and non-Zhou tribes in 771 and King Ping decided to move the capital to the east to Chengzhou, the modern Luoyang, Henan province. For a while this revived the fortunes of the dynasty, but soon the clan ties that bound the Zhou vassals to their king became looser and he was no longer able to command the respect of his distant kinsmen nor to field a sufficiently large and powerful army to force compliance with his demands. Furthermore, the system of ranking (there were five ranks of nobles) gradually weakened because changes in the relative political, economic, and military power of the various nobles no longer reflected the ideal order of the ranks. This led directly to the second system, that of covenants. Soon after the Zhou moved east, the rule that members of the same clan surname were not to attack each other was ignored. Duke Zhuang of the state of Zheng, located near the new Zhou capital, although defending the Zhou court, broke the previous rules of behavior by engaging in unprecedented attacks against members of the Zhou polity in addition to the Rong tribes. The king felt so threatened that he appointed another noble from another nearby state, that of Guo, to assist him as another high minister to balance Duke Zhuang’s power. The duke was enraged and only mollified when the king sent him in 720 one of his own sons in exchange for the duke’s heir apparent to act as hostages and guarantors of peaceful relations (Hsu 1999: 552).
World History
