Space And Time: Northern Wei Dynasty Cosmology And The Political Culture Research

The Northern Wei Dynasty minority regime, founded by the Tuoba tribe of Xianbei, is one of the most significant historical periods in Chinese ancient history.As a regime between the State of Xi Jin and Sui-Tang Empire, it made a great contribution to the formation and development of Chinese multiculture and even the commercial communications between Hans in Central Plains and the northern nomadic people.The Northern Wei Dynasty regime is considered as an extremely important historical bridge especially in the circulation of Hans cultures.While living in plains, Xianbei people had already had the traditional time concept and spatial awareness.According to the directions of sunset and sunrise, they gradually figured out the spatial dimensions of four directions and formed the cosmology,namely,both the heaven and the earth were round,which was unique to the plain culture.In the guidance of the primitive religious thought of sacrificing the sun, the moon and the stars, people in this tribe lived together harmoniously.Living in the vast plains, herdsmen concluded the beginning of each year by observing the growth of grass, which had the same sociological category as Hans in the Central Plains who declared the beginning of each year by observing the harvest time of grains.After Tuoba tribe of Xianbei settled in the Central Plains and being affected by the Hans culture, this time concept and spatial awareness gradually mixed together by means of collisions and communications.Tuoba tribe of Xianbei had its own traditional worship rituals which was called“Summer April”(夏四月).After the Northern Wei Dynasty regime was founded,they built an altar in the west of the capital Pingcheng.As a result,the place of worship was finally settled,which symbolized the gradual changes from nomadic life to settled life.According to the ritual system of Hans culture,Emperor Daowu decided to worship the heaven in the southern suburbs.Therefore,Xianbei people and Hans had mutual political foundations and cultural platforms,which mitigated their religious conflicts and national controversies,and they founded the centralization of authority basing on Tuoba tribe of Xianbei as its political core.“Worship the heaven in the western suburbs”and“worship the heaven in the south suburbs”coexisted during the Northern Wei Dynasty regime,and did not get fused until Emperor Xiaowen carried out the overall Chinesization.The worship rituals in the early days of the Northern Wei Dynasty regime had the following characteristics.The worship time of the third ancestral temple(三庙)and the animals offered to sacrifice(太牢牺牲)were totally affected by the rituals of Hans.The worship time of the fifth ancestral temple(五庙)fell in“January”and“September”,while the seventh ancestral temple(七庙)fell in“January”,but both of them were affected by the Xiongnu culture to some extent.Horses and cows used by the fifth ancestral temple and the seventh ancestral temple were the traditional rituals of Xianbei nomadic people.In the macro architectural patterns of the Northern Wei Dynasty Ducheng,palaces were regarded as the political center of the country,the third ancestral temple and“two clubs one millet”(二社一稷)as two flanks to defend the palaces,and the altars in the outskirts were the four poles to protect the capital.Such architectural ideas and styles represented geometry’s symmetry principles,religious ethics ideas and imaginative universal spatial thinking.Although the ritual infrastructures in the capital Pingcheng were related to Xianbei’s traditional customs to some extent,they indicated Hans architectural ideas and Confucian administration methods,which had a decisive political and historical meaning in the infrastructures of the Northern Wei Dynasty Pingcheng and Chinese orthodoxy discussed during the South and North Dynasties.The belief of The five elements(metal,wood,water,fire and earth“五行”)in the Northern Wei Dynasty had gone through three changes.In the early days of rebuilding the state of Dai,they upheld water(水德),and changed to earth(土德)in the first year of Tian Xing(天兴元年,398年),and advocated water again in the fifteenth years of Tai He(太�'�十五年,491年).Actually every time when Xianbei regime adjusted the five elements,they were potentially affected by the political elements and military patterns of the very period inordinately.When it came to decide the title of the reigning dynasty,the leaders had to take the five elements into thorough consideration.And the sequence of the five elements was closely related to the ancestors’virtues and their spiritual blessing.When confirming his ancestors,Emperor Daowu Tuoba Gui compiled the pedigree from Tuoba to Emperor Huang with the help of Shih Chi(《史记》)and the Classic of Mountains and Seas(《山海经》).In fact,this was a typical cultural recognition instead of the blood lineage.Deeply influenced by the whole China Unification Thought(大一统思想),Emperor Huang was considered as the historical image of the earliest ancestors and the orthodoxy of Chinese cultures,and this was generally accepted by all walks of life in the society,which in return played a profound role in Xianbei’s cultural learning and the country’s future political developments.What’s more,there were two kinds of different cultural propitious omens in deciding the sequence of the five elements.In Hans culture,people saw Yellow Star(黄星)as the propitious omen of earth(土德),while in nomadic culture,Xianbei people regarded the animals admired by the tribe itself to be the omen.Actually they were the historical beginnings for the Northern Wei Dynasty regime to carry out two systems and they indicated the authority’s superb political wisdom in recognizing culture,nation and Confucian administration.The Northern Wei Dynasty was a minority regime that extremely advocated astrology. Among 61 solar eclipse datas, 31 of which was about the future development of the nation in the guidance of divination.To achieve some political purpose,the rulers would make up the time of solar eclipse on purpose to match the appropriate inscriptions and provide evidences for the nation’s future political development and personnel revolution. Though some oracle inscriptions used in the Northern Wei Dynasty was accurate in time and space, they were profoundly impacted by the astronomy and astrology during the periods of Western Han and Eastern Han Dynasties instead of the intrinsic cultures of the Northern Wei Dynasty.As a kind of experience of diviners, these oracle inscriptions were subjective idealism apriorism which could not be examined by the modern technologies.The three generations of rulers in the early days of the Northern Wei Dynasty sincerely believed in heaven-human induction(天人感应).As a politician of that age,Cui Hao firmly believed that he must have the same religious belief as the dominators so as to have his own say in politics.Therefore,he often declared his political ideas using heaven-human induction and even subjectively fabricated some astronomical phenomena.His success in politics and military did not derive from the scientific statistics but the systematic researches of the accurate information of every aspect.As a result,the dominators often adopted his political viewpoints.According to Wei Shu(《魏书》)and The History of Ancient Five Dynasties(《旧五代史》),Cui Hao was proficient in heaven-human induction and could predict the future accurately.However,it was not right.It was because the historians did not consider Cui Hao’s exact motivations and as a result of the limits of technology of that age that the diviners of later generations worshiped him as a god.