A fun story in today’s LA Times about ghosts and Chinese culture.  It turns out that the best place to study the relationship of spirits and Chinese-ness is Taiwan:

In Taiwan, ghosts are rarely a laughing matter. On TV, in daily
conversation, at temples and in the deepest recesses of the
unconscious, they maintain a firm grip on island society. Taiwanese are
ghost-crazy — or rather, crazy to avoid them. A recent survey of Taipei
college students found that 87% were believers, and some say that could
be on the low side.

"I’d
say the other 13% would probably hedge their bets if you questioned
them closer," says Marc Moskowitz, an anthropologist at Lake Forest
College in Illinois who has studied Taiwan’s spirit beliefs. "Many
Taiwanese feel it’s best not to anger the ghosts, just in case they do
exist."

Ghosts have been an integral part of Chinese culture
dating to at least the Shang Dynasty, with 3,500-year-old oracle bones
from the period depicting a big-headed, bent-kneed phantom.

But
China has seen much of its otherworldly belief system erode under the
Communist Party’s assault on religion and superstition. That has left
Taiwan, which split from China in 1949 after civil war, a rich
repository of this living tradition, one that draws scholars eager to
study Chinese ghost practices in their purest form.

    Now, I don’t doubt that a lot of people in Taiwan believe in ghosts of one sort or another.  But I bet more people on the mainland are into spirits than this story suggests.  After all, 68% of Americans believe in angels (but, oddly, only 40% believe in ghosts – I guess it matters how you ask the question).  But let’s get to the "integral part of Chinese culture" thing.

    Yes, ghosts, spirits, gods, etc. are certainly to be found in "Chinese culture" going way back (when does "Chinese culture" start, anyway?).  And Chinese ghosts and spirits take culturally specific Chinese forms.  But belief in ghosts and spirits is not a peculiarly Chinese cultural practice.  Every culture, I would guess, has its other-worldly presences.  Moreover,  belief in ghosts, etc., is not necessary for Confucianism and philosophic Taoism.

    Of course, historically, believers in Confucian and Taoist ideas may also have believed in ghosts – religious Taoism is, in essence, the expression of central Taoist principles in spiritual form.  But ghosts and spirits are not prominent in the central texts of Taoism (Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu) or Confucianism (Analects and Mencius).  Ghosts may be mentioned here and there, but they are not essential features of the philosophies.

    So, one could be a modern Taoist or Confucian and not believe in ghosts. 

    But here’s an interesting question: do we have to believe in ghosts to be morally good?  The article suggests that we do:

"On the mainland, we’re more cut off from our culture by socialist
education and propaganda, and I don’t believe in ghosts," says Wang
Shen, 28, a Beijing-based website designer. "That’s not necessarily a
good thing, though. People here aren’t as nice as they were before,
when they feared retribution."

    People are ethically better when they believe in ghosts.  Actually, I think this is not in keeping with Confucius’s own writing.  It seems to me that he gives us guidelines for living a good life, and most of these have to do with cultivating our closest social relationships in the here and now.  Yes, we need to respect the memory of our ancestor but that veneration is premised on our taking care of our concrete, everyday duties.  Here’s this passage from the Analects:

When Adept Lu asked about serving ghosts and spirits, the Master said: "You haven’t learned to serve the living, so how could you serve ghosts?"
"Might I ask about death?"
"You don’t understand life," the Master replied, "so how could you understand death?"  (11.12)

    I guess what I want to say here is that "Chinese culture" cannot be simply reduced to Confucianism, or some combination of the classic philosophies.  The everyday experiences and beliefs of individual Chinese, including believing in ghosts and spirits, is a rich and deep well of Chinese cultural practices, some of which might contradict some or all of the classical systems of thought.  While Confucianism is obviously a part of "Chinese culture," "Chinese culture" has always been bigger and more diverse than Confucianism.

      Now, I could be wrong on this, and I welcome any comments that would point out the centrality of spirit-belief to Confucius’s own writing (as opposed to the various uses of his thought after him), or to philosophic Taoism.