by Livia Kohn
1458), and the Zanling ji (Collection of Praise for the Numinous, HY
1457).1
The Perfected Lords: Between Region and Empire
In my earlier work on the Xu brothers (1985), I devoted my efforts to the explanation of the origin of their cult in Fujian and of the Yongle emperor’s unprecedented attention to these obscure local gods. The first of these explanations seemed particularly demanding, since there is no evidence that the Xu brothers ever went to Fujian. Returning to my research after more than a decade, I am more convinced than ever of their absence from Fujian, as well as of my earlier explanation for their divinization in Min County. Disinherited by their family and dis-enfranchised from political power, these two Southern Tang princes became the cynosure for the aspirations of the landowners of rural Min County precisely at the time when Fuzhou and its environs were being ravaged by civil war and invasion and were absorbed within the Southern Tang state. Among these landowners’ aspirations was the preservation of their hard work, because many of them had migrated
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to the region from the middle and lower Yangzi during the ninth and tenth centuries. Another was to harvest the fruits of their labor on a regional and ultimately national scale. One of the ways this was expressed was in the hagiographical revision of Southern Tang history, placing these marginalized princes at the very center of a state, the Southern Tang, that self-consciously viewed itself as the inheritor of the Tang ecumene and the guardians of a literary-aesthetic culture that would pass on to the Song. And one of the ways in which their aspirations were acted upon was by placing the cult to the Xu brothers at the center of the social order and examination success of rural Min County and by extending their fame through the combined efforts of local and bureaucratic co-regionalists from the Southern Song through the early Ming (see Davis 1985).2
Like the relation between dao and fa, or substance and function ( ti/yong ), the aspirations of these ninth- and tenth-century pioneers in Fujian remained latent until they congealed in the literary consciousness of several Southern Song lineages. This was a point I have made earlier with respect to the Xu brothers, almost as an afterthought (1985). Since then, Robert Hymes and others have driven this point home. In contrast to their Northern Song predecessors, members of the Southern Song elite derived status from their identity as local gentlemen based on strategies of local marriage, defense, and the patronage of local institutions (Hymes 1986, 210–214). The compelling conclusions of Hymes’s study of the elite of southeastern Jiangxi are still being debated, and their implications for other regions of Southern-Song China have yet to be assessed (for a contrasting view, see Bossler 1998).
I prefer—and it is only a preference —to paint with a broader brush and would merely suggest that the land- and office-holding elite of the twelfth century finally had to come to terms with a brute fact whose possibility they had already anticipated with dread—a dynasty without an empire. While the provincial elite of the eleventh century could count on their links to the court to maintain their local status, those born at the end of the century could no longer be so confident. This does not mean, however, that the provincial elites of the Southern Song merely substituted horizontal ties for vertical ones. Rather, it means that in a world of shrinking horizons, new links to the transcendent had to be forged out of local institutions—shrines, abbeys, monasteries, and academies. This is true also of the beleaguered court, which to reconstitute itself had now to pay tribute to these same local sources of transcendence. Such, anyway, is one way to read the sharp incline
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of titles granted to local gods and religious institutions by the court (see Hansen 1990, ch. 4).
There is certainly evidence that the literary and institutional im-presarios of the cult to the Xu brothers were members of the local elite in southern Min County from the twelfth century on. The construction of the first “Patriarchal Temple” ( zumiao) in the late tenth century is identified with a landlord named Fang Jue, and succeeding generations of his descendants organized the institutional and ideological expansion of the cult ( Xuxian zhenlu 1.6; Xuxian hanzao 1.2a, 1.6b).
Nine individual Fangs are named, and their activities center on the late twelfth, the first and second halves of the fourteenth, and the early fifteenth centuries.3 Two members of another lineage, Zhou Yue and Zhou Sui, whose ancestors and descendants were also linked to the cult, picked up the slack in the thirteenth century.4 The Zhou and the Fang are not the only landed families involved by any means, but they are the ones whose prominence is consistently revealed over the centuries.
While the identity and role of the Zhou lineage will be, as we shall see, easier to account for, the Fangs appear nowhere else but in the literary legacy of the cult to the Xu brothers. With a little armchair legwork, I have come up with one hypothesis as to their provenance.
