Chinese Popular Religion in Text and Acts

This volume explores practices and experiences in Chinese popular religion. The research adds new materials and new approaches to well-known worships such as the cults of doomsday, underworld, and Lord Guan on the one hand, and draws attention to under-the-radar deities and holy figures hiding in the mountainous countryside or among the urban crowd. While this book centers on Chinese popular religion, it will be of use to non-China scholars in folklore, religious art, and ritual studies as well as China scholars in popular culture from late-medieval to contemporary times.The focus of our analysis is the discursive nature of Chinese popular religion. The enduing mutual interaction between institutional and popular religion is well captured in the analogy of reverberation that Paul Katz has first proposed. In addition, texts imply contexts. When studying texts, it is required to study the contexts in which the texts were generated, disseminated, received, and recreated as well as the agents who did all these. Popular religion as diffused religion in C.K. Yang’s terminology is not a separate realm from society and religious history is, argues Barend ter Haar, an integrated part of general history. With texts as the starting point, this volume is historical in the scope while employing fieldworks in the approach. The contributors all have done their share of fieldworks in locating and collecting new primary texts such as stone inscriptions, folktales, and manuscripts. The ethnographical approach to history has been forcefully argued by historians like Daniel in a resumption of the interrupted folklore studies movement in China of the 1920s and 1930s. In the meantime, libraries and archives are by no means abandoned field for primary-source hunting. Newspapers, pamphlets, flyers, diaries and scriptures of both institutional and popular religion all have been keenly scrutinized in this volume.

Shin-yi Chao is Associate Professor of Religion at University of Rochester, US. Her research interests include Chinese popular religion, Daoism, and ritual studies. She has published extensively on Daoist rituals and women in Daoism. Currently, she is working on two projects: village religion in North China and temple cults in Taiwan. Her most recent publication is Seekers and Seers: Lay Buddhists and Buddhist Revival in Rural China (2022).