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  • Daojiao yu minjian zongjiao yanjiu lunji [inline-graphic xlink:href="01i.gif" /][inline-graphic xlink:href="02i.gif" /] (Essays on the studies of the relationship between Daoism and Chinese popular religion)
  • David C. Yu (bio)
Lai Chi-tim, editor. Daojiao yu minjian zongjiao yanjiu lunji (Essays on the studies of the relationship between Daoism and Chinese popular religion). Hong Kong: Xuefeng Wenhua Shiye Gongsi , 1999. 211 pp. Paperback HK $98, ISBN 962-651-600-3.

In recent decades the meaning of "Chinese popular religion" has been a topic of lively debate among Western anthropologists, historians, and scholars of religion. Perhaps due to the influence of this Western discussion, Asian scholars have also become increasingly interested in it, and the publication of the present book is a concrete example of this trend. Indeed, the Chinese University of Hong Kong has even launched a Center for the Study of the Relationship between Religion and Chinese Society, and this book has been published under its auspices.

Editor Lai Chi-tim, a member of the Religious Studies faculty of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, does not offer a definition of Chinese popular religion in the book's Foreword, perhaps assuming that the reader will readily understand what it is all about after having read through all nine of the book's essays. Under this assumption, I will quickly mention here the items related to Daoism discussed in the nine essays: excessive cults (yin-ci)—millennial religious cults proclaiming the end of the world; popular scriptures known as Bao juan (Precious volumes); the Eight Trigrams Society; the temples of the Celestial Queen in Hong Kong; the scriptures of the ethnic Pai-Yao people; the worship of female deities; mediums and exorcism; and the worship of deities who answer people's prayers for worldly fortune or success. The reader may infer from a list of topics like these that popular religion does not necessarily mean the worship of [End Page 97] a particular entity but rather a complex process involving multiple agents—religious specialists, believers, ritual practices, deities, and opinions of the state or critics. It is in this sense that Stephen Teiser, scholar of Chinese popular religion, reminds us that a culture should be seen "not as an integrated whole shared by all, but as a process involving difference and dispute." Those who view a culture in this way tend to understand Chinese popular religion "less as an entity than as an activity or an arena of conflict."1 I believe that Teiser's remarks on popular religion are relevant to the essays in this book, because there is no common consensus on the meaning of Chinese popular religion.

The first essay, Lai Chi-tim's "Celestial Master Daoism and the Ritual Practices of Chinese Popular Religion in the Six Dynasties Period" (Liuchao Tianshidao yu minjian zongjiao ) is a textual study of the attitude of the Celestial Master Sect toward the rituals of popular religion in this period (317-581). Because Lai uses Japanese, Western, and Chinese sources to substantiate his arguments, the content of his essay is rich and complex. He argues that Celestial Master Daoism's criticisms of the extremist cults are based on its understanding of Dao as the ultimate authority, as well as on its own ethics and liturgy of petitions. Based on this conviction, Lai argues that there is a difference in character and quality between Celestial Master Daoism and the popular cults of the Six Dynasties period. In this regard, Lai disagrees with Rolf Stein, who feels that between religious Daoism's (i.e., the Celestial Master Sect's) own practices and those of Chinese popular cults "there was not a difference of nature, but only of degree; not of quality but only of quantity."2

Although Lai knows very well that the Celestial Master Sect in the Later Han was influenced by contemporary religious beliefs and practices, he claims that by the Six Dynasties period Celestial Master Daoism in the South had vindicated itself, as can be verified by its scriptures composed in this period, such as the "Inner explications on the doctrine of Three Heavens" (Santian neijie jing) and "Scripture of divine words" (Shenzhou...

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