Chinese Local Religion in Late Imperial and Modern Times

Local Religion in North China in the Twentieth Century: The Structure And Organization Of Community Rituals And Beliefs By Daniel L. Overmyer Leiden: Brill, 2009. Pps. ix–xiv + 219. Hardcover, €115.00. Spectacle and Sacrifice: The Ritual Foundations of Village Life In North China By David Johnson Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010. Pps. vii–xiv + 390. Hardcover, $49.95. Dry Spells: State Rainmaking and Local Governance in Late Imperial China By Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009. Pps. vii–xii + 314. Hardcover, $45.00. Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity As A Local Religion in Late Imperial China By Eugenio Menegon Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010. Pps. xii–xx + 450. Hardcover, $49.95. All of these four books show the remarkable maturity of the field that is often called either Chinese local religion or Chinese popular religion. Before the 1990s, postwar studies of Chinese local religions largely consisted of anthropological studies based on fieldwork done in either Hong Kong or Taiwan. Historical studies of popular religion existed, but they were few in number. Many of the historical works focused on sectarian religions. One of the pioneering studies was Daniel Overmyer's Folk Buddhist Religion: Dissenting Sects in Late Traditional China (1976). Overmyer was also one of the first historians to work with an anthropologist, David K. Jordan, to produce a comprehensive study of a popular religious phenomenon: The Flying Phoenix: Aspects of Chinese Sectarianism in Taiwan (Jordan and Overmyer 1986). Since 1990, there has been a rapid increase of works on Chinese popular religion on a myriad of topics, including gods and their cults, morality, cosmology, spirit possession, prognostication, gender and religion, ritual, festivals, pilgrimages, popular religious literature, and so on.11 All four of these works, which are all of superior quality, demonstrate how sophisticated and rich this field of inquiry has become. The most comprehensive of all the four works under review here is Daniel Overmyer's Local Religion in North China in the Twentieth Century. Both it and David Johnson's Spectacle and Sacrifice examine temple festivals and stress that they were organized and led by ordinary villagers, not religious specialists. The overall purpose of Overmyer's book is to use “non-sectarian Chinese community traditions to demonstrate that China's ordinary people had a universal practical religion” (187). Overmyer focuses on local religion in north China because it has been much less studied than local religion in the south. The volume primarily concentrates on the provinces of Hebei, Henan, Shaanxi, Shandong, and Shanxi. The book is organized into eight chapters, each of which explores different aspects of temple festivals, such as their history, government attitudes towards them, leadership and organization, the pantheon of gods worshipped within, the participants’ beliefs and values, and the temples where they take place. Overmyer's overall argument is that local religion in northern China was a communal, lay phenomenon that involved all members of a village, town, or city, no matter what their social class was. It was a religion that had its own practical theology, in which the living and the dead, the people and the spirits are all in need of each other; moreover, their relationships are all based on a notion of reciprocity. The gods, who were once living humans, respond to sincere requests from petitioners; in return, the supplicant fulfills his/her vow by providing the deity with a promised offering. People and the gods live within a moral universe in which deities punish the wicked and reward the virtuous. The religion also had its institutions: spatially, in the form of household altars, ancestral and local god shrines, and in temples; temporally, it was embodied in traditions of deities, rituals, and events such as processions and festivals. Although religious specialists, such as Daoist priests or Buddhist monks, might be invited to assist in the performance of some tasks, the true officiants of this religion were the people themselves. The book is rich with fascinating discoveries. One of the surprising facts that Overmyer presents is the continued worship of ancient figures as local deities. Nüwa, Fuxi, Shennong, and Pangu are all legendary characters from high antiquity. It is easy to assume that active worship of these figures must have died off some time during the long imperial period (206 BCE–1911 CE). Nevertheless, Overmyer provides evidence that these figures are still beneficiaries of local cults in specific northern localities. In no less than three areas, there are temple festivals devoted to Nüwa, the female progenitor of mankind and repairer of the sky. Also captivating are the gods that are worshipped in the north. The author makes the important point that almost none of the gods that are worshipped in the south have followers in the north. Surprising too is the identity of some of the deities; one might expect Mao Zedong to be deified, but not the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune. Another surprising fact is that the sectarian deity Wusheng laomu (“The Unborn Venerable Mother”) is still also worshipped, but as a local deity rather than an universal savior. One of the striking points that Overmyer makes is the extent to which the process of modernization devastated local religion. He notes that already at the turn of the twentieth century intellectuals were turning against local religion. The Republican government soon began sponsoring anti-superstition campaigns; as a consequence, many temples were either destroyed or turned into schools. Hence, the destruction of temples during the Cultural Revolution was merely the continuation, on an even greater scale, of a longstanding tradition. Nevertheless, this makes me wonder about how unimportant Buddhist