The Fangs of Putian
In Putian, Xinghua Commandary, a couple days’ journey south of Fuzhou, a large lineage named Fang was flourishing in the Southern Song. We know about it—or rather, about the most important of its three branches, the “Purple-Robed Fangs” (Zhuzi Fang)—from the genealogical essays of one of its members, Fang Dacong (1183–1247), an early-thirteenth-century “presented scholar,” one of three in his generation alone ( Tie’an ji 31, 32). These essays were the literary accompaniment to Fang Dacong’s reconstruction of the ancestral
“Sacrificial Hall” ( citang )—or what is now called a “Sacrificial Hall”—
near the suburban residences of the Fang lineage on Wushi shan (Blackstone Mountain).5 This temple, which was actually a Buddhist merit cloister, was dedicated to the six tenth-century sons of the founding ancestor of the Purple-Robed Fangs and appears to have fallen into disuse and disrepair. The reconstructed Sacrificial Hall now became the focus of the ancestral rites of all branches of the Fang lineage, placing as it did a first-century Fang named Fang Hong at the apex of an ancestral tree in which the Purple-Robed Fangs con-
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stituted the trunk ( Tie’an ji 32). By 1269, it is said, several thousand Fangs were annually attending the ancestral rites here ( Houcun xiansheng quanji 161).
We can certainly find in the activities of the Purple-Robed Fangs some of the localist strategies Robert Hymes has identified among the elite of southeastern Jiangxi, especially the preference for marriages within a circumscribed region and social circle. But even here, as the historian Kobayashi Yoshihiro has discovered, the Purple-Robed Fangs showed a marked preference for those families that had as much literary and bureaucratic success as they had (Kobayashi 1995, 508–511).
By the time of Fang Dacong, the three descendant groups of his lineage could boast more than 120 officials since the late Tang dynasty and approximately 60 living degree-holders, no doubt nurtured in the schools, the lecture halls, and the library of 40,000 volumes that the lineage maintained throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Kobayashi 1995, 517). Along with their charitable lands, the thirteenth-century Fangs of Putian more closely resembled the Northern-Song Fangs of suburban Suzhou. The Sacrificial Hall was meant to top off two centuries of examination success, bureaucratic office, and literary accomplishment, goals quite explicitly celebrated in the sources as the strategy of the Fang lineage. The Sacrificial Hall, in fact, was precisely one of those local religious institutions through which a larger vision was maintained. It celebrated not merely the Fangs’ role in an imperial system but also quite explicitly a family tradition of seeking and occupying high positions in the censorate, of steadfastly oppos-ing the appeasement policies of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and, throughout, of speaking the “plain truth,” as they put it, to the powerful (Kobayashi 1995, 507–508).
In one of Fang Dacong’s genealogical essays, he mentions very briefly the other two branches of his lineage —the Baidu pai and the Fangshan pai. I am interested in the latter, the Fangs of
Fang Mountain. According to Dacong’s brief notice, these Fangs, before they took up literary pursuits, moved from the city of Putian to the villages around Wushi shan and from there —still, perhaps, in the tenth century—“away in other directions” ( Tie’an ji 32.3.ll3–6). Fangshan was in Min County, sixty-four miles north of Putian. This range, which became known as Wuhu shan (Five Tiger Mountain) in the Qing and is so designated on maps today, sits on an east–west axis parallel to the river that separates Fuzhou from southern Min County ( Mindu ji 14.14–15). In the hagiography of the Xus it is identified as one of the Sanshan Three Mountains—the famous appellation by which the re-
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gion around Fuzhou was known. More importantly, the Xu brothers refer to themselves as the tutelary spirits of Fangshan, the eastern portion of which includes Aofeng, the exact site of their Patriarchal Temple and of the Lingji gong ( Xuxian hanzao 2.11a, 3.1a). Now, if the im-presarios of this temple-cult, the “South-of-the-River Fangs” (Henan Fangshi), were descendants of the Fangshan Fangs, as some believe they were (see Clart 1998),6 some interesting conclusions can be drawn.
The Perfected Lords: Between Elites and Commoners
The Xu brothers of the Lingji gong were the patrons, among other things, of a tradition of primary school education established south of the river since the end of the Tang dynasty, a tradition that had allowed even peasants and artisans to aspire to scholarship and culture.
