Analects 3.11
Here Confucius points to the palm of his hand and tells us that one who understands the di sacrifice "could handle the world as if he had it right here." The commentary on analect 3.10 mentions that the " di sacrifice was a special type of ancestor sacrifice, directed toward the ultimate progenitor of one's ancestral line." The details on how to perform it and by whom it was to be performed are something that had been largely forgotten by the time of the Zhou dynasty, which partially makes sense of Confucius' comment that there is a power that stems from understanding the rite. However, this does not completely explain it; there are still several questions that remain. What is it about sacrificing to one's roots that gives one political power? How are we to take understanding the ritual? Is this a form of knowledge or is it something else? Is the goal of ritual to reorder the individual person or does it have a mimetic effect that simultaneously reorders...

Maybe an account that touches on this question is Plato's section on the modes in The Republic, as well as Xunzi's. It's worth digging into this question: does music affect character? And what do you make of the lack of mention of melody in such accounts? This is worthy of a more sustained follow-up.
ReplyDelete