monks and Daoist priests were to local religion? A great deal of Overmyer's detailed evidence is based on field work done by Japanese researchers in Manchuria during the 1930s and by Chinese scholars all across northern China in the 1980s and 1990s. Hence, his evidence is coming from periods in which organized religions were already in deep retreat. Could it not be that modernization campaigns and the damage that they caused have attenuated the extent to which religious professionals played a role in local religion? If one is looking for an overview of popular religion in the twentieth century, particularly for northern China, this is the book to read. Overmyer succeeds in giving the reader a broad look and sampling of the many facets of local religion. However, compared to the other three works reviewed here, this is the least satisfying read. This is undoubtedly because, being a survey, it does not have the luxury of focusing on one particular topic or place. After all, this is in Brill's Handbook of Oriental Studies series, so unlike the other books reviewed here it is more of a reference work than a monograph. Unlike Overmyer, who asserts the existence in China of a universal shared local religion, David Johnson in his Spectacle and Sacrifice questions whether there is such a thing. For him, the term religion is so weighed down by meanings from the Judeo-Christian tradition that it cannot accurately describe Chinese realities. What mattered to Chinese was ritual. He argues that, “Ritual was the highest form of action or performance; every significant life event, social, political, or religious, was embedded in and expressed through ritual” (p. 8). Like Overmyer, the rituals he examines are predominately twentieth-century temple festivals in northern China. However, he looks at only one area in particular, mountainous Shanxi Province. He shares, though, one of the same goals as Overmyer: to show that communal religious rites were exclusively run and created by villagers, not religious specialists. He tells us, “My goal therefore is quite simple: to show in detail the extraordinarily rich symbolic world that farmers, shopkeepers, craftsmen, and the like, quite without guidance from ecclesiastical or political authorities, created for themselves in the villages of southeastern Shanxi” (178). However, whereas Overmyer sees a large degree of homogeneity in Chinese local religion, Johnson sees an even greater degree of heterogeneity. Rather than a broad survey, Johnson presents what he describes as a microhistory of communal festivals that are richly documented either through surviving manuscripts or field research. In Part I, he examines New Year rituals that are predominately exorcisms, such as the Fan-Drum Roster of the Gods in Renzhuang Village, the New Year's festivals of the Aoshi and Sandhill villages in northeastern Shanxi, and the Catching the Yellow Dragon Festival in Guyi (in neighboring southwest Hebei Province). Part II, the shortest section of the work, is an overview of village ritual opera. In Part III, Johnson shifts to his attention to three temple festivals: that of the Divine Mother, which was celebrated in Donghe, and two temple festivals devoted to Hou Yi, the Divine Archer. In Parts I & III, we learn about the area in which each festival took place, the available sources for reconstructing the ceremony, the people who staged it, and what transpired on each day of the festival. If Johnson's description of the festival is based on surviving manuscripts, he translates large segments of them. In this manner, he is able to transport us in time and space, so that our mind's eye can vividly envision what took place at the festival and the words and values its participants might have uttered. If one wants a thick description of a northern Chinese village festival, this is the book he/she should read. Johnson also provides us with useful analytical concepts to understand Chinese rituals. He notes that all village festivals were of two types: seasonal and liturgical. Each type contained both spectacle and sacrifice. The spectacle was the public aspect of the ceremony that happened outside of the temple, such as processions, skits, and operas. These events were filled with excitement and emotion. Sacrifices took place within the temple, had restricted access, and were marked by solemnity. Seasonal rituals emphasized the spectacle aspect of communal rituals, whereas liturgical rituals equally stressed both spectacle and sacrifice. The rituals discussed in Part I are seasonal ceremonies, whereas Part III discusses liturgical ones. Johnson demonstrates that the two types of festivals are qualitatively different. Seasonal festivals are mostly exorcistic, devoted to many different gods, rarely involve religious specialists, feature human scapegoats, proceed through processions, entertain through skits and pantomimes, and make perfunctory food offerings. Liturgical festivals, on the other hand, are devoted to a single deity, entertain with full-scale operas, stress exorcism less, involve religious specialists, and offer massive food offerings. Johnson asserts that the fundamental concern of Shanxi opera was not worship, prayer, or salvation; it was sacrifice. Whereas the seasonal festivals focused on the cathartic execution of a scapegoat, the liturgical rituals were elaborate birthday parties for deities who were perceived as very close in their customs and likes to human beings. Another important contribution that Johnson makes is his observations on ritual opera. He continually stresses that operas were an essential part of all communal rituals in Shanxi's villages. This addition can be traced all the way back to the Song-Yuan period (960–1368), when we see stages becoming important elements of Shanxi temple architecture. Full-scale operas were particularly important in liturgical rituals. A key point of Johnson's argument is that the operas performed at the temple festivals were ritual ones, not the well-known regional