by Livia Kohn
Their main activity was to provide medical services, including prescriptions through spirit-writing, free medicines, and consultations with doctors of traditional Chinese medicine. Sometimes following Guangchengzi’s instruction, they produced their own pills. After the establishment of the Republic, they ran a medicine shop to make money and provided vaccinations, funeral services, and aid for disaster victims ( Shenggong caotang dashi jiyao, ch. 7).
The third example is the Yu shantang, which began during the cholera epidemic of 1902 with a series of spirit-writing sessions performed at the Huixing Charitable Institute. The institute was one of nine big charitable societies in Guangzhou; it had been established in New Town in 1900 and contained an altar for Lüzu. During the cholera outbreak, its member Zhao Zunsi performed spirit-writing there to ask for prescriptions. Zhao held a juren degree and earned his living by
Manifestations of Lüzu in Modern Guangdong 203
teaching. He made pills to treat cholera according to Lüzu’s instruction and distributed them widely. The pills were so efficacious that followers increased day by day. Eventually, he and his followers set up a new shrine worshiping Lüzu called Yihe lou; this was located in Huangsha, a western suburb of Guangzhou City. The following year, they established a new charitable society called Yu shantang next to the Yihe lou, whose main activity was to provide free medicine and assistance to the poor. They had twenty-four branches in Guangdong and, with the support of local merchants, also developed charitable activities in Hong Kong, Macao, and Singapore. Baodao tang, the Hong Kong branch, was established in 1921 ( Baosong baohe ji, 385–387; Fuxing 5:11–13).
All these three daotan had a number of things in common, aside from the fact that they were all founded at times of plague. First, they emphasized medical services, such as receiving prescriptions through spirit-writing, producing pills, consulting with doctors, and so on. Second, they published morality books edited from spirit-writing oracles, including prescriptions given by immortals and talismans to cure diseases. Third, they were located not in isolated places of scenic beauty but in urban or suburban areas. Daotan as charitable societies and helpers in distress became mainstream during the Republican period and were succeeded by Hong Kong’s present-day groups.
The Daotan Movement in the Republican Period
The Republican period saw two major changes in the daotan movement. First, the range of members’ social strata gradually expanded.
The Yunquan xianguan is a good example. According to an old member’s memoir, in the early days most members belonged to the upper classes, including local gentry, literati, and wealthy merchants. However, in the Republican period, more members were businessmen engaging in commerce and industry
In the late 1920s the leaders were the director of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, an overseas Chinese, and a politician. They replaced the traditional elites who had passed the imperial examinations, reflecting the general power shift from the local gentry to merchants. In addition, common people —farmers, shop keepers, and re-tail salesmen—gradually joined in greater numbers ( Xiqiao yunquan xianguan shiji, 55). The same trend is also apparent in new founda-tions, such as that of the Xinshan tang, which arose in 1935 and whose members were ordinary young men working in a lumber shop, neither wealthy merchants nor literati nor religious specialists.
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A second major change was that the daotan movement extended throughout Hong Kong and Macao. For example, the Yunquan xianguan established branches in all these places; the Yushan tang set up a branch in Hong Kong; some Shenggong caotang members started businesses in Hong Kong and built a new temple there in 1934.
This change in location reflects the population expansion of Hong Kong, which had an estimated 840,473 people in 1931 as opposed to 456,739 in 1911 (Fan 1974, 2). Many Cantonese looking for business opportunities and jobs were moving to Hong Kong; refugees from disasters and civil wars found a new home there —bringing new religious impulses and encouraging the establishment of local daotan branches.
After the Japanese army invaded China in 1937 and occupied Guangzhou and Hong Kong, most spirit-writing cults were forced to stop their activities, returning to their customs only after 1945. Among the most prominent groups then was the Zhibao tai (Establishment of Utmost Treasure), founded by He Qizhong.6 According to his biography written by a follower, he was born in 1916 as the illegitimate child of a silk merchant in Shunde County. In 1930, when he was in middle school, he visited a spirit-writing cult and received prophecies that turned out to be true. From then on he believed in spirit-writing and began to learn it, becoming a medium, while working in a silk shop. Between 1937 and 1940 he went to the Chongxu guan on Mount Luofu and studied under a Daoist master of the Longmen subsect. After 1941 he returned to Guangzhou to support his family, living in his friend’s silk shop. The shop had been a pharmacy before the fall of Guangzhou, and on the second floor there was an altar for Lüzu. He Qisheng started a spirit-writing cult there and named it Jishan xiantan; later he moved it to Xiguan in the western part of Guangzhou City.
