Ghost Heroes

Chu’s boundaries in 260 BCE. Credit: Philg88.

Last Saturday was Duanwu Festival, the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. The festival has ancient roots in early summer ceremonies to protect against plague, and also ceremonies to propitiate river spirits. It is most often associated now, however, with the poet Qu Yuan who lived in the state of Chu, and who committed suicide in 257 BCE when Chu was conquered by Qin. This conquest was a significant battle in the first unification of China, which led to rule by an Emperor rather than a feudal over-King. The name “China” actually comes from Qin. Here is one of Qu Yuan’s poems, the “Elegy for the National Martyrs” from the Songs of Chu, as quoted in Deng Ming-Dao’s The Lunar Tao:

They gripped the halberds of Wu, wore rhinoceros-hide armor.
Chariot hub crashed, short swords clashed.
Banners blotted out the sun, their foes charged like clouds.
Volleys of arrows answered each other, warriors vied to be first.

The enemy broke their ranks, trampled their lines.
The horse on the left died, the one on the right was slashed.
Chariot wheels seized in the dust, teams of horses fell tangled.
Raising jade drumsticks, they shouted and beat their drums.

Yet heaven’s season was against them, the powerful gods were angry!
Our staunchest men were slaughtered, left scattered on the field.
They went out, did not come back, will never return.
The plains lie empty, the roads stretch on.

They buckled on their long swords, raised their Qin bows.
Although their heads were hacked from their bodies, their hearts held no regret.
They were truly brave, such great warriors.
Strong and powerful to the end, they were never cowed.

Their bodies may be dead, but their spirits have become gods.
Their souls are transformed, they are our ghost heroes! (152)

Today is the thirteenth day of the fifth lunar month, Guan Di’s birthday as a mortal [EDIT: festival, one of several throughout the year. Attributed by some sources as (one of) his birthday(s), celebrated by others as his son Guan Ping’s birthday or the day that he sharpened his blade — see comments below].

I’m posting this poem on this blog in his honor as well, for the last two stanzas apply to his life and apotheosis perfectly.

Romance of Three Kingdoms: Guan Yu

Guan Yu Mural at Summer Palace, Beijing. Credit: Shizhao.

San Guo Yan Yi (三国演义, Romance of the Three Kingdoms) is one of China’s Four Great Classical Novels. It is a historical novel dealing with the Three Kingdoms period (220-280 CE) and is based upon Chen Shou’s Records of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguozhi, 三国志), which was written in the late 3rd Century CE.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms is traditionally said to have been authored by Luo Guanzhong. Brian May, Takako Tomoda and Michael Wang question this attribution in an essay on the physician Hua Tuo (who is featured as a character in the novel):

Little is known about Luo but he appears to have been a poet and recluse who lived during the last years of the Yuan [Mongol] dynasty. He was probably born between 1315 and 1318 and was still alive in 1364. One source suggests that he was involved in anti-Yuan rebellions in south China but retired to write an unofficial history (Roberts 1995).

Although Luo is given as the author, he could not have written the version of the Romance that we have today. The earliest extant version of the Romance is prefaced 1494 and the earliest edition is dated 1522. However, modern versions are based on the Mao edition that appeared in the mid 1660s (Roberts 1995).

Consequently, the Romance must be considered a product of the Ming Dynasty that is based on earlier historical and popular works that may included one by Luo. Even though the Romance is the least reliable source for the Hua Tuo story, the popularity of this novel makes it the most influential. (2-3)

Though May, Tomoda and Wang are writing about Hua Tuo, the last sentence can be applied with equal accuracy to Guan Yu (the historical figure later deified as Guan Di).

Obviously, as a historical novel written over a millennium after the events it covers, the Romance cannot be considered a reliable historical source for the Three Kingdoms period: that would be Chen Shou’s work. On the other hand, it does provide some insight into the popular stories being told during the time period in which it was written.

As Sannion at The House of Vines wrote recently, there are many different types of “religious literature.” To use his examples, the Romance should be seen as closer in intent to the writings attributed to Homer than those attributed to Orpheus. The analogy doesn’t hold up under closer scrutiny, of course, since the Romance is actually a novel taking great liberties with the writings of a historian (Sannion’s first category, for which he provides Diodorus Sikeliotes as an example).

In “From History to Fiction: The Popular Image of Kuan¹ Yu,” Winston L.Y. Yang argues that with regards to the character of Guan Yu, the Romance actually “adhered fairly closely” to the source material:

Many episodes historically unfounded and obviously created by Luo Guanzhong or borrowed from popular legends have led scholars to believe that Guan has been portrayed in the novel essentially as a man of dignity, righteousness, extreme nobility, and superhuman bravery. […]

Roy Andrew Miller believes that the fictional Guan Yu has completely replaced the historical one in the Chinese imagination. But there are many other episodes in the novel which show that Luo has adhered fairly closely to the image of Guan projected by Chen Shou in his official history. (71)

After providing some examples of negative traits that Chen Shou attributes to Guan Yu that also find their way into the novel, Yang argues that the Romance was not intended as a hagiography (which it wasn’t, as far as I can tell); however, Yang goes on to say that any and all stories about Guan’s deification were merely a “concession to popular taste” (79).

It should be understood, however, that Luo, influenced by popular literature and writing at a time when Guan had already become an object of national veneration and worship, could not but take the national sentiment into consideration and accord the hero all the glorification which has been heaped upon him in popular legends and myths.

