Chinese Popular Religion

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In a great many Chinese houses there stood, until very recently, a shelf or a small table against the north wall, bearing the spirit tablets of the family dead, a censer for incense, and perhaps a printed image of a god. This shelf is the smallest unit of a religion that has no name of its own. It has no founder, no governing church, no creed to recite and no roll of members, and most of the people who tended such an altar would not have called what they did a religion at all. It was simply what one did — for the ancestors, for the gods of the place, for the unsettled dead — at the turning of the seasons and the turning points of a life.

Chinese popular religion is the diffuse, largely unorganized religious life of much of the Chinese world: the worship of ancestors and of a crowded pantheon of gods, ghosts, and immortals, conducted through household altars, village temples, festivals, divination, and the geomantic art of fengshui. The sociologist C. K. Yang gave the field its enduring frame. In Religion in Chinese Society (1961) he distinguished institutional religion — possessed of its own theology, clergy, scriptures, and congregations, set apart as a thing in itself, as Buddhism and organized Taoism are — from diffused religion, which has no separate organization at all but is woven into the secular institutions of family, village, guild, and state, drawing its life from them and lending them a sacred sanction in return. The ancestral rites belong to the family; the cult of the City God belonged to the magistrate’s office; the harvest sacrifice belonged to the agricultural year. Religion here is not a department of life but a dimension of every department of it. Yang’s distinction remains the standard point of departure, and it explains why a thing so pervasive could pass without a name: a religion diffused through everything is nowhere a separate institution one might join or leave.

The three teachings as resources

Its materials are drawn from everywhere. The reverence owed to the dead, and the ordering of obligations within the family, come largely from the Confucian tradition — the duty of filial piety extended past death into the lifelong care of the ancestors, with the family’s continuity guaranteed by sons who would keep the rites in their turn. The celestial bureaucracy of gods, the rites of exorcism, and the ideal of the deathless immortal come from Daoism, whose ordained priests were the specialists called to renew a community’s covenant with the high gods. The salvation of the dead, the accounting of merit and the workings of rebirth, and the great midsummer festival for the hungry ghosts come from Buddhism, which gave the afterlife its courts, its purgatories, and its means of release.

These were never held apart as rival faiths. The old formula that China had “three teachings” — sanjiao, naming Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism — treated them less as competing churches than as a single repertoire, drawn on for different occasions and by different specialists. A funeral might call for a Buddhist monk to chant the dead through the courts of the underworld and a Daoist priest to perform the rites of release, while the family’s own observance through the mourning years was Confucian to the bone. The three furnished a shared vocabulary of gods, ghosts, ancestors, merit, and cosmic order; popular religion is what speakers made of that vocabulary in the ordinary work of living and dying. To ask whether a given household was “really” Buddhist or Daoist is to misread the grammar. It drew on all three because all three were there to be drawn on.

The celestial bureaucracy

The gods were imagined on the model of imperial government, and the resemblance was exact rather than approximate. Heaven was an administration. Deities held office; they received written petitions and reports; they were appointed, promoted, demoted, transferred, and at the year’s end audited, exactly as a living magistrate was. A god could be appealed to as one appealed to an official — with a correctly worded request, the right intermediaries, and an offering that functioned at once as honor and as the oil of administration. A god who failed to deliver might have his statue reproached, his temple let fall into disrepair, or his case carried over his head to a superior power, for the bureaucracy ran upward without limit.

Above the local gods presided the high celestial sovereign, the Jade Emperor, who held court over the spirit-world as the human emperor held court over the realm. Beneath him the apparatus reached down through ranks of officials to the smallest locality: the City God, a magistrate of the unseen with jurisdiction over a single walled town, before whom the dead of the district were brought to account; the god of the local earth, ruling a neighborhood or a field; and the Stove God, who sat in the kitchen of every household through the year as a kind of resident inspector and, in the last days before the New Year, ascended to report to Heaven on the conduct of the family — a domestic audit that the household met with sweet offerings smeared on his image, in the hope of a favorable account. Alongside these officeholders ranged a vast company of locally venerated heroes, deified worthies, ancestors raised to the standing of gods, the deathless immortals of Daoist cultivation, and at the bottom the gui — the ghosts, the dead with no descendants to feed them, hungry and dangerous, the strangers and the wronged. Gods, ghosts, and ancestors form the three great classes of the unseen, and the anthropologist Arthur Wolf showed that they mirror the social world precisely: the gods are the officials, the ancestors are one’s own kin, and the ghosts are the strangers and outsiders — the beggars and bandits — of the world beyond.

The grammar of exchange

Worship aimed at concrete goods, and was unembarrassed about it. The petitioner came for health, for the birth of sons, for rain in a dry season, for safe passage on a journey, for success in the examinations on which a family’s fortunes might turn, for a cure, for a marriage, for the settling of a debt. Its central instruments were the offering and the burnt sacrifice — food set before the gods and the ancestors and afterward eaten by the living, so that the meal was shared across the boundary of the seen; the burning of incense, whose rising smoke both honored the spirit and carried the supplicant’s presence upward; and the burning of spirit money, sheets of paper printed or foiled as currency and dispatched by fire to the dead and the gods, whose world ran on a treasury and an economy of its own. The dead needed funds in the courts below as the living needed them in the courts above; fire was the channel between the ledgers.