styles. Unlike the better known regional styles that were performed by professional troupes, ritual operas were performed by villagers, included little music and singing, and mostly relied on speeches and slapstick. The scripts to these village operas were jealously guarded and individual roles were passed down from father to son. Since the opera scripts were offerings to the gods, villagers did not dare to change them. Consequently, Johnson contends that the ritual operas performed in the villages of twentieth-century Shanxi were probably a continuation of the operas first established in the Song-Yuan period. The content of the operas did not concern the gods; instead, they were usually on historical subjects and propagated secular ethics. One of the conclusions that Johnson reaches about the seasonal rituals in Part I is that, despite having a number of resemblances, such as exorcisms, skits, and elaborate processions, their most striking and evocative features are quite different. This is because northern Chinese villages were for the most part insular, which led to village ritual autarky. But if each hamlet's rituals were significantly different from those of other villages, that means we cannot make general statements about ritual life in the same region, much less northern China as a whole. It would seem, though, that the similarities between these seasonal rituals are structural, while the differences are more in the specific details of how each ritual is carried out. Given the commercialization of late imperial China and the importance of Shanxi as both a banking center and a trade route to the northern frontier, it is also difficult to believe that villages were all that insular. Although Johnson does show that these communal rituals were conceived and carried out by commoners, his claims that religious specialists had little to do with these rites seems overstated. As for the temple festivals, Johnson notes that they were often performed with the help of specialists such as hereditary entertainers (yuehu) in the case of the Divine Mother festival in Donghe, or yinyang masters in the case of the Hou Yi festival at Mount Longquan. Needless to say, neither group of these men belonged to the elite; however, they were specialists who to some degree made conducting these rituals part of their professional repertoire. Also, I think Johnson overstates the separation of the center from localities. It might be true that these communal rituals were entirely created and run by the villagers themselves. Nevertheless, as Johnson himself notes in a number of places, the elite tradition was always near in the form of classical written works that circulated at the local level. Classically educated people, such as local school teachers, civil service examination aspirants, and retired officials probably lived in or near most villages. Hence, people who were educated in the elite tradition were never far away. After all, it seems likely that it was these types of people who were writing the scripts and handbook manuscripts that Johnson relies on to give us precious glimpses of local religion in action. Jeffrey Snyder-Reinke's Dry Spells is about late imperial governance rather than local religion. Nevertheless, the book sheds considerable light on the relationship between the state and popular religion. The stereotype of the late imperial state is that it was a Confucian one that was deeply involved in regulating religion. The state determined which deities could be worshipped and the means by which they should be honored. Indeed, orthopraxy was at a premium. Even if the people oftentimes did not abide by the state's dictates, then certainly the state's Confucian officials would do so. By closely looking at the rainmaking activities of late imperial local officials, Snyder-Reinke convincingly demonstrates that these assumptions are unwarranted. In an effort to produce rain, local magistrates would perform any rainmaking ritual, no matter its origin. In doing so, they frequently ignored state guidelines on rainmaking activities and illegally worshiped unsanctioned deities. They frequently justified their actions by referring to the following line from the canonical Book of Poetry: “There are no spirits not honored, there are no sacrifices withheld.” Part of the reason for this is that the state did not bother to explicitly state what form rainmaking activities should take. Another reason is that the magistrate did not initiate rainmaking ceremonies. He was usually pressured to do so by either peasants or members of the local elite who demanded action, which often entailed worshipping local deities. Sometimes magistrates even employed Daoist priests and Buddhist monks to make the rite efficacious. Rainmaking rituals were of such importance in local religion that Overmyer's Local Religion in North China in the Twenthieth Century devotes its first chapter entirely to these rites. As Snyder-Reinke indicates, though, these were rituals that almost always called for the leadership of the local magistrate. Indeed, since droughts were attributed to Heaven's anger at misgovernment or injustice, it was the magistrate's responsibility as the people's parent (fumu guan “the official who is father and mother”) to set things right. Preliminary action to do so was for the local official to impose a community-wide prohibition of the consumption of animals and strong-smelling foods, as well as worshipping local deities that were thought to be particularly efficacious at ending drought. Nevertheless, some of the most effective actions against drought called for the magistrate to undergo deprivations. This could take many forms: fasting, walking rather than riding in a sedan chair to pray at local temples, walking to temples barefoot and with an uncovered head, wearing mourning clothes to show the depth of his sorrow, parading himself in the streets while wearing the chains of a criminal, writing petitions to deities with his own blood, exposing