After overthrowing the Mongol Yuan dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang, the
founder of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), proclaimed that he had
obtained the Mandate of Heaven (Tianming), enabling establishment
of a spiritual orientation and social agenda for China. Zhu,
emperor during the Ming's Hongwu reign period, launched a series of
social programs to rebuild the empire and define Chinese cultural
identity. To promote its reform programs, the Ming imperial court
issued a series of legal documents, culminating in The Great Ming
Code (Da Ming lu), which supported China's legal system until the
Ming was overthrown and also served as the basis of the legal code
of the following dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911). This companion
volume to Jiang Yonglin's translation of The Great Ming Code (2005)
analyzes the thought underlying the imperial legal code. Was the
concept of the Mandate of Heaven merely a tool manipulated by the
ruling elite to justify state power, or was it essential to their
belief system and to the intellectual foundation of legal culture?
What role did law play in the imperial effort to carry out the
social reform programs? Jiang addresses these questions by
examining the transformative role of the Code in educating the
people about the Mandate of Heaven. The Code served as a cosmic
instrument and moral textbook to ensure "all under Heaven" were
aligned with the cosmic order. By promoting, regulating, and
prohibiting categories of ritual behavior, the intent of the Code
was to provide spiritual guidance to Chinese subjects, as well as
to acquire political legitimacy. The Code also obligated officials
to obey the supreme authority of the emperor, to observe filial
behavior toward parents, to care for the welfare of the masses, and
to maintain harmonious relationships with deities. This set of
regulations made officials the representatives of the Son of Heaven
in mediating between the spiritual and mundane worlds and in
governing the human realm. This study challenges the conventional
assumption that law in premodern China was used merely as an arm of
the state to maintain social control and as a secular tool to
exercise naked power. Based on a holistic approach, Jiang argues
that the Ming ruling elite envisioned the cosmos as an integrated
unit; they saw law, religion, and political power as intertwined,
remarkably different from the "modern" compartmentalized worldview.
In serving as a cosmic instrument to manifest the Mandate of
Heaven, The Great Ming Code represented a powerful religious effort
to educate the masses and transform society. The open access
publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the
James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.
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