There is a religious ritual system in Ruism which has been translated as ‘The Three Sacrifices’ (三祭, sanji): Sacrifice in celebration of Tian (Heaven), sacrifice in celebration of distinguished teachers such as Confucius, and sacrifice in celebration of one’s ancestors. Traditionally, the sacrificial ritual in celebration of Tian could only be performed by an emperor, the so-called Son of Tian (天子). This ritual used to take place in the suburb of a capital such as this:

The sacrificial ritual in celebration of Confucius was performed in Confucian temples such as this:

Everyone is allowed to perform this ritual. However, because Confucius is taken to be the common teacher of everyone in the Ru tradition, the main participators in this ritual were the Ruist literati.

By comparison, the ritual of sacrifice to one’s ancestors is more private. It is either performed before an ancestral altar in each individual household, in cemeteries, or in an ancestral temple shared by an extended family. It looks like this:

At this time, I would like to introduce a new ritual which combines the first two rituals, which I am calling a ritual of Tian-worship and Confucius-veneration(敬天尊孔).

The major reason that such a combination is needed is that in a contemporary context, the celebration of Tian can no longer be performed by an emperor alone. As a Ru committed and connected to the all-encompassing transcendent power of Tian, not just an emperor but every person has the need and right to celebrate it. Actually, traditional Ru literati also realized the egalitarian power of the idea of Tian, since each individual Ru was free to interpret this idea in his or her own particular way in order to counteract the ideologies and political policies which may have been endorsed by his or her emperor. This was a distinctive Ruist check and balance system within the traditional Chinese dynastic polity. However, because the polity was imperial, the ritual aspect of Tian-worship could not be decoupled from the monopoly power of the emperor. Nowadays, the political context of emperor has died out, and every Ru has accordingly recovered the right to perform a ritual of Tian-worship.

The reason I suggest combining the ritual of Tian-worship and the ritual of Confucius-veneration is that the relationship among Ru, as students of Confucius, is egalitarian. They are friends (友, you), committed to the Dao of Tian (天道, tiandao), who are trying to realize dynamic harmony at all levels of human existence in accordance with Confucius’ teachings. Therefore, when an occasion arises for Ruist friends “who are coming from afar” [Analects, 1:1] to join each other and to advance their Ruist learning, they will be able to perform the ritual of Confucius-veneration and the ritual of Tian-worship at the same time. This will remind the Ruist community that when studying the tradition, each Ru is not only a student of Confucius, but also a citizen of Tian (天民, tianmin). In this way, each Ru will continually nurture the feeling of gratitude towards the ultimate origin of their personal lives and personal energy; simultaneously, they will enhance their devotion to a life of manifesting Tian’s creativity in a distinctively human way in accordance with Confucius’s teaching about ‘humaneness’ (仁, ren).

Based upon these reasonable considerations which encourage the creation of an updated ritual (“to create rituals according to what is right,” – “以義起禮”, 禮記∙禮運), during the first ‘Ruist Friends From Afar’ Retreat in North America, held at Marsh Chapel, Boston University, on July 1-3rd, 2016, and before any formal readings and discussions even began, Ru friends performed a new Ruist ritual of Tian-worship and Confucius-veneration.

We tried to make the set-up of the ritual simple, since simplicity and authenticity are a consistent concern which traditional Ruist rituals convey. The set-up of the ritual looked like this:

We used a Chinese landscape painting to symbolize Tian. It was hung out in front. Then, we placed a Confucius statue on a small table in front of it, and an altar in the middle for holding incense. The painting we chose was drawn by Wang Hui (王翚, 1632-1717 CE) during the early Qing dynasty. A digital version of it looks like this:

This painting was selected by courtesy of Yair Lior, as Yair, among all the friends who attended the retreat, is a Ru versed in Chinese art history. The ‘Tian’ which this painting depicts feels solemn and energetic. In choosing the painting, we made sure that it was one which included Heaven, Earth, and Human Beings, since these three are the constitutive co-creators (三才) within Tian. In future, we have a plan to choose some western landscape paintings to symbolize the same Tian. This is because Tian’s creativity is all-encompassing, whether in the East or in the West, and one major concern of the participants of the retreat was how to share the Ru tradition’s wisdom and experience with fellow Americans.

The performative act of the ritual was also simple. At the beginning of the ritual, a Presider held two sticks of incense, bowed to Tian three times, and then stepped aside a bit, and bowed to Confucius once. After this, the Presider placed the incense in the altar, and then handed another couple of sticks to a second Ruist friend. After all friends had completed their celebrations, we stood in a line facing the altar, meditated for a while, and then completed the ritual.

There is no strict meaning for the numbers mentioned above. Neither does any step in the sequence have to be rigorously followed. After the Presider has performed the ritual, each friend can follow it in his or her favorite way: bowing to Tian but not bowing to Confucius, or as we elected to do during the retreat when some friends didn’t feel comfortable performing a religious-seeming ritual, giving them the option to wait in the reading room during the entire event. In a word, the performance of this suggested ritual is entirely voluntary.

However, because I was lucky enough to be supported by friends to act as Presider of the ritual, I tried to endow a Ruist meaning in my mind at each step of the ritual. Once again, these meanings were my own interpretation, and they are heuristic, and not in any way prescriptive. Future practitioners will surely choose whether to follow my interpretation or not according to their own understanding of the Ruist tradition. Here was my thinking:

I used two sticks of incense to symbolize Yin and Yang, the two most basic forms of cosmic reality in the Ruist cosmology. In this way, holding two sticks of incense while bowing to Tian symbolized that Tian is an even higher cosmological concept than Yin and Yang, since the power it refers to creates everything in the universe including these two realities. I bowed three times to Tian because, as I mentioned earlier, Tian includes three parts: Heaven, Earth and Human Beings. This trinitarian idea of Tian in Ruism underpins the Ruist commitment to Tian as both ecological and humanistic.

We all bowed to Tian in front of the statue of Confucius because we wanted our celebration of Tian to witness to our common teacher Confucius, who taught us to treat Tian as what is ultimately meaningful and powerful, that is, what is transcendent for human life. Each friend may also choose whether or not to bow to Confucius after bowing to Tian depending upon how comfortable he or she feels about bowing to a statue of a human being.

In conclusion, what I have set out in this essay is the totality of the new Ruist ritual of Tian-worship and Confucius-veneration performed during the first retreat. The effect of the performance, I have to say, felt good and appropriate. Friends told me that it was simple and felt authentic. Their feelings toward Tian and toward Confucius were expressed and enhanced. In this way, they also felt more at home in this beloved Ru community and in the more than 2,500 year-old living Ru tradition.