Book review of Susan Naquin, Gods of Mount Tai: Familiarity and the Material Culture of North China, 1000–2000 (original) (raw)
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Ming Qing Yanjiu, 2023
Susan Naquin's new book does what it says on the cover: With inimitable thoroughness and an almost five-decade-long familiarity with the place and the sources, Naquin traces the rise and fall of the personified gods and goddesses of Mount Tai over the course of a millennium. She also makes some genuinely innovative arguments about materiality and public art in early-modern China, but to fully understand her interventions, it's both useful and interesting to consider the scholarly background against which this book is set. Naquin tells us: "There is currently no field of Ming/Qing religious art […]."1 This is not the same thing as saying there is no scholarship on religious images and objects from the Ming and Qing dynasties. Indeed, Westerners have been writing about Chinese temples and their contents since the days of William of Rubruck (fl. mid-13th century), and this literature only increases in density as it approaches the present.2 It is, however, fair to question the existence of a unified field of Ming-Qing religious art in the sense that "Buddhist Art" or "Ming-Qing Literature" comprise "fields," i.e. groups of scholars in conversation, with journals, conferences, grad courses, a relatively shared sense of research objects and problematics, etc. (What the English words "religion" or "art" should mean in the Chinese context are, of course, their own much-debated problems.3) I thus essay a "state of the (arguably-nonexistent) field" in 2023. I cite only book-length studies in Western languages, as articles and chapters are too
the stone of mount tai: shigandang worship in northern china and the power of symbols
Material Religion, 2019
By using ethnographic evidence and theoretical analysis, this article challenges the distinction between symbolic meanings and power lying in material objects. The perception and worship of the stones from a holy mountain in a city in northern China show how the symbolic meaning and the agency of material objects are connected to each other, and the importance of the body as a parameter for our comprehension of the material world and society. Furthermore, this view on the connectedness between the agency of the stone, its symbolic meanings, and the human body reflects local people’s understanding of what network and association are in human beings’ daily life in a Latourian sense.
Approaching the Sacred in Chinese past Contexts Summary
2018
Recent scholarship on sacred sites and pilgrimage convincingly demonstrates that the conceptual separation of belief and knowledge as well as the dichotomization of the ‘secular’ and the ‘sacred’ both in the case of the Chinese historical and present-day contexts are most inappropriate as a methodological framework. With a strong focus on practice and embodiment and by breaking away from a single discipline approach, my paper is concerned with the question why and how people narrated their own encounters with the Sacred. In the center of my discussion are the mountains as the paragons of Chinese history. They display multiple identities as part of imperial ritual, of mysticism, nature and history, of life, fertility and death and as part of Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist sites of worship and for performing self-cultivation which were used by literati to project something of themselves into the future.
Dancing with the Gods: Daoist Ritual and Popular Religion in Central Hunan
The Daoists of Yangyuan Village (central Hunan Province, P.R.C.) offer important insights into the relationship between so-called " popular religion " (or " local religion "), on the one hand, and institutional religions with greater interregional coherence such as Daoism, on the other. I argue that the concept of " popular religion " does not do justice to the situation in central Hunan, especially not in its common usage as a sphere of culture that can be studied separately from national traditions such Daoism. Focusing on Yangyuan Village, I show that Daoists there have incorporated local traditions into their liturgies, particularly in a constellation whereby local gods protect canonical divinities. From a reverse perspective, I show that local ritualists who are not nominally " Daoist " have nonetheless constructed their own ritual traditions in reference to the mythology and liturgy of Daoism. In particular, the deified manifestation of Lao Zi , entitled Most High Lord Lao (Taishang Laojun), is presented as authoritative source of the local village ritual traditions. Although this paper is primarily written in order to provide a comprehensive introduction of the religious repertoire that the Daoists in Yangyuan represent (as was the motivation behind the conference for which this paper was originally written), my secondary motivation is to go beyond a mere survey and formulate the