himself in the hot sun, and in even a few One of most significant points is that rainmaking was one of the magistrate's most important Since the rituals were all public this was not only the most likely in which would see the they would see and on their these rituals were where the official could himself as the of and the of Given the to this officials would make use of means were available because effective rainmaking was One important that makes is that rainmaking rituals were not a Local people could both the and content of the magistrate's It was local people who caused the magistrate to take action. they often his actions by which temples he should to and which deities he should In other his subjects could to what ritual actions he should take. As Snyder-Reinke so it, the state have to the religious of the local also made an effort to the religious of the If an official did not take any action or only perfunctory ones, the local people could of on his as a since both officials and that the magistrate's actions would only be if he a of his actions were always to If he was not as the people could always that he do Hence, local officials who were in what religious in which they were to would to be the more ones. In officials were not in what ritual was they were only with which one was efficacious. One of the of Dry Spells is that it demonstrates that officials were also and participants in local religion. Even more the author that not only did local officials have to out religious but these were some of their most important ones. does a of that local officials were not particular about which traditions they employed in their to rain, he the Confucian aspect of their a little too It is true that magistrates were not particular about the of the rituals they in their rainmaking Nevertheless, the author the Confucian in which they were Confucian assumptions the local local were caused by is very much a Confucian in The magistrate's and himself for such is also an Confucian tradition. the that the magistrate's only be effective if he and an of is also a Confucian Hence, even magistrates might have made use of from different they were still in a Confucian to Confucian Although Dry Spells tells us much less about local religion than the two it does the reader of the role that government could in local religion. In Eugenio Ancestors, Virgins, and the state is also an important but one that could be by local book is about the of a community of in northern from the the its even more is that the who this community were not the who with Chinese religion, but the who were to ancestral worship and the of The first part of book looks at the the of the community in One of the first was the of educated men who were for the civil service in the The most important of these men was who is with being the of the It was men who were well by their community who were able to their other and to to these Christianity embedded in their As for it was the rather than the who had in even it was through the of Chinese intellectuals by means of Christianity that the examination were the only they could to to was a Even the were less to religious they had already of in Christianity to and in China, the they were to in by wearing moreover, unlike the the not only but also which A the community was that Christianity took there at a particularly Both the of the in and the of all people from the so much and that which were usually the of social were so that they were no able to or members who had the same in part to the of the at the and the and activities of in China. It was during this period that were able to Christianity into a local religion. A and was that, when official under the of the and it to the community rather than is because the of Christianity local to and with the in their for periods of their to and with the The of also led to the Chinese to These could more and than their despite the official of the number of in The execution of only to the community with this point in because Christianity was so well established in as a local religion, the also to local for the Indeed, so many local government and were that could always of or And a was all that was for officials to look the other The part of book looks more in depth at Christianity as it was and perceived in One of the most within the community was how to the important Chinese of with the that In particular, the to the on the that were to each and to them. Whereas in other of local doing so, by the late century such had almost entirely from the of is because priests were able to their that their at more than ancestral who were in of could through celebrated on their by a and through the of their by means of prayer, and through such works, one could also for The the them, were to make it even more effective in the Like in pray for rather than to the Of particular is of the role and importance of in the community of Menegon notes that the of in were Many in could to who were within local because not only did they to they also ignored They often the to to the religious of other and in Christianity was being they also to with priests at In they much more than their this by that was a means to and and was a greater form of Local of this which was by the existence of Buddhist and the fact that had already near for with their of the For Menegon this process of the of and female was an important means by which Christianity was By within the tradition but its were able to social values and The of Chinese religions and their made for a of religious at the local even for that that could be as and Ancestors, Virgins, and is a and well the that it If one to learn about the and of Chinese local religion by one of these works, I would this Nevertheless, the other three works are also to read. All four of these works show the and analytical with which Chinese popular religion is Each work demonstrates the and of Chinese religion in even the most and of

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