What Confucianism says about reverence and ritual
Reverence in Confucian thought is mostly a matter of form. The word is li, which covers ritual, etiquette and manners, from state ceremony down to how you greet someone at a door. What makes it interesting is the recurring anxiety that the forms will go hollow. Nine concepts from the library follow, with the passages behind them.
Li - Ritual Propriety
Li is the whole repertoire of ritual, custom and proper behaviour: the outward shape conduct takes. In the Analects it governs what you look at and listen to, not only how you act.
Analects 12.1
Respect Through Ritual
Ritual gives the impulse of respect somewhere to go. Without a form to take, the passage suggests, respectfulness simply becomes laborious.
Analects 8.2
Spirit and Form
Form and feeling are supposed to arrive together. Given a choice, the text prefers a plain rite done sincerely to an extravagant one.
Analects 3.4
Critique of Empty Ritual
Confucius is sharpest about ritual performed without inner substance. His question is what a person lacking ren has to do with ritual at all, and form without substance is treated as worse than none.
Analects 3.3
Daily Rituals
Li is not reserved for ceremonies. Eating, greeting and working can all be done with attention: dutiful at home, respectful abroad.
Analects 13.19
Music and Ritual
Ritual orders behaviour and music is held to order the feelings. The two are given as a sequence, with poetry stirring a person, ritual steadying them and music completing them.
Analects 8.8
Ancestor Veneration
Offerings to ancestors are made as though they were present. The instruction concerns the attention you bring, not what the dead are thought to receive.
Analects 3.12
The Mandate of Heaven
Above the ruler stands Heaven, and the right to rule is conditional on virtue and on the people's welfare. The Book of Documents ties the two together: Heaven sees as the people see.
Shujing
Humility
The reverent posture points sideways as well as upward. Meeting someone better than you should prompt imitation; meeting someone worse should prompt self-examination.
Analects 4.17
Reverence here is not awe kept at a distance. It is a set of small performances, how you stand, what you play, where you look, which the tradition then keeps testing for sincerity. The testing is the more interesting half. A rite that has gone hollow is judged more harshly than no rite at all.