Temples and Taoist in modern Chinese cities

Wednesday 17 October 2007

"Temples and Taoist in modern Chinese cities"
By Mr Vincent Goossaert, researcher at the Groupe Religions Laïcités Group (EPHE-CNRS).

Vincent Goossaert tackled with enthusiasm and enthusiasm the relationship between temples, clergy and the population in contemporary Taoism.


© Vincent Goossaert

Taoist priests celebrating a community ritual
in a village in Hong Kong,
January 2007 

His research has taken him to mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, embracing a cultural but, nevertheless, still Chinese tradition. These last two countries are a little conservatory since many temples were destroyed in mainland China and four generations were tried to eradicate religious culture. However, today, many temples are rebuilt or restored in mainland China, despite a very rigid bureaucratic framework.

What are the Taoists for in a competitive pluralistic religious system?

Temples offer a number of services:

  • Treatment with TMC (traditional Chinese medicine with herbs or acupuncture) for cures or solutions to malaise. Taoist practitioners are valued and sought after for their knowledge of TMC, the transmission of knowledge from master to disciple.
  • Some Taoists practice symbolic therapies with rituals (this is forbidden in Mainland China).
  • Advice to people, in a role that can sometimes approach our psychoanalysts, and formation of lay disciples. The training can be personalized such as the transmission of classical culture: calligraphy, reading and reciting scriptures, music or learning meditation.
  • Divination offered not only to community members but to strangers at the temple. Divination corresponds to a direct relationship between the individual and the deity, but the interpretation of the oracle requires the help of a Taoist (Daoshi : "Literate of the Dao").
  • Transmission of religious culture: how to behave in a temple, what gestures should be made, how to burn incense or offering money, etc. (Everyone at birth creates an account in the heavenly treasury with a debt that will have to be repaid during his life, good deeds are one way to settle his debt, but burning the offering currency is another. of offering money are used to appease intermediaries between gods and men. Each type of offering money serves a different purpose and the same is not burned for a deceased as for asking for a favor!)
  • Personalized rituals: funeral rites, propitiatories etc.
  • Sale of talismans and other religious tools.
  • Reception of pilgrims. The associations, often formed largely of retired women, regularly visit sacred sites, sometimes very far away: temples such as the eight great temples of Hangzhou or sacred mountains such as the Wudang Shan near Wuhan, whose flanks are dotted. about twenty temples. These pilgrimages aim not only to purify the participants but also all their families.
  • Large annual celebrations: rites for the salvation of suffering souls, funeral rituals (services that used to be very expensive but which tend to become more democratic thanks to a certain standardization).
  • Para-religious services such as vegetarian restaurants which are annexed to temples. Not only is the food excellent, but also purer than in a non-Taoist vegetarian restaurant: it is a mode of purification, a form of asceticism.

© Vincent Goossaert

A Taoist in front of divination oracles
from his temple, Jiugongshan, (Hubei),
July 2007

 

There are different Taoist groups:

  • Quanzhen monasteries, an elite defined by asceticism and discipline.
  • Zhengyi temples, very often at the center of local ritual systems until the beginning of 20nd century.
  • The temples built by subscription, properties of a religious family, representing a clerical ideal of retirement and independence.
  • One of the religious mutations in modern Chinese cities, especially in megacities, is the creation of private Taoist altars (dao tan) that offer religious services, healings or divinations.
  • There are also Taoist funerary shops that provide all the necessary and indispensable elements for the salvation of souls.

 

If all these services are in full expansion, we must still note the decline of Taoist rituals of several days (jiao) sponsored by territorial groups (villages, neighborhoods) in favor of more individual approaches. These rituals are very expensive and, moreover, the villages disappear. These rituals are organized so that the position of the local god is recognized within the pantheon and thereby to strengthen the position of the village chief.

 

 

0

Enter a text and press Enter to search