Embodying the Dead: Ritual as Preventative Therapy in Chinese Ancestor Worship and Funerary Practices

The commemoration of one’s ancestors is one of the central institutions of Chinese ritual culture. Early sources, such as the Book of Rites and the Xunzi, feature detailed prescriptions of mortuary procedures, as well as theoretical discussions on the meaning of ancestral sacrifices. This article offers a new reading of these sources against the backdrop of recent scholarship on the neurophysiology of trauma to argue that in early China, mourning and commemorative rituals were sometimes seen as preventative therapeutic measures designed to deal with the death of one’s loved ones and foil the potential development of trauma that might follow their loss. It begins by examining the role of funerary rituals in providing structure during the immediate aftermath of death and suggest that part of their efficacy lies in their ability to flood the mourner’s working memory thereby thwarting potentially hazardous thoughts and desires from setting in. It then proceeds to discuss two components of ancestral rites, the preparatory stage of ritual fasting (zhai) undertaken by the mourner, and the subsequent interaction between the mourner and the “personator of the dead” (shi). It concludes by demonstrating the impact of ritual in facilitating a therapeutic experience of contact with one’s ancestors that can physically contradict the distress and helplessness associated with the trauma of their death by replacing the memory of the loss of one’s parents with the life--affirming, and palpably corporeal, celebration of their life.