Thus, Luo has created numerous details pertaining to Guan’s extraordinary bravery, loyalty, and nobility of character, in line with the popular image of the hero. But only occasionally does he make Guan appear a saint or god, as demanded by the popular beliefs of his time. Yet, on the other hand, Luo follows closely the official history of the San Guo period, San Guo Zhi, his most important source. (78-9)

Yang’s argument here is highly debatable (he confuses “deification” with “portrayal as a perfect human being,” when the two are not the same thing), but that is not the point of this post, which is instead to present precisely those stories about Guan’s apotheosis. Without further caveat or disclaimer, then…

Guan Di Statue at Jinguashi, Taiwan. Credit: Fred Hsu.

The following quotations are from the highly abridged version of Moss Roberts’s translation. Guan Yu is executed by the ruler of Wu, Sun Quan. Later, at a banquet, Sun Quan presents his general Lü Meng with a cup of wine:

Sun Quan personally poured the ceremonial wine and presented it to Lü Meng. Receiving it, Lü was about to drink when he dashed the cup to the ground and seized Sun Quan with one hand. “Blue-eyed boy!² Red-whiskered rodent! Have you forgotten me? Or not?” The assemblage was aghast.

As someone moved to stop him, Meng knocked Sun Quan to the ground and with long strides came to the throne and seated himself upon it. His eyebrows arched vertically, his eyes grew round and prominent as he bellowed: “I have crisscrossed the empire for thirty-odd years since defeating the Yellow Scarves, only to have your treacherous trap sprung on me. But if I have failed to taste your flesh in life, I shall give your soul no peace in death—for I am Lord Guan Yü, master of the Han Shou district!”

Fear-stricken, Sun Quan led the assemblage in offering obeisance. Lü Meng collapsed on the ground, blood ran out of his seven orifices, and he died. There was general terror, and thereafter Sun Quan was tormented with fear over the execution of Lord Guan. (244)

Possession and death by bleeding from one’s orifices are also featured in the Guan Di World-Subduing, Eternally-Effective, Disaster-Relieving Prayer.

Sun Quan then sends Guan’s severed head to Cao Cao, ruler of Wei, in an attempt to shift blame for Guan’s execution to Cao Cao:

The wooden box was presented. Cao Cao opened it and saw Lord Guan’s face, just as it had been in life. Cao smiled. “You have been well, I trust, general, since we parted?”³ Before Cao could finish, the mouth opened, the eyes moved, and the hair and beard stood up like quills. Cao fell in a faint, reviving only after a long spell. He said to his officers: “General Guan is no mortal.”

The messenger from the South told him how Lord Guan’s powers had entered into Lü Meng and reviled Sun Quan. This increased Cao’s fear. He adopted Sima Yi’s advice and buried the head and a wooden corpse with full royal honors outside the south gate of Lo Yang. All the officers and officials were told to tend the body, while Cao personally made offerings. (246)

These particular stories might be nowhere to be found in Chen Shou’s Records of the Three Kingdoms, but they do give us an idea of Ming Dynasty-era stories being told about the power of the god Guan Di.

Endnotes:

¹All subsequent Chinese transliterations have been rendered in Pinyin rather than Wade-Giles.

²The word used is bi 碧, which means “emerald” and can signify either blue or green. Chen Shou’s Records of the Three Kingdoms reports that Sun Quan’s eyes were said to be jing guang 精光. 光 means “light.” 精 is a word that can mean “energy” or “spirit” (in the sense of energy, not of a ghost) or “semen,” but originally meant “crystal.” See this post for more on jing.

Chen Shou says nothing about Sun Quan’s hair. Another translation of this passage (Yang 74) translates “You green-eyed boy! You purple-bearded rat!” It is also worth noting that Guan Yu’s liege lord is described as having arms that reach past his knees and earlobes that reach his shoulders…

³A line Cao Cao had used before to convince Guan Yu to spare his life; Cao Cao had once taken Guan Yu prisoner and spared him, and this line was used to remind Guan Yu of that fact.

Guan Di, Hero and Guardian

Guan Di Shrine, Manhattan

Prasenjit Duara’s 1988 article “Superscribing Symbols: The Myth of Guandi, Chinese God of War,” published in The Journal of Asian Studies, provides an overview of the different myths told about the Guan Di over the course of more than a thousand years, as well as a theory to explain how the differences in these myths co-exist:

Myths are simultaneously continuous and discontinuous. I explore this relationship by examining the myth of Guandi through a concept that I call the “superscription of symbols.” […]

Is Guandi the protector of the Buddhist faith or a Chinese god of war? Whether we speak of them as conceptions of the spirit world or as embodiment of this-wordly interests, the two visions seem to have very little in common. (778-9)

Guan Yu was a historical figure in the late Han dynasty:

Guan Yu’s biography appears in the Sanguozhi (History of the three kingdoms), written by Chen Shou about sixty years after Guan Yu’s death (Chen 1973, 36:939-42). Chen Shou […] writes of Guan Yu’s friendship and devotion to Liu Bei of the royal house of the later Han.

Together with the butcher Zhang Fei, the two friends took the famous “Oath of the Peach Orchard” binding them to protect one another until death. Still later Guan Yu became a general and a governor of a province. Even though he was tempted by the enemy of his lord, Cao Cao, with a marquisate, Guan Yu remained faithful to his oath. In 220 A.D. He was captured by the enemy and put to death. (780)

His spirit appeared as an apparition to a Buddhist monk in the 6th Century CE:

One of the earliest miracle stories about Guan Yu is derived from a temple stele of 820 A.D. Erected when the Yuquan temple in Dangyang County in modern Hubei was reconstructed. Here, in the vicinity of Yuquan mountain, Guan Yu was decapitated during the long battle he fought against the enemies of his lord, Liu Bei.