This tradition culminated in the “Hall of Purification” ( zhaitang ), a Confucian lecture hall within Lingji gong ( Xuxian hanzao 1.16b–19a).
While peasants and artisans were certainly free to come here and be purified by philosophy, it is clear that the local elite made greater use of it. And none benefited more from its use than the Fangs. In 1198
and again a few years later, the South-of-the-River Fangs produced their first and second “presented scholars”—Fang Jie and Fang Ce, respectively—and their success is directly attributed to the patronage of the Xu brothers following a session of “dream divination” ( mengbu) ( Xuxian hanzao 1.3a–b).
Now, what appears to be a common example of the elite practice of “temple incubation” from the twelfth century would become, and perhaps already was, something else entirely. The relationship between the supernatural patrons of the Lingji gong and their clients, the residents of the twenty-odd villages around Aofeng and not just the Fangs, was one of unabashed mediumism. It was not exactly the spirit-possession of the “divination youths” ( tongji) of village Fujian, nor was it exactly the visionary transmission of texts of the lower gentry around fourth-century Maoshan, but something in between, sharing characteristics of both. Its primary mechanism was the “phoenix bas-ket” ( luanji ), the planchette, or sand table, on which the invoked spirits spell out a message ( Zanling ji 1a). The first account dates from 955:
“The Perfected Lords lowered the brush ( jiangbi ), marking talismanic remedies to help people, and news of this spread far and wide” ( Xu-xuan zhenlu 1.30a). This is only ten years after the death of the Xu brothers, purportedly at Aofeng, and twenty-eight years before Fang Jue sponsored what would become known as the “Ancestral Temple of Spir-
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itual Succor” (Lingji zongmiao), suggesting that the composers of one of these texts’ prefaces were correct in identifying the origin of temple worship in a village spirit-medium cult ( congci) ( Zanling ji 1.4a).
Subsequent descriptions of it waver between divination ( bu) and possession ( pingfu), depending on the passage, but it was this mechanism that produced everything from the graded doggerrel based on the sixty-four hexagrams ( qianshi) through linked verse and prose poems to the encomia, exorcistic writs, liturgical documents, stelae, and all the historical records of the temple complex itself. The fourteen volumes and five hundred printed pages of the Xuxian hanzao is nothing but the literary residue of these mediumistic sessions, at various degrees of remove and refinement to be sure, but always self-consciously spoken in, and interrupted by, the first-person pronoun of the gods.
I will not trouble with the niceties of this process, which would require a difficult and tedious analysis of the textual language. The supernatural and terrestrial producers of this discourse, some of it inscribed in stone before printed on paper, do not seem troubled by it, though they do feel the need for a justification. What they want to jus-tify, however, is not the process itself, but rather its suitability for public consumption. To do so they must search for a literary precedent, and they find it in an epigraphic genre first introduced to the literati world by the spirit of Liu Zongyuan (773–819): inscriptions on the reverse side of funerary tablets ( beiyin). The textual reproduction of the Xu brothers’ own “reverse tablet” is preceded by a discussion of the practice, which the editors of the Xuxian hanzao distinguish from those tablets that record such things as music, moral learning, history, mourning, and biography (1.9a–10a). The contrast drawn is between tablets by living descendants to commemorate the dead and reverse tablets that were intended, quite literally, to embody and prolong a personal relationship after death. The subtext of this difficult passage is, first, Liu Zongyuan’s own composition of a reverse tablet for a reclusive monk and, second, the reverse tablet marking Liu’s own tomb, in which he or his spirit identified the names of his disciples and clients (his “fellows”) ( Liu Zongyuan quanji, chs. 6, 7, and supplement).
The problem that is being addressed by both text and subtext is the persistence of nonaffinal, hierarchical relationships such as those between a master and disciple or patron and client. Having identified a precedent, the editors of the Xuxian hanzao feel no need to elaborate:
“Since Liu [Zi-]hou,” they say, “there have been reverse tablets; since the Xu [Immortals], Princes of the Yangzi, have begun [to do the same], who dares argue with this?” (1.10a). In the reverse tablet of the
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Xu brothers, the gods only hope that they will be blessed with disciples who have half the talent of Liu Zongyuan and of the chronicler of Liu’s temple-cult, none other than HanYu (768–830) ( Xuxian hanzao 1.10a–b). Who dares to argue, indeed!