case of Yangyuan Village as an argument about ways in which disparate elements of Chinese religion may have to be understood as parts in a coherent cultural framework. Because ritual constitutes the most comprehensive venue for individual and communal engagement with specific gods, it is thus a main focus throughout this paper. In order to situate my exploration of ritual interactions with gods within a particular academic debate, I start out in this section with a brief discussion of the limits of the concept of " popular religion. " Then, in section 2, I map out the variegated world of local gods and ancestors that are worshiped throughout Yangyuan 1 This term is widely used in reference to some sort of autonomous category within the whole of Chinese religious phenomena. Among the earlier generations of scholars who took this cultural sphere seriously, C.K. Yang posits a theory that is at once sophisticated and flawed – and that has greatly influenced the field. Yang understands " popular religion " as a set of " diffused " beliefs and practices that have been derived from " institutional " religion. While Yang's model is useful for understanding the correspondences between Chinese religious traditions, it is less accurate in the assumption of some sort of mainstream " Great Tradition " of ancestor worship that has influenced all of the disparate " Little Traditions. " It seems to be more accurate to understand Chinese religious phenomena as built upon a stratum of shared beliefs and practices that have been reconfigured or reemphasized within different contexts. For a general overview of the way in which the term " popular religion " has been used in modern scholarship, see Stephen Teiser, " Popular
Occult Arts, Art History and Cultural Exchange in Early China: Festschrift for Li Ling on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday. Miao Zhe and Guolong Lai eds., (Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press), p.621-52 , 2021
The paper grows from a talk delivered at a conference in celebration of Li Ling, a long-time friend and teacher. Li Ling's hometown is in the Changzhi region of Shanxi, and questions of local temples and religious or ritual practice have long captured his attention. More than anyone, Li Ling is responsible for my love of travel to and research about out-of-the-way places in China. The publication grew from the conference in celebration of his then-approaching 70th birthday: “Myth, Prayer, and Social Integration in Popular Chinese Religion: The Lingqiu Temple in Zhangzi County, Shanxi, and the Cult of the Daughter of Yandi” 山西長治長子縣發鳩山的靈湫廟與“炎帝之少女”精衛 in Occult Arts, Art History and Cultural Exchange in Early China: Festschrift for Li Ling on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday. Miao Zhe and Guolong Lai, eds., (Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2021). 浙江大學藝術與考古研究（特輯二）：中國早期數術、藝術與文化交流 ——李零先生七秩華誕慶壽論文集 浙江大學藝術與考古研究中心 編
Le Maître céleste (Zhang tianshi) confère depuis l'époque des Yuan des titres et rangs aux divinités locales dans diverses parties du monde chinois, en particulier au Jiangnan. Ces titres et rangs jouent un rôle important dans la légitimation des cultes, notamment territoriaux, et permettent aux dieux d'avoir une place bien défi nie à l'intérieur d'un système local de régulation interne des cultes et des communautés. L'article, partant de l'exemple de la canonisation des célèbres divinités Wutong, retrace l'histoire de cette procédure de canonisation depuis le XIV e jusqu'au XIX e siècle. Il montre que son fondement liturgique est la transmission de registres (lu) aux dieux, de la même façon que lors d'une ordination pour un vivant : l'obtention de registres donne droit à un rang (zhi) dans la bureaucratie céleste. Au Jiangnan, en sus des ces registres et rangs, les communautés locales demandent au Maître céleste, pour leur dieux, des titres « féodaux » (conte, marquis, prince) identiques à ceux donnés par l'État impérial. En accédant à ces demandes, le Maître céleste en vient ainsi, au Jiangnan, à s'intégrer très largement à la gouvernance impériale de la société locale. Le taoïsme devient dans ces conditions le cadre bureaucratique de la société du Jiangnan.
This is my translation of an article published in Japanese by Iiyama Tomoyasu as “Kingendai kahoku ni okeru shūken shibyōsaisi kara mita chihōkan no keihu: sansei heiyōken ōjunkōbyo wo chushinni” 金元代華北における州県祠廟祭祀からみた地方官の系譜―山西平遥県応潤侯廟を中心に (Administrative legacies and worship at prefectural and county temples in North China under the Jin and Yuan: the case of the Yingrun hou Temple in Pingyao, Shanxi) in Tōyō Gakuhō 東洋学報, June 2003. It represents some of the best research in any language on middle period northern China. Through the examination of stelea in counties in Shaanxi, Iiyama argues that local administrators from different dynasties were able to establish legitimacy by worshiping local deities. In contrast to the south, these deities did not change, but remained constant through the Song, Jin, and Yuan.