One still night, when the Buddhist monk Zhi Yi (A.D. 538-97) was deep in meditation under a great tree on the mountain, the silence was suddenly filled by a booming voice: “Return me my head.” When the monk looked up he saw the ghostly apparition of a figure whom he recognized as Guan Yu, the spirit of the mountain.

An exchange followed between the two in which the monk reminded Guan Yu of the severed heads of Guan Yu’s own victims. Deeply impressed by the logic of karmic retribution, the spirit of Guan Yu sought instruction in the Buddhist faith from the monk, built a monastery for him, and began to guard the mountain. Later the mountain people built a temple to Guan Yu where they offered sacrifices at the beginning of each new season. (779)

This temple was built in 713 CE, and was affiliated with the nearby Buddhist monastery:

The earliest temple dedicated to Guan Yu is the Yuquan temple in Dangyang County in Hubei, where he is said to have been killed. This temple was established in 713 A.D. And was attached to the Buddhist monastery on Yuquan mountain. Over the next two hundred years […] his role as the Chinese protector of Buddhist temples (in place of the Indian devas) spread rapidly throughout the empire (Inoue 1941, no. 1:48).

Thus did Buddhism also become sinicized […] One may pause to consider the true direction of the acculturation process: did the Buddhists convert Guan Yu, or did he in fact make them a little more authentically Chinese? (781)

This question is an important one to consider, especially in light of subsequent “superscriptions” to the story of Guan Yu.

Buddhist Guan Di statue, City of 10,000 Buddhas.

For example, the Daoists quickly responded by claiming Guan Yu as one of their own:

It did not take long for Daoist temples also to adopt him as their protector god […] In Xiezhou in Shanxi, where Guan Yu was born, there is a famous lake called Salt Lake. In the Song a Daoist temple was established to Guan Yu at Salt Lake. According to the founding myth, a temple to the legendary Yellow Emperor had originally been built by the lake. However, soon afterward a demon who turned out to be Chi You, leader of the Miao tribes defeated by the Yellow Emperor, began to menace the area.

The Daoist Master Zhang was instructed by the imperial court to find a way to put an end to this desecration of imperial honor. The Master invoked the assistance of Guan Yu, who dispatched shadow (yin) soldiers to fight and vanquish Chi You. The temple was founded in order to thank Guan Yu and commemorate the event.

The founding myth of the Guan Yu temple at Salt Lake has all the ingredients of a Daoist legitimating myth: it draws on a potentially significant element of the story of Guan Yu—his birthplace—and combines it with the sacred geography and ancient history of China; with this as background, it identifies the imperial court as the patron of the Daoists who have successfully invoked the spirit of Guan Yu to restore the imperial honor. (781)

Later, Guan Yu gained both popular worship and imperial patronage (in 1615, he received the imperial title di). Duara devotes an entire section to “The Guandi Myth and the Imperial State,” but I’m going to skip that (for now) to focus on Guandi’s popularity among the populace:

It is well known that the spread of the worship of Guan Yu as a folk deity beyond the confines of sectarian religion was communicated in the vernacular novels and plays of the Song-Yuan transition. […]

Huang Huajie links Guan Yu’s growing popularity in the Ming (1368-1644) and the Qing (1644-1911) to the great socioeconomic changes of the era, which of course also enabled the popular media to spread. As the rural economy became increasingly commercialized, self-sufficient kin-based communities tended to disintegrate. In their place, settlements came to be composed of unrelated kin groups, merchants for whom sojourning had become a way of life, and marginal peoples without a community, such as vagrants and bandits.

None of these new groups was able to use bonds of kinship or community to hold the settlements together. As a symbol of loyalty and guardianship, the image of Guan Yu inspired an ethic of trust and camaraderie to hold together “a society of strangers.” (781-2)

Among both merchants and villagers, Guan Di was worshiped as a Wealth God. Like Zhao Gong Ming (whose worship seems to be linked to Guan Di’s), he was considered a military wealth god rather than a civilian one (789).

Guan Di Temple, Reunion Island (Indian Ocean).

Among the bandits and secret societies, Guan Di’s association with oaths became paramount:

For the rootless bandits and rebels of secret societies, the oath of loyalty that Guan Yu upheld gained an unparalleled salience. All rites and ceremonies among the Triads, for instance, including those performed at the initiation of recruits and the punishment of traitors, took place before the altars of Guan Yu and the founders of the secret society. (782)

I discussed the complicated alliance and falling out between the Triads and the Christian-influenced Taiping Rebels in a previous post. Huang Huajie notes the Triads and other secret societies also fought against the Taipings on behalf of the hated Qing Dynasty, and theorizes on how this unlikely alliance came about:

Rural elites, led by the gentry, which mobilized the resistance and ultimately defeated the Taipings, were able to draw antistate secret society members into their local armies. Although monetary inducements were doubtless important in attracting the secret societies, Huang Huajie (1968:230) believes that the appeal to the image of Guandi was more significant. […]

For them, the oath symbolized loyalty to brotherhood, not to the state that had been their enemy. Yet under circumstances when it could be demonstrated that Chinese civilization itself was under attack by the foreign-inspired Taipings, the identification of Guandi with the nation and Chinese civilization, shaped to a great extent by the imperial state and the elites, could be mobilized in defense of the imperial order. After all, had Guandi not defended the house of Han from the rebellious Yellow Turbans? (789-90)

Speaking of Guan Di’s role in the suppression of the Daoist Yellow Turban revolt, I initially was hesitant about worshiping Guan Di for exactly that reason. However, I realized that the ability to be worshiped by diametrically opposed sectors of society and hold space for these contradictions–as long as his worshipers conduct themselves with honor and loyalty–is intrinsic to Guan Di’s widespread popularity.

