ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the cultural dynamics between the Diaspora Chinese and the Mainland Chinese. We will locate ancestor worship and its continued centrality in the life of the Diaspora and Mainland Chinese. Here, we endeavour to demonstrate the extent to which ancestor worship is an important shared religious–cultural element and a social bridge within the collaborative cultural basin of the Diaspora Chinese and Mainland Chinese universes.
To understand ancestor worship as a shared cultural and religious tradition in the Diaspora and Mainland Chinese universes, this chapter investigates the moral, cultural, religious, and secular reasons embraced by the individual Chinese and the local community of the two Chinese universes from three perspectives. In the first perspective, ancestor worship is investigated as an expression of filial piety governed by the broad Confucian ideology embraced by the Chinese within the two universes. A second perspective concerns the role of ancestor worship as a social bond that helps restructure the Chinese kinship system within each universe as well as between the two universes. A third perspective has to do with the understanding of ancestor worship as an integral part of popular Chinese religion where death and the dead ancestors are situated within the broad popular syncretic Chinese religious system that incorporates elements of Buddhist and Daoist teachings of karma, merit-accumulation, ritual, and material offerings. Upon death, the ancestral spirit embarked on a journey through purgatory where a series of ritual, material offerings and the transference of merits to increase the store of good karma for the dead ancestors were performed, to enable the spirit to be transformed into an ancestral soul. This shared understanding of ancestors and the practices of ancestor worship are integral cultural elements of the collaborative cultural basin.