The vast literary output of the Xu brothers was a product of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and early fifteenth centuries, a period that broadly coincides with the very public patronage of the Zhou and Fang lineages. The members of these lineages, who are specifically identified as the benefactors and press agents of the cult, were not, however, the ones responsible for this literary output. This was the work of a wider array of residents of Jishan li, the administrative unit that comprised several villages on or around Aofeng. Amazingly, we have all the names of these villagers and rural gentlemen ( cunren, liren, xiangren), though a few may have belonged to the Zhou lineage in particular. From a maze of cross-references I can identify at least two groups, defined by their activities. One group of seven individuals, representing seven surnames, was responsible for those mediumistic sessions that resulted in the historical records of the gods and their temple complex ( Xuxian hanzao 1.19ab, 8.1a–3a). Another group of five individuals represents four surnames, three of which overlap with surnames of the first group. This second group of five formed a kind of club or society—
what in secular sources might be called a rushe. Their sessions produced a lot of poetry. They were given floral titles: “Fellow Plum,” “Fellow Bamboo,” “Fellow Orchid, “Fellow Pine,” and “Fellow Chrysanthemum” ( Xuxian hanzao 5.4ab).7 This group was also in charge of the
“kitchens” ( chu) of the gods, village feasts that have an ancient history ( Xuxian hanzao 5.3a–4b, 6.1a–b; see Stein 1971; also Feuchtwang 1992, 85–87).
The temple also appears to have been the center of other literati activities, including painting, Yijing studies, Buddhism, and geomancy ( Xuxian hanzao 6.1b–4b, 6.5b–7a), but the Lingji gong was what we would identify as a “community temple” and not a temple-cult that appealed ex
clusively to the local elite. The gods responded to the needs and requests of the commoner households of Jishan ( Xuxian hanzao 5.5a). These are recorded in loving detail and were often the occasion for lengthy memorials. Moving beyond personal requests, we see that the peasants, artisans, and petty merchants of Jishan participated together with the elite in confessional and votive ceremonies that defined and reinforced a rigid social and occupational hierarchy, even as they envisioned a rural order of benign paternalism and harmony.
We have the texts of these communal rites ( Xuxian zhenlu 2.16–43; Hou-
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cun xiansheng daquan ji), which need to be compared with what we know about the rural order and ideology that was evolving in the Yuan and early Ming dynasties. Looking ahead, these texts embody the world into which the first Ming ruler Zhu Yuanzhang very much wanted to tap with his system of tax captains. Looking back, they are exemplary of the vision condensed in the great Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi’s feeble blueprint for rural compacts (Hymes and Shirokauer 1993, 22–25).
Moving beyond these rites, we can also see that the Lingji gong served as the structuring center for the religious and liturgical traditions of the entire region south of the river. Large-scale multivil-lage “offerings” ( jiao) were performed here (Luotian jiao, Huanglu jiao, and Yulanpen hui/Ullambana) for the legions of hungry ghosts ( Xuxian hanzao 11.1a–8a, 11.8a–16b, 11.26a–34b). Exorcistic rituals directed against the many infectious diseases of this subtropical region have roots deep in the past of Chinese and non-Han Fujian, as do the special rituals for women, the Xuepen hui (Bloodpool Gatherings), which reveal themselves here in a largely Buddhist framework ( Xuxian hanzao 4.7b–14b, 11.16b–19b; see Seaman 1981). The relation, in fact, between the Lingji gong and the Buddhist institutions of the region is profound and complex. Within its purview was drawn a Buddhist Yuqing tang (Hall of Blessings), presided over by Dingguang fo (Skt.: Dipimkara; Ch.: Randeng), the most important Buddha among commoners in Fujian and a significant object of worship in Jiangxi and Zhejiang as well. Here he is called “The Holy Lord in White Clothing, Dingguang of Mount Pangu” (Baiyi shenggong Pangu Dingguang) ( Xuxian hanzao 1.20a–22b).8 The Xu brothers, in fact, claimed a special relationship with this Buddha, as clients to patron, just as the literati and literate clients of the Xu brothers maintained an ongoing intellectual and social relationship with the Chan monks of the region.9