State Cult and Popular Religiosity
According to Confucianism, the worship of great deities was the affair of the state, ancestral worship is required of all, and a multitude of popular cults are tolerable. Confucianism tolerated magic and mysticism as long as they were useful tools for controlling the masses; it denounced them as heresy and suppressed them when they threatened the established order (hence the opposition to Buddhism). Another notable quality was the avoidance or both irrational ecstasy and excitement, as well as mystic contemplation and metaphysical speculation.
Note that in this context Confucianism can be referred to as the state cult, and Taoism as the popular religion.
Read more about this topic: The Religion Of China: Confucianism And Taoism
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“The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.”
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“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.”
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“Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than a mediator that links us with divinity.”
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