This realization of mine fits in well with Duara’s thesis of the “superscription of symbols.” Duara recognizes that across all of these differing conceptions of Guan Di, two things remain constant:

[…] If a myth represents radically discontinuous meanings, if its symbols are pursued by particular groups only for their own particular purposes, how can it continue to impart legitimacy so widely across the culture?

On closer examination the two visions of the same figure have at least two common features: the apotheosization of a hero and his role as guardian.

This commonality is hardly accidental or insignificant. It is what gives the myth its legitimating power and gives historical groups a sense of identity as they undergo changes. (779)

Eight Immortals

Cao Guojiu

One of the Chinese gods that the atheists in Wisconsin claimed was “dead” was “Royal Uncle Cao,” also known as Cao Guojiu. Cao Guojiu, however, is still worshiped in China.

Cao Guojiu is one of the Eight Immortals (Ba Xian), who were all originally humans that attained immortality. In his The Lunar Tao: Meditations in Harmony with the Seasons, Deng Ming-Dao explains who Cao Guojiu is:

[…] an old, bearded man dressed in royal robes and carrying a pair of clappers [castanets]. The younger brother of the mother of a Song emperor, he was ashamed of how the nobility killed the common people so lightly and so often. Disillusioned, he retreated to a mountain cave to practice Taoist austerities. (322)

Elsewhere, Deng says that in addition to castanets, Cao Guojiu is sometimes depicted holding “plaques required for admission to court,” and that he “represents the nobility” (124). But back to the story: Cao eventually met two of the other Immortals (Han Zhongli and Lu Dongbin), who tested him by asking where Heaven was. Cao pointed at his own heart, whereupon the two Immortals invited him to join them.

Note for those planning to include Cao Guojiu in their rituals: I haven’t found any liturgy yet, but I’ll keep on looking.

Temple of the Eight Immortals, Xian.

Temples

One famous temple to the Eight Immortals is located in Xian, the capital of Shaanxi Province (and an old imperial capital as well). It is said to be the largest Daoist temple in the city of Xian today. A temple/monastery was first built in the Song Dynasty, but most of the buildings there today were built during the Qing Dynasty.

Historical sidenote: in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, when foreign forces invaded Beijing, the imperial family fled to Xian and took refuge at the Monastery of the Eight Immortals.

There is also a famous temple in Penglai, Shandong Province. “Penglai” (蓬莱) is both the name of an actual city, and of a mythical island in the ocean where the Eight Immortals live. The city of Penglai is said to be the location where the Eight Immortals “got drunk” and began floating across the ocean, presumably on their way to the island of Penglai.

Temple of the Eight Immortals, Penglai. Credit: Two Otters.

Deng Ming-Dao on Apotheosis

Deng Ming-Dao’s book has a page for each day of the lunar year. On Cao Guojiu’s birthday, the 2nd day of the 10th moon, his meditations were upon apotheosis and “gods once human” (322). Some of his thoughts are especially pertinent to the discussion around atheism and proselytizing (emphasis is mine):

Perhaps this is just a macro- and communal extension of ancestor worship. Perhaps it happens because seeing how people become holy encourages us to believe that there are higher levels to human existence.

Cynics will say that this only proves that religion is fantasy, and a use of myth to shape societal attitudes. Others may object to the idea that humans can become gods: they want gods who are supreme […]

In general, the Chinese and Taoist attitude is not to proselytize. If you’re curious about the gods and temples, people will happily invite you in. If you’re not interested, people will hardly thrust pamphlets in your face or invade your house with their gods. So the right way to understand the gods is simply to meet them and see if their stories resonate with you. If they do, then you’ve gained something, as you would from any other happy encounter with another.

Review of a Review: Chinggis Khan and his Biographer

Chinggis Khan Mausoleum, Ordos City, Inner Mongolia. Built 1956.

British historian and travel writer John Man published Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection in 2004. I’d originally intended to post excerpts from Chapter 15 (“The Making of a Demi-God”)–specifically those passages that deal with the complex interactions between the Mongolians and the Chinese when it comes to veneration of Chinggis Khan–but I was distracted by certain critiques of the book.

Dr. Alicia J. Campi, who holds a PhD in Mongolian Studies and used to work as an adviser for the U.S. State Department, published a review of Man’s book in December 2005/January 2006 issue of the Taiwanese government’s Bi-monthly Journal on Mongolian and Tibetan Current Situation.

I decided to use this blog post to draw attention to Campi’s relatively obscure review instead of quoting from Man’s book, which is is widely available.

Campi’s criticisms of Man’s book are numerous, and range from what she considers annoying hyperbole and “pseudo-psychological comments”  to more serious accusations of factual inaccuracy and presenting other people’s theories without attribution (73).

