Quick questions on Religion and belief in Han China: HSC Ancient History

Confucianism was not the Han's founding ideology. The early reigns of Emperors Wen (180-157 BC) and Jing (157-141 BC), the so-called "Rule of Wen and Jing," were guided instead by Huang-Lao Daoist governing philosophy, favouring light taxation and minimal state intervention (wuwei, "non-action"), partly under the influence of the Dowager Empress Dou. This changed decisively under Emperor Wu (141-87 BC). In memorials traditionally dated to 134 BC, the Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu urged Wu to make Confucian teaching the exclusive basis of state ideology and official recruitment.

Daoism operated in Han China in two related but distinct forms. Philosophical Daoism, rooted in the Dao De Jing (attributed to Laozi) and the Zhuangzi, stressed alignment with the natural Way (dao) and governing, or living, through wuwei. In its Huang-Lao form, combining the legendary Yellow Emperor with Laozi, this philosophy directly shaped early Han statecraft under Wen and Jing, before Confucianism displaced it as official orthodoxy under Wu.

Han cosmology rested on two related frameworks. Yin-yang described the universe as governed by two complementary, interacting forces (yin: dark, passive, feminine, earthly; yang: bright, active, masculine, heavenly), present in constantly shifting balance in everything from the seasons to the human body. The Five Phases (wuxing): wood, fire, earth, metal and water, first systematised as a political theory by the Warring States philosopher Zou Yan, correlated with directions, colours, seasons and virtues, and were used to explain both natural change and dynastic succession.

No Han ruler pursued immortality more obsessively than Emperor Wu. Fangshi ("masters of methods"), magician-technicians claiming expert knowledge of alchemy, dietary and breathing techniques, and communication with immortal beings (xian), found an eager patron in an emperor famously fearful of death. Li Shaojun claimed to be centuries old and to know the secret of transmuting cinnabar into gold, a substance he said would grant longevity when eaten from; Shao Weng, given the title "Master of Marvellous Methods," was executed once his fraudulent methods were exposed; Luan Da rose furthest of all, granted noble rank, extensive gifts, and marriage to a Han princess on the strength of his promise to contact the immortals, before he too was executed when the promised meeting never occurred.

Han funerary belief rested on a dualistic theory of the soul. The hun, an ethereal, yang-associated soul, was believed to ascend after death, while the po, a bodily, yin-associated soul, remained linked to the corpse and the tomb. This theory explains two of the period's most striking funerary practices. Jade burial suits, entire body-covering suits of small jade plaques sewn together with gold, silver or bronze thread according to the wearer's rank, were believed to preserve the body and stabilise the po soul against decay; the suits of Liu Sheng, Prince Jing of Zhongshan, and his wife Dou Wan, excavated at Mancheng in 1968 and sewn with gold thread, remain the best-preserved examples.

Buddhism reached China along Silk Road trade and diplomatic contacts during the Eastern Han. The earliest solid documentary evidence comes from the Hou Hanshu's record that in AD 65 Liu Ying, Prince of Chu, was noted at court for combining sacrifices to Huang-Lao with reverence for the Buddha (recorded as Futu), suggesting Buddhism initially entered elite Chinese religious life understood through the existing vocabulary of Huang-Lao Daoist cult practice rather than as a wholly separate system. The more famous tradition, that Emperor Ming (r. AD 57-75) dreamed of a golden deity and dispatched envoys to Central Asia and India, leading to the traditional founding of the White Horse Temple (Baima Si) at Luoyang in AD 68, is treated by modern historians including Erik Zurcher with some caution as a later, embellished legend built around a real but more modest process of gradual transmission.