De Jiao - A Religious Movement in Contemporary China and Overseas: Purple Qi from the East

CONCLUSION

208 Conclusion 208 CONCLUSION D e Jiao is one of the Asian new religious movements (NRMs) which formed part of the escalation in religious innovation following the Second World War. Although it was originally a local reaction by Teochew mediums to the occupation of China by Japan, De Jiao rapidly took another dimension, the turning point being the Communist takeover of China in 1949, and the subsequent repression of cults which compelled some of its instigators and adherents to flee to Hong Kong and to migrate to Southeast Asia. Although through the impetus of Ma Gui-De an embryonic doctrine had been promulgated in 1942, it is overseas, into the cosmopolitan contexts of Hong Kong and Singapore, that De Jiao definitively transformed from its humble status of “Society for the recitation of sutra” or of an association named after the minor Taoist gods it worshipped to become a syncretistic religious movement uniting tens of congregations through a common set of values and emblems. After 1949, Ma Gui-De, Li Huai-De, and their fellows added to the De Jiao Xin Dian a basic creed of five tenets, a corpus of ten virtues, and eight rules which the followers should observe. A flag and an anthem, symbols of collective identity, were also devised, and at that time they tried to make their religious movement accessible to a larger audience through the publication of its earliest miraculous achievements (cf. the Bamboo Bridge Collection) or through articles which traced its beginnings to the origins of Chinese civilization. The inevitable culture shock resulting from the emigration overseas of Ma Gui-De and his associates, and the necessity for them to adapt to the host societies, partly explain such a change of orientation and scope. In this new environment, their early motivations against the spread of secular materialism in post-imperial China became reinforced. Their attitude in the face of westernization then took two forms: a conservative reaction advocating more radically than before the return to a society dominated by Confucian ethics; and an attempt to appropriate, at least symbolically, the major religions of the west. By incorporating Jesus Christ and Prophet Muhammad into the de de she, but under the supreme Conclusion 209 authority of the Jade Emperor, they tried to compensate for the immersion of a majority of followers into ideological universes dominated by Christian or Muslim values. The fact that their experience of social uprooting and cultural shock was shared by most of the Teochew immigrants in Southeast Asia, channelled to the movement thousands of people of different age groups and social conditions who were searching for meaningful and efficient links with an idealized Chinese civilization that the divine “society of virtue” apotheosized. After its resettling in Southeast Asia, De Jiao became a movement of uprooted Chinese whose projective quest for identity was exacerbated accordingly. Spirit-writing as a core activity of the movement responded to this sharpened quest by reconnecting the adepts’ identity to multisecular symbols of authority and centrality. Thus, against acculturation and endangered family structures, the divine teachings profess moral revival as a basic requirement for individual salvation, social order, and cultural unity. Moreover, by resorting to the notion of “son [daughter] of affinity”, fu ji oracles substitute metaphorical kinship with gods for loosened genealogic links. More precisely, the notion of “fate affinity” between certain followers and the “honourable masters” anchors their personal identities into a spiritual line of descent incorporating the forefathers and preceptors of Chinese civilization. In this respect, it overcomes the weakening, overseas, of lineage membership and ancestor worship. The fact that the de de she incorporates Teochew Buddhist saints or Taoist masters such as Song Da-Feng, Song Chan, or He Ye-Yun also substantiates the thesis that, overseas, one of the implicit functions of De Jiao spirit-writing is to entertain meaningful and effective links between practitioners and these two major levels of identification that are the homeland and within it the dialectal place of origin. With regard to the reformulation of individual identity, another important function of spirit-writing consists in incorporating, through divine appointments, the followers into the celestial bureaucracy whose Jade Emperor is the supreme ruler. The outcomes of this symbolical incorporation are threefold. Migrants living on the fringe of the Chinese world are thus directly connected to its mythical centre of power. Although most overseas practitioners are poorly educated in Chinese, thanks to proficient mediums they believe to be acknowledged by gods...