Regarding historical detail, she points out a few glaring mistakes:

Man mistakenly identifies Jurchen tribes as nomads like the Mongols, and does not explain well the Jurchen (Jin Dynasty) conflicts with the Khitans (Liao Dynasty). He thinks the Great Wall was built in its present form during the pre-Jin period. (72)

I’m not sure where exactly in the book Man suggests that he thinks the Great Wall was fully built before the Mongol invasion, but if so, it is a major error (as the Wall in its current iconic form was a Ming Dynasty project).

Chinggis Khan Statue, at his Mausoleum.

Campi further criticizes Man’s seeming lack of knowledge about present-day Mongolia:

Man’s limited knowledge of contemporary Mongolia is very evident. For example, he writes that one-half of the population of Ulaanbaatar lives in gers on the outskirts of the city (pg. 365), when by all credible calculations this percentage is closer to 10-15%. (77)

She is also annoyed at the book’s inconsistency in transliterating Mongolian and Chinese words into the Latin alphabet, which she attributes to Man’s lack of familiarity with those languages:

Man’s text includes a mish mash of transliteration of names and spelling, which is not unusual for a person unfamiliar with Mongolian and Chinese. However, one wonders why he did not give the text to Mongolists such as Charles Bawden and Igor de Rachewiltz, whom he thanks in his ‘Acknowledgements,’ to assist him with standardization. […]

The lack of a book editor who is familiar with Chinese and Mongolian languages is evident by the example of Man transliterating Ejen Khoroo as ‘Edsen’ Khoroo and moving back and forth haphazardly from Wade Giles to Pinyin transcription systems. (66-7)

Campi is highly skeptical of one of Man’s central theses, namely that the veneration of Chinggis Khan is a “religion in the making” (Man 370):

I am not certain that most Mongolists and Sinologists would interpret the rites to Chinggis that are practiced at the shrine in Ejen Khoroo as real religious worship. Man does not explain how such rites are different from traditional Chinese ancestor ‘worship’, if in fact they are.

Since Man’s credentials as a Chinese historian are weak, it may be that his lack of experience with traditional Chinese and Asian respect or veneration for dead spirits leads him to false conclusions. Or, it may be that he has captured a special different quality about the rites to Chinggis that are in fact more religious (68)

While I disagree with Campi’s assertion that traditional ancestor veneration is not “real religious worship,” she is right to draw attention to Man’s seeming lack of understanding of Asian religion:

In trying to explain the rites the author falls into all sorts of pecular [a]llusions to other religious practices which in fact not only do not explain the Chinggis rituals but insult them. His prejudicial comparisons are often made to various Christian customs. […] Banners inside the main temple are compared to “rather tatty Christmas decorations.” (pg. 305)

The weirdest analogy is Man’s claim that at Ejen Khoroo the ceremonies to Chinggis represented “a sort of Mongolian Trinity, with God the Father, Son and Holy [Spirit] mirrored by Blue Heaven, Genghis and [yak-tailed] Standard.” (pg. 314) ( 69-70)

Chinggis Khan Portrait, 14th Century

Campi concludes that Man should have severely limited the scope of his book:

Man should have stuck with what he does best – write travel books. His foray into biographical writing sows confusion and distortion. Yet because he includes some very interesting travel accounts in the text, his book cannot be completely dismissed by serious Mongolian researchers. (78)

In that spirit, however, I’d like to present some of Man’s travel writing, in particular his retelling of stories he heard from Mongolians about the power of Genghis Khan’s spirit:

The Darkhat Guriljab recalled in 1993: “All those who offended against Genghis Khan and were activists in damaging the Mausoleum during the Cultural Revolution are now dead. They were all about my age. I saw them die one after another. They all died abnormal deaths.

One suffered a kind of stroke. He couldn’t move for eight or ten years before his death. Another one, his head swelled up three times the size of his normal head, and he died. Yes, this is retribution.

Our former banner magistrate, he was the leader of this rebel team. Later he was accused of being a member of the Inner Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, and he was beaten and killed by a long nail being driven into his head. His wife and daughter died, and his son has gone mad. Another one…he fell into a manure pit and drowned.”

Everyone has their own stories proving Genghis’s power. A group of soldiers break a taboo by killing two snakes in the Mausoleum; their car crashes, killing six. A young man gets drunk at a liquor ceremony, and urinates against a wall; that night his wife dies. A ceremony was omitted in error after the Cultural Revolution; sheep fall ill and die. Such stories carry a message: Have respect! Take care! Genghis is as powerful in death as in life! (316-7)

Those are definitely some cool stories!

Horses outside Chinggis Khan’s Mausoleum

Link: Precious Scroll of Heavenly Grace

Mazu temple procession, April 20, 2013, Taipei. Credit: Katherine Alexander.

I’ve had this a link to this blog since the middle of summer, but I revisited it today, and realized that the blog came to its natural conclusion over a month ago. It was written by a Ph.D. student, Katherine Alexander, who just spent a year studying at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy in Taipei, Taiwan.

My specific interest in the blog, unsurprisingly, was in the posts tagged “Chinese religion.” There’s a good mix of first-hand observation of Taiwanese rituals and academic research. Some highlights include:

• A post about an online database of haunted construction sites (so that prospective home-buyers can avoid those locations)

• A two-part series about Mazu: Part 1 has some videos and photos of an April 20th, 2013 procession through the streets with firecrackers galore, Part 2 has information about the history of Mazu’s worship. My favorite new story:
  

  [I]n the 1600s, the pirate lord Zheng Chenggong (鄭成功) (aka Koxinga) was said to have established a famous (but no longer extant) Matsu temple on the spot where his forces landed in Tainan before they successfully defeated the Dutch settlers and took Taiwan for Zheng’s own pirate base (and stronghold of resistance to the Qing).

