Ritual and Scripture in Chinese Popular Religion: Five Studies ed. by David Johnson (review)

Book Review Book Review Ritual and Scripture in Chinese Popular Religion: Five Studies. Edited by David Johnson. Publications of the Chinese Popular Culture Project 3. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies Publications, 1995. 26S+xv pp. Glossary- Index. The papers in this important and long-awaited volume were originally presented at a 1990 conference organized by the Chinese Popular Culture Project at the University of California at Berkeley, and this book is further testimony to the importance of that project for the China field as a whole. CHINOPERL members will be particularly interested in this volume, because of the inseparability of oral performance and religious practice in Chinese culture. The authors of these five studies are Robert L. Chard ("Rituals and Scriptures of the Stove Cult"), David Johnson ("Mu-lien in Pao-chiian*: The Performance Context and Religious Meaning of the Yu-ming Paoch 'uan "), Patricia Ebrey ("The Liturgies for Sacrifices to Ancestors in Successive Versions of the Family Rituals"), Ursula-Angelika Cedzich ("The cult of the Wu-t'unglWu-hsien in History and Fiction: The Religious Roots of The Journey to the South"), and Chinfa Lien ("Language Adaptation in Taoist Liturgical Texts"). A brief introduction by David Johnson relates the papers to each other and to the title of the volume, and extracts two major themes that run through all of them: the "never-ending literati campaign to reform the religious practices and beliefs of ordinary people," and the "characteristically Chinese blurring of the line dividing religion and entertainment" (p.xi). This book makes very little reference to the theoretical issues raised by scholars of Chinese religion like Catherine Bell, but I will suggest below that the historical focus Johnson notes in these essays makes a different but no less important contribution. Chard's study of the cult of the Stove God summarizes in straightforward, readable fashion the findings of his dissertation "Master of the Family: History and Development of the Chinese Cult of the Stove" (1990). Chard analyzes the two main manifestations of the cult, namely the lively, fairly irreverent annual send-off of the god whose report to the Jade Thearch is a China-wide feature of the New Year's celebration; and a tradition of Stove God scriptures whose didactic tone and prescriptions for continual reverence bespeak a more elite or clerical (in any case, more rule- •. Since Ritual and Scripture does use Wade-Giles romanization throughout, I have used the same system throughout this review. 105 CIllNOPERL Papers No. 19 giving) perspective. The scriptures are so different in emphasis from the annual popular celebration that they cannot be assumed to have been the vehicle for the spread of the New Year's customs, and Chard's suggestion that the popular cult spread instead via printed images of the god is one of the most provocative fmdings of his research. David Johnson, who also edited Ritual Opera: Operatic Ritual: "Mu-lien Rescues His Mother" in Chinese Popular Culture(1989), has made in that work and others a very important contribution in emphasizing the role of spectacle (exemplified by opera) in Chinese religious practice. Here he turns to the way narrative pao-chiian _~ use the Mu-lien 13i!l! material to do subtly different cultural work. His study is divided into two parts. First is a broad look at the performance context of pao-chuan, a capacious term for "prosimetric narratives intended for non-elite audiences, of substantial length, and with pronounced religious or ethical themes" (p.S7). (He excludes from analysis the sectarian pao-chuan treated extensively by Daniel Overmyer elsewhere.) Second is a discussion of Mulien chiu.. mu pao-ch'uan §j11j(aJf~ [The Precious Tradition of Mulien Rescuing His Mother in Hell]. Striking differences are found between Mu-lien operas and the Tang dynasty pien-wen~)( version of the story, with the operas representing a numinous experience of meaning, and the Tang dynasty pien-wen a discursive dimension that allows for a didacticism not present in the operas. Ebrey's contribution is a valuable complement to her Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China: A Social History of Writing About Rites (1991). Here she describes in detail the ideal funeral liturgy prescribed by...