As if they were present.
The instruction is to sacrifice as if the spirits were there — and Confucius, asked directly about serving the spirits and about death, said that if you cannot yet serve the living, or understand life, you should not be asking. The as if is doing deliberate work, and the tradition has left it doing that work for two and a half millennia.
Analects 3.12 records that he sacrificed as if the ancestors were present, and sacrificed to the spirits as if the spirits were present, and adds his own remark that if he is not present at the sacrifice, it is as if he had not sacrificed. The formula ru zai — as if present — has generated two thousand years of argument. One reading takes it as reverent agnosticism: the rite is performed with full seriousness and the metaphysical question is left open. Another, Xunzi's, is frankly naturalistic — the gentleman regards these as human practices and the common people regard them as serving spirits, and there is no harm in the difference. A third holds that the as if is not a hedge at all but a description of a mode of attention that constitutes the ancestor's presence in the only sense that matters. Confucius blocked the direct question twice, telling Zilu that if he could not yet serve the living he should not ask about serving the spirits, and that not yet understanding life he should not ask about death.
He sacrificed as if present. He sacrificed to the spirits as if the spirits were present. The Master said: if I am not present at the sacrifice, it is as if I had not sacrificed.
Analects 3.12 (rendered)The as if has been argued over for two thousand years and was never resolved.
The same ground, other faiths
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