  Katherine also cites Stephen Sangren’s statement from the 1980s that “Taipei is particularly unsuitable as a center for ritual expression of Taiwanese identity,” leading her to observe that “In the 1980s, pilgrimage to visit Peikang’s Matsu was a statement of Taiwanese identity (defined as the Taiwanese speakers whose ancestors had arrived from China long ago, rather than in the 20th century).” There’s some context required for both quotes, so you should read the entire paragraph, as well as the one following it.

  

  Tu Di Gong new shrine ceremony, May 31, 2013, Taipei. Credit: Katherine Alexander.

• A series about the relocation of a local earth god (Tu Di Gong) into a newly constructed shrine. The story begins in February with the sudden demolition of the old shrine, progresses through the new shrine’s construction in the spring, and ends with a first-hand account (complete with more photos and videos) of the May 31st, 2013 ceremony to welcome Tu Di Gong to his new home.

• One of Katherine’s research topics at the Academia Sinica: namely, a baojuan (precious scroll) dating from 1855. It is, of course, easiest to just quote her explanation of her own object of study:
  

  Pan Gong Baojuan 潘公寶卷, presents Pan Zengyi, a philanthropist from the Jiangnan region who lived from 1792-1853, as a powerful deity. He appears in dreams after his death and warns residents of Nanjing of the disaster that awaits them in the imminent attack by Taiping armies.

  The scroll was first published in 1855. Pan Zengyi died two years before that, in 1853. The Taiping Rebellion took over Nanjing in March of the same year. The significance?

  When people told each other stories about Pan Gong appearing in their dreams, when they donated money for the printing and reprinting of this baojuan, the conclusion had not yet been written to the war – there was no guarantee that the Qing would regain control. There was no lens of official interpretation, but there was religion.

  Pretty interesting how quickly a mortal could be deified in 1800s China, and how rapidly religion can respond to current events.

Criminal Gods

Temple to the Eighteen Lords

Sannion wrote an excellent essay on Hellenic hero cultus at Witches & Pagans yesterday. Among many other things (including oral traditions and the solidarity of the theater), he discussed how hero cultus was extremely localized and focused on the tomb of the deceased, and how “most of them were right bastards in life and after it — murderers, thieves, rapists and lunatics.”

There are some fascinating parallels between these last two facets of Hellenic hero cultus and the deification of unknown ghosts in Taiwan. Robert P. Weller’s 1995 essay “Matricidal Magistrates and Gambling Gods: Weak States and Strong Spirits in China” deals with departures from (and reversals of) the normal conception of Chinese gods as heavenly bureaucrats.

Weller focuses on two case studies: one from Guangxi in the 1840s, and the other from northern Taiwan in the 1980s. Here is the story from Taiwan. It starts with seventeen corpses and a living dog on a boat:

Perhaps a century ago, or perhaps much longer (no one really knows), a fishing boat washed up on the shore at the northernmost tip of Taiwan. The local people had no idea who the seventeen corpses on the boat might be, nor how the dog that accompanied them had remained alive. They followed the usual tradition when one stumbles across bodies or unknown bones in Taiwan: they buried the men in a common grave and erected a tiny shrine so that people might make occasional offerings to these otherwise unworshipped and pitiful spirits.

The only odd bit of the story concerned the dog, whose unbreakable loyalty to his masters caused him to leap into the grave along with the bodies, to be buried alive by the villagers. The dog was the eighteenth of what the local people politely (and euphemistically) named the Eighteen Lords (Shiba Wanggong). (116)

The shrine is forced to defend itself in the 1970s:

The little shrine followed the fate of most such ghost temples, gradually deteriorating over the years, and receiving only occasional worship. By the 1960s, it was little more than a vague mound with a gravestone and an incense pot, occasionally worshipped [sic] by a bored soldier standing coastal sentry duty.

A decade later, however, its transformation commenced. Taiwan began to build its first nuclear power plant not far away, and the little grave was slated for destruction as the bulldozers strengthened the cliffs along the shore. When a number of accidents began occurring on the site, some of the workers began to worry about ghosts. Their fears were confirmed one day when a backhoe, poised to tear up the Eighteen Lords’ grave, suddenly froze and defeated all attempts at repair.

At this point, workers and local inhabitants mobilized in defense of the shrine. The government finally gave in, agreeing to ‘respect local customs’ and to recreate the shrine at the new, higher ground level. (116-7)

At this point, things really begin to take off:

Not only had the previously forgotten shrine brought the state itself to do its bidding, it had done so in front of an audience of workers from all over Taiwan. Community and worker pressure pushed planners to make the newly rebuilt temple larger and fancier than any ghost temple previously built in Taiwan.

Within a few years it rivalled [sic] the island’s most important god temples in popularity, attracting thousands of people every night, and thoroughly tying up traffic on the coastal road for hours. While ghosts have been transformed into gods by worshippers in the past, these eighteen continued to celebrate their ghostliness on a grander scale than ever before […] (117)

Bronze Dog

The elements of worship were completely unconventional:

Even though half of the new temple had god images of the Eighteen Lords, the main centre of worship remained the grave mound and two larger-than-life bronze statues of the dog that flanked it. The dogs themselves attracted the most attention, as members of the invariably raucous crowd would stroke them and empower amulets by rubbing them over the dogs. Worship peaked in the small hours of the morning (the yin, ghostly time) instead of the daylight of the yang gods.