To learn the disposition of the unseen, the petitioner turned to divination. The crescent-shaped moon blocks were cast before an altar to put a yes-or-no question to a god and read the answer in how they fell; numbered lots were shaken from a cylinder until one sprang out, its number matched to a printed oracle-poem to be interpreted, often by the temple keeper; and where a more direct word was wanted, a spirit medium might be consulted, a man or woman through whom a god was held to speak or to write characters in a tray of sand. This whole apparatus of reading the will of the unseen belongs to the broader human art of divination — the wager that the world is legible, that its hidden order leaves signs a trained reader can take. The point throughout was not belief in the abstract but a working relationship: the gods and the dead were parties one dealt with, and dealing well meant knowing the forms.

A coherent system, not a survival

Western scholarship long struggled to fit this into its categories. Missionaries and early ethnographers, looking for a creed, a clergy, and a church and finding none, debated whether so loose a thing should be called a religion at all, or demoted it to folk practice, mere custom, or — the word that did the most damage — superstition. The disparagement obscured what the more recent study of Chinese religion has recovered: that this is a coherent system on its own terms, organized less by doctrine and assent than by ritual obligation and by the placing of human dealings within an unseen order that mirrors the visible one. It has its own logic, its own specialists, its own calendar, and its own theology of office, merit, and exchange; it simply does not store these in a separate institution labeled “religion.” Recent scholars describe it less as a set of beliefs than as a repertoire of things people do — making offerings, keeping festivals, consulting the gods, tending the dead — modalities of practice that cut clean across the boundary lines of the three teachings.

What this looks like in a single house is the whole tradition in miniature. The ancestral tablets stand on the family shelf and receive their offerings of food and incense at the proper days. Spirit money is folded and burned to a Daoist deity in the temple down the lane, in payment of a vow made when a child was sick. When the grandfather dies, a Buddhist monk is paid to chant him through the underworld and shorten his passage. None of this is felt as inconsistency, because the household is not choosing among faiths. It is meeting different obligations with the appropriate means, drawing on Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist resources as the occasion calls for each. What unifies it is not doctrine but a shared grammar of exchange between the living, the dead, and the gods — kept up, season by season, in the ordinary work of remembering and giving.

Scholarship and the study of a diffused tradition

The modern study of Chinese popular religion turns on the categories used to grasp something that resists the Western template of the bounded, creedal faith. The founding move is C. K. Yang’s Religion in Chinese Society: A Study of Contemporary Social Functions of Religion and Some of Their Historical Factors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), whose twelfth chapter, “Diffused and Institutional Religion in Chinese Society,” supplied the distinction that organizes the field; the volume and chapter remain in print and cataloged through the press (De Gruyter / University of California Press). A concise and widely assigned synthesis is Stephen F. Teiser’s introductory essay “The Spirits of Chinese Religion,” prefacing Donald S. Lopez Jr., ed., Religions of China in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), which reframes Chinese religion away from the tidy “three teachings” schema toward the lived interplay of gods, ghosts, and ancestors; the introduction is hosted in full text by Princeton University Press at assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i5804.pdf.

The bureaucratic and social anatomy of the pantheon was given its classic statement in Arthur P. Wolf’s essay “Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors,” in Wolf, ed., Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), which argued that the three classes of the unseen reproduce the structure of the living social world. The salvation of the dead and the great festival of the seventh lunar month received their definitive treatment in Stephen F. Teiser’s The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), a study of the yulanpen rite and the Buddhist economy of merit by which the living relieve their ancestors in the courts below (Princeton University Press). For the structure of practice itself, Adam Yuet Chau’s “Modalities of Doing Religion,” in David A. Palmer, Glenn Shive, and Philip L. Wickeri, eds., Chinese Religious Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), proposes five “modalities” — discursive, personal-cultivational, liturgical, immediate-practical, and relational — that cut across the named traditions and describe what people actually do (Oxford Academic). The broad modern history of how China renegotiated the very category of “religion,” within which diffused household practice, organized Daoism, and the salvationist redemptive societies are carefully distinguished, is Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer’s The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

The early documentary record runs through the great missionary and colonial-era ethnographers, who must be read with their framings in view: J. J. M. de Groot’s six-volume The Religious System of China (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1892–1910), an irreplaceable field record of southern Chinese funerary, divinatory, and exorcistic ritual built around the now-abandoned theory of “Universism,” and Henri Doré’s Recherches sur les superstitions en Chine (Shanghai: Imprimerie de la Mission Catholique, 1911–1938), a vast Jesuit catalog of the popular pantheon whose very title carries the disparagement the field has since set aside. The classical-language sources on which the whole edifice rests — the ritual canon of the Confucian classics, the liturgical and revealed scriptures of the Daoist canon, the sutras and merit-tracts of Chinese Buddhism — are surveyed in their public-domain English forms in James Legge’s The Texts of Tâoism (Sacred Books of the East 39 and 40, Oxford: Clarendon, 1891) and his renderings of the Confucian classics. The codification of the Daoist canon into the Three Caverns by Lu Xiujing, the monastic discipline of the Quanzhen order, the ritual machinery of communal offering, and the Buddhism that reached the Korean kingdom of Silla and met, on the trade roads, even Manichaeism in its Chinese diaspora all open into this same diffused field of everyday devotion, where the gods of office, the fed ancestors, and the hungry dead share one household’s care.

→ In the library: Legge — The Texts of Tâoism (SBE 39 & 40, 1891)

→ Related: Divination · Buddhism · Confucianism · Taoism · Quanzhen · China · Immortality · Incense · Ritual · Exorcism · Lu Xiujing · Central Asian Chinese Manichaeism · Korean Silla Buddhism