This was the beginning of the Zhibao tai.
Like the shop clerks who started the Xinshan tang, He was young and of a low social class, but unlike them he had great talent for spirit-writing, a strong interest in Daoist knowledge, and ambition. The medicines prescribed by his spirit-writing séances were renowned for their miraculous efficacy, so the number of followers gradually increased.
After he returned to Guangzhou, he continued to study rituals under the Quanzhen Daoist Ye Zongmao, an abbot of the Yingyuan gong and a resident of the Xiuyuan jingshe. Finally, he got an ordination certificate from the Yingyuan gong as a member of the twenty-fourth generation of the Quanzhen sect. He seems to have had a large circle of acquaintances. Besides Quanzhen Daoists, he kept company with
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Buddhist priests, leaders of the Xiantian dao and the Tongshan she, and traditional Chinese doctors. Through these exchanges, he acquired a wide variety of religious knowledge. Later he encountered Lu Yinfang, a wealthy Hong Kong merchant, and greatly expanded his activities, establishing in 1945 the officially accredited Chinese Daoist Charitable Society of Zhibao.
He Qizhong claimed that the Zhibao tai was a successor to the Quanzhen school in two ways. First, he himself became a follower of the school and received ordination. Second, he created a genealogy that linked the Zhibao tai with the Quanzhen school. In the Zhibao tai’s original certificate, there is the following passage: It began with Donghua dijun. . . . The teaching was then transmitted to Patriarch Qiu of the Longmen subsect. . . . Eventually the teaching was transmitted to the patriarch of the fourth generation of Longmen subsect.
His family name was Huang and his Daoist name was Xuanxian. He was a native of Chen County in Guangdong. He was born on the eleventh hour of the 22nd day of the seventh moon. He descended on the spirit-writing board and established teachings in the Zhibao tai in Guangzhou after the model of Lüzu. He enlarged the gate of salvation and showed the right way. His teaching was called the Zhibao school.
( Baosong baohe ji 159–160)
Huang Xuanxian was a fictional Daoist created by spirit-writing, who allegedly founded the Zhibao tai as a new branch of the Longmen subsect of the Quanzhen school, in effect becoming the pivot of a new genealogy. He Qizhong thereby legitimized the Zhibao tai as an orthodox Daoist organization in the Quanzhen tradition, elevating it above the status of a spirit-writing cult.
According to a report, the number of members of the Zhibao tai was more than seven hundred in the beginning and increased to several thousand after a while (Liu 1992). Most traditional daotan did not admit women members, but the Zhibao tai clearly stated that women could also join, possibly contributing to the popularization of female spirit-writing mediums and scripture cantors. However, their prosperity did not continue for long. In 1949, when the communist government was established, spirit-writing cult
s were regarded as a “feudalistic su-perstition,” and like other spirit-writing cults, the Zhibao tai was forced to cease its activities. He Qizhong and his company fled to Hong Kong and set up a new Lüzu altar and planchette in a downtown building, which in due course developed into the Qingsong guan, one of the most powerful Daoist organizations in Hong Kong today.
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Conclusion
The rise and growth of daotan, as we have seen, is a complex and multilayered phenomenon that cannot be explained only by the traditional view that sees them as a result of the transmission and spread of the Quanzhen tradition. This is not to deny that the Quanzhen school had some influence on the daotan movement. In nineteenth-century Guangdong, many Daoist temples belonged to the Quanzhen school and had close ties to the Daoists of Mount Luofu. Most worshiped Lüzu and were renowned for some folk medicines, such as spirit-written prescriptions and talisman water. It is likely that those temples supplied a model for the later daotan movement.
However, Lüzu worship and spirit-writing, the most important elements of the daotan movement, were not limited to the spread of Quanzhen temples. The practice of communicating with Lüzu by spirit-writing was popular among different social groups, from the upper to the lowest classes, and even to children—a phenomenon that cannot be explained only by the popularization of elite culture. Cantonese folk customs, such as the shamanistic games played by children at the Mid-Autumn Festival, show that ancient folk religious practices—
antecedents of spirit-writing—were continuously handed down and formed a religious foundation underlying local culture.