Even more unusual, the original grave had been preserved as an underground room, directly below the replica with its dog statues. Those who knew about the basement room would go down there […] To top it off, people would offer a burning cigarette rather than sticks of incense in the pot. Worshipping underground and late at night, fondling a bronze dog, and offering cigarettes in lieu of incense, the cult of the Eighteen Lords turned bureaucratic god worship on its head. (117)

Weller then delves into the temple’s connections with the criminal underworld:

Ghost will do anything in exchange for worship – unlike proper bureaucratic [deities], who will not deal with improper requests. Ghost shrines have the reputation of pandering especially to those who cannot go to the official-like gods, like gangsters, gamblers and prostitutes. The Eighteen Lords played up to this reputation. […]

Visitors are always warned about pickpockets […] Relations with the Eighteen Lords have resembled contracts with mobsters more than the respectful petitions to the proper gods. The Eighteen Lords would do anything at all, but punishment for not paying them was quick and dire. […]

Many of the requests of the Eighteen Lords concerned profit (to which even the stuffiest gods have no objection in China), but especially profit from gambling on an illegal lottery, or a killing from the stock-market craze that swept Taiwan in those years, or from less than strictly respectable business practices. (117-8)

Weller lists several other ghost shrines in Taiwan, including several that are dedicated to outlaw folk heroes:

[One popular spirit] during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan […] was Liao Tianding, a sort of Robin Hood. He was murdered in his sleep by a brother-in-law who wanted the reward on his head. A similar shrine honours a mainland soldier who turned to bank robbery, supposedly to support a friend’s child. He was shot by firing squad. (118)

Weller goes on to analyze the historical context of Taiwan in the 1980s: capitalism’s “breakdown of communal ties” (120) and a secular state that had “had undermined its claims about ultimate values [by simultaneously proclaiming freedom of religion and championing rationalism], leaving a void that religion has stepped in to fill” (121).

Weber observes that “capricious deities matched the capricious nature of profit itself” (120), while their association with outlaw elements reflects the “collapse of political control over religion” (121). One can see certain similarities in the cult of Santa Muerte, which the Vatican recently declared blasphemous, or the cult of the Santos Malandros (Holy Thugs) in Venezuela, which is part of the María Lionza religion. Their leader, Ismael Sánchez, was active in the 1960s and 70s and “would supposedly steal truckloads of meat or flour and then distribute the goods among his neighbours in a poor area of Caracas.”

Cementerio General del Sur, Caracas, Credit: Santiago Stelley

It is not only criminals who worship these saints: “Even though their devotees have been often stigmatised as thieves and prostitutes, the reality is that more and more ordinary Venezuelans have turned to these peculiar saints to ask for protection.”

Weller makes a similar observation about the Eighteen Lords: “So many people went that they could not all be underworld figures, but clearly people found a thrill in going to a temple that claimed this element of disreputability [sic] and danger” (117). I’m not including them in my worship because of the Lords’ extremely localized nature, but if I ever travel to Taiwan for some reason I’ll make sure to visit their temple.

Mazu: The Story of Lin Mo Niang

Mazu Statue at Meizhou Bay, Putian, Fujian Province

Today, the 23rd day of the 3rd lunar month, is Mazu’s birthday. I wrote about her on this blog’s first real post.

Laura Zinck wrote an essay, “Inquiry Report on the Chinese Goddesses Hsi Wang Mu and Ma-tsu,” which summarizes much of the Western academic research about both Xi Wang Mu and Mazu.

Regarding Mazu, Zinck tells us that “Her legend of origin tells of a young woman called Lin Mo Niang from a family involved in trade who lived on the island of Meizhou circa 980 C.E”

Zinck relates that Lin Mo Niang was a very unique young woman, and at least certain stories tie her to Buddhism:

She was particularly devoted to the Buddhist deity Guanyin and, following her example, refused to marry, which was a very unusual resolution for a young Chinese woman.”

The main story about her is as follows:

Lin Mo Niang went into a trance during a storm and used her spiritual powers to save three of her four brothers from being lost at sea; she was roused from her trance before she could save the fourth brother (Irwin, 1990). She died soon afterwards (Maspero, 1981).

Zinck summarizes a theory put forth by Lee Irwin that Lin Mo Niang was a “shamaness” of sorts:

Irwin (1990) believes that Lin Mo Niang may have been a shamaness whose fame outlived her; knowledge of distant events through trance and supernatural abilities were associated with shamanism in China.

There is also an interesting observation about what usually happened to an unmarried woman when she died, and how Lin Mo Niang avoided that fate:

Jordan Paper (1989) notes that as an unmarried female, the Lin Mo Niang would have been especially prone to becoming a ghost rather than an ancestral spirit, because she has no one to sacrifice to her. Because of her benevolent spiritual powers, however, she was worshiped as the patron goddess of sailors and seafarers under the name of “Ma Tsu,” or “Grandmother” (Paper, 1989).

Her unmarried status has some obvious potential social ramifications with regards to women’s status and roles:

It is also significant that Ma-tsu refused to marry but was still praised and revered as a goddess; like Hsi Wang Mu, Ma-tsu provided her female worshipers with an alternative model to the traditional roles of women as filial daughters, obedient wives, and self-sacrificing mothers.

