Ancestral Memory in Early China

An history of the early Chinese ancestral cult, particularly its cognitive aspects. It intends to excavate the cult's color and vitality and to quell assumptions that it was no more than a simplistic and uninspired exchange of food for longevity, of prayers for prosperity.

Rather, it was an idea system that aroused serious debates about the nature of postmortem existence, served as the religious backbone to Confucianism, and may even have been the forerunner of Daoist and Buddhist meditation practices.