Chinese gods

Chinese traditional religion is polytheistic, meaning that many deities are worshipped as part of a pantheistic worldview in which divinity is inherent to the world itself. The gods are energies or principles that reveal or reproduce the way of Heaven orTian.

Gods cannot be counted, as every phenomenon has or is one or more gods. Besides the traditional worship of these entities, Confucianism and Taoism give theological interpretations and arrange the deities in complex hierarchies (this is especially true in Taoist schools). Also folk religious sects may incorporate them in their theological systems.

While most Chinese worship or respect a number of deities, the formal thinkers in Chinese theological thought have asserted a monistic essence of divinity. "Polytheism" and "monotheism" are categories derived from Western religion and do not fit Chinese religion, which has never conceived the two things as opposites.

In Chinese language there is a terminological distinction between 神 shén, 帝 dì and 仙 xiān. Although the usage of the former two is sometimes blurred, it corresponds to the distinction in Western cultures between "god" and "deity", Latin genius (meaning a generative principle, "spirit") and deus or divus; dì, sometimes translated as "", implies a manifested or incarnate "godly" power. It is etymologically and figuratively analogous to the concept of di as the base of a fruit, which falls and produces other fruits. This analogy is attested in the Shuowen jiezi explaining "deity" as "what faces the base of a melon fruit". The latter term 仙 xiān unambiguously means a man who has reached immortality, similarly to the Western idea of "hero".

Chinese traditional theology, which comes in different interpretations according to the classic texts, and specifically Confucian, Taoist and other philosophical formulations, is fundamentally monistic, that is to say it sees the world and the gods who produce it as an organic whole, or cosmos. There universal principle that gives origin to the world is conceived as transcendent and immanent to creation, at the same time. The Chinese idea of the universal God is expressed in different ways; there are many names of God from the different sources of Chinese tradition.

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