Another important aspect is the sociology of daotan members. They were lay believers with Daoist knowledge and financial ability, not professional Daoist priests belonging to the Quanzhen sect. Especially in the early stages of the daotan movement, it was bureaucrats, local gentry, and wealthy merchants who became active participants. Their power, wealth, and strong devotion to Daoism and spirit-writing became driving forces in the movement. In the second stage, when the daotan began to take on the character of charitable societies, it was the drug merchants’ capital, technical expertise, and networks that formed the primary driving forces behind the movement’s development. Although their movements developed outside official Daoist circles, they identified themselves as “Daoist” on the basis of their own idea about what Daoism was.
In the Republican period, the range of people involved in daotan expanded. The young founders of Xinshan tang, which originated in the folk shamanistic game, volunteered to be Lüzu’s disciples, that is, to be Daoist through communications with their master by spirit-writing. The founder of the Zhibao tai, the most famous daotan in post-war Guangzhou, was also originally only a young spirit-writing medium
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but had the amibition to become well known and wealthy. He obtained rich Daoist knowledge and funds through a Quanzhen priest’s guidance and a large circle of acquaintances, allowing his ambition and imagination not only to make Zhibao tai popular and powerful in Guangzhou but also to create a new genealogy linking it with the Quanzhen school. One may see all this as part of the popularization of an originally pure Quanzhen tradition, but I do not share this view.
I would rather see the daotan phenomenon as the lay people’s movement toward the orthodoxy of Daoism, as their way of working toward their religious ideals and advancing their social prestige. The movement indicates, to borrow Kristofer Schipper’s words, “the upgrading and emancipation of local power structure, and not the downgrading or popularization of Taoism” (1985, 834).
To conclude, the daotan movement began and grew through the integration of elements from various social groups, merging their ideas and lifestyles. It gained momentum around the turn of the century, when social disorder and unrest led to strong eschatological senti-ments, then settled down to become a strong and supportive part of Hong Kong society today.
Notes
This paper is a conflation, revision, and expansion of ideas and materials discussed in Shiga 1999, chs. 4–6. The main field research for this study was done from May of 1992 to August of 1993 when I was a research student of the OISP program of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, receiving support from the Rotary Foundation, and from January to April of 1994, when I was a visiting scholar at the Center of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, supported by a grant from the Niwano Peace Foundation. I am deeply indebted to both supporters and to the academic programs that helped me in my studies.
1. Lingwei literally means the space where a spirit tablet of the dead is placed.
Most daotan sell a lingwei including a spirit tablet made from white tile. On the tile, the name, place of birth, and photograph of the dead person are printed.
2. Table 1 is based on data collected from local gazetteers, morality books, and my interviews with senior members of daotan in Hong Kong and Macao.
3. Nah mouh louh is a Cantonese transliteration. The romanization is based on the Huang-Kok Yale system.
4. The early history of the Xinshan tang is based on manuscripts written by one of the founders, my interviews with the founders’ descendants, and a spirit-written text entitled Weishan zuile.
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5. Guangchengzi is an immortal who instructed Huangdi (Yellow Thearch) on longevity.
6. The materials in this section are derived mainly from Baosong baohe ji, edited on the basis of records and articles concerning four daotan, which He Qizhong had a part in founding.
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Part IV
Ritual Boundaries
10
Fang Yankou and Pudu
Translation, Metaphor,
and Religious Identity
Charles D. Orzech
The Problem of Religious Identity
and the Poverty of Syncretism
Over the years, students of Chinese religion have struggled to understand and articulate the encounter between South Asian and Chinese religions, variously depicting this encounter as “conquest,” “sinification,” and “transformation.” Recent work on the interaction between indigenous Chinese traditions and the traditions originating to the west and south of China (Zürcher 1980; Bokenkamp 1983 and 1990), as well as work on so-called apocrypha have begun to render such simplistic characterizations of this encounter problematic. In the course of my study of the Renwang huguo boruo bolomiduo jing (Scripture for Humane Kings, T. 245/246; Orzech 1998) I found myself struggling to articulate the sophisticated hermeneutical “play” between Confucian and Buddhist religious concepts that signaled the emergence of a new Chinese Buddhist religious identity, and which later characterized the reception of Esoteric Buddhism during the Tang dynasty. My problem was that the language of “mixture,” “hybrid,” or syncretism was vague and imprecise and provided little help in understanding what was going on, particularly with regard to new notions of religious identity.