The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit: Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China.

• Author: Bartlett, Beatrice S.

How are people led to be good? Societies on our planet have devised a variety of goads and rewards, some religious, some philosophical, some legal. In a wide-ranging study, of admirable clarity, Cynthia Brokaw describes what must certainly be one of the more unusual methods, the Chinese ledgers of merit and demerit, a sub-type of the many kinds of Chinese morality or instructional books (shanshu) designed to help people realize the good in themselves. The ledgers flourished during the late imperial era, roughly from the Song to the early Qing, and are still found in simplified form on Taiwan today. Brokaw's well-organized narrative of the ledgers' development builds on recent Japanese scholarship on the same subject, for instance that of Sakai Tadao, who in 1960 published a book on the ledgers.(1) To this Brokaw adds research and insights of her own, particularly on how the later ledger authors slanted their works to meet the varying needs of their times.

The ledgers of merit and demerit (gongguoge) incorporated the ancient Chinese belief that heaven's retribution would surely reward the good and punish evil-doers. Brokaw finds that the concept of retribution originated well before the arrival of Buddhism, beginning with the Chou requirement that the Mandate of Heaven be conferred only on wise rulers. Later came the Han belief in "action and response" (ganying), that human action provokes a cosmic response, as illustrated by the view that disastrous floods directly reflected a ruler's failure to listen to ministerial counsel. But both the nature of the cosmic rewards and the prescribed paths to goodness changed over time. Brokaw makes effective use of two twelfth-century Sung works that were frequently reprinted in later dynasties to explain the basic operation of the ledger system.

The Tract of T'ai-shang on Action and Response (Taishang ganying pian), a brief work of only 1280 characters, described the mechanisms of retribution, particularly how an individual's acts were regularly reported to heaven: "Inside a man's body there are the Three Worm Spirits (Sanshi shen) who on every fifty-seventh day of the sixty-day cycle report a man's crimes and transgressions to the Heavenly Tribunal. On the last day of each month the Kitchen God (Zaoshen) also makes such a report" (translated, p. 36). The honorable deeds of the good man--acts of filial piety, compassion, generosity, and so forth--are also reported. Three hundred good deeds were...