Mazu Enthroned

Zinck also presents Lin Mei-Rong’s thesis, which deals with the question posed in my last post about Mazu about whether or not it mattered that her worship was being co-opted by political vultures:

Mei-Rong Lin (1996) argues that Ma-tsu will never become accepted as the “national” deity of either Taiwan or China because her worship is based at the local level; Ma-tsu cults in neighbouring areas frequently disagree on such issues as pilgrimage routes, historical precedence, and orthodoxy.

However, her intimate ties at the local level with her worshipers makes her more approachable than many other deities, and thus more popular (Paper, 1989).

So according to Lin, the co-optation doesn’t matter that much because of the exceedingly local nature of her worship–what Zinck describes as “intimate.”

In fact, early in the essay, Zinck lists all of the titles in the divine hierarchy that Mazu received by imperial decree, and says that these decrees partially “civilized and assimilated [her] into the patriarchal social and political culture.” Which is to say, it’s been attempted before.

However, writes Zinck, “In spite of this […] the true power of Ma-tsu lies in her popular worship, which continues to flourish to this day.”

Of course, at the same time that she is a deity with great local variation, she is also international in scope. My previous post about Mazu quoted an estimate of 160 million worshipers in China. According to the Confucius Institute Online, “The belief in Mazu has become a sort of transnational folk belief with more than 200 million worshippers.”

That’s at least 40 million overseas Chinese who worship her. Deng Ming Dao explains the connection: “When emigrants left China by sea, they prayed to Mother Ancestor for protection. Once in their new homes, they gave offerings and erected temples to her in gratitude for their safe passage” (98).

One more story about Mazu is quite interesting. This one comes from Wikipedia, which is…far from a reliable source. It cites Klaas Ruitenbeek’s article “Mazu, the Patroness of Sailors, in Chinese Pictorial Art,” but since I haven’t verified what Ruitenbeek actually wrote.

Mazu is usually depicted together with two guardian generals known as “Thousand Miles Eye” (千里眼, Qianli Yan) and “With-the-Wind Ear” (順風耳 Shunfeng Er). Though their iconography can vary, both are usually represented as demons; “Thousand Miles Eye” is often red with two horns, while “With-the-Wind Ear” is green with one horn.

They are said to have been two demons whom Mazu conquered. The both of them were in love with her, but she said she would marry the one who defeated her. Using her martial arts skills, Mazu defeated them both and they became her friends.

The two guardian generals are definitely often present accompanying Mazu, but I’ll have to do some research to corroborate the backstory at some point. So it’s a “maybe” for now. If it is true, however, this tale both reinforces the fact that she refused marriage, and also portrays her as something of warrior goddess. “They became her friends” sounds like Wikipedia writing, though.

Zhao Gongming, A Wealth God

Zhao Gong Ming Statue, 1482

ADDENDUM: The Chinese Gods of Wealth website is insistent that the most common Chinese God of Wealth, the one who holds the appelation of “Cai Shen,” is Cai Bo Xing Jun (财帛星君), who was a magistrate of the Northern Wei Dynasty named Li Gui Zu (李诡祖). That website identifies Zhao Gong Ming as one of the five wealth gods corresponding to the cardinal directions, with Zhao Gong Ming occupying the Central direction.

The website says that while the 5th day of the 1st lunar month is a day to pray to all wealth gods, the 15th of the 3rd lunar month is the specific celebration date for Zhao Gong Ming. Zhao Gong Ming is also considered the “Military God of Wealth,” as opposed to several deities who are Civil Gods of Wealth (including Cai Bo Xing Jun, Bi Gan, and Fan Li).

I just San Francisco’s Chinatown, and I did indeed see separate statues for Cai Shen and Zhao Gongming, so I think that the Encyclopædia Brittanica is mistaken.

Original Post: One of a number of Chinese gods known to bestow wealth is Cai Shen (財神 – literally, “wealth god”). As discussed with Tu Di Gong, this title appears to be a position in the celestial hierarchy that can be filled by different individuals. The Encyclopædia Brittanica entry on Cai Shen lists two possible occupants of the position, and tells a very interesting story about the first:

The Ming-dynasty novel Fengshen Yanyi relates that when a hermit, Zhao Gongming, employed magic to support the collapsing Shang dynasty (12th century bce), Jiang Ziya, a supporter of the subsequent Zhou-dynasty clan, made a straw effigy of Zhao and, after 20 days of incantations, shot an arrow made of peach-tree wood through the heart of the image. At that moment Zhao became ill and died.

Later, during a visit to the temple of Yuan Shi, Jiang was rebuked for causing the death of a virtuous man. He carried the corpse, as ordered, into the temple, apologized for his misdeed, extolled Zhao’s virtues, and in the name of that god canonized Zhao as Caishen, god of wealth, and proclaimed him president of the Ministry of Wealth. (Some accounts reverse the dynastic loyalties of Zhao and Jiang.)

Another account identifies Caishen as Bi Gan, put to death by order of Zhou Xin, the last Shang emperor, who was enraged that a relative should criticize his dissolute life. Zhou is said to have exclaimed that he now had a chance to verify the rumour that every sage has seven openings in his heart.

There are a few things to consider aside from the fascinating example of Chinese malevolent sorcery/curses (it’s quite a process!). For one, both stories would place the origin of the wealth god(s) at the end of the Shang dynasty, over 3000 years ago.

For another, the dynastic loyalties are ultimately not that important. I don’t know what accounts reverse their loyalties, Jiang Ziya is the main character in Fengshen Yanyi and is clearly against the Shang Dynasty and in favor of the Zhou. However, the story of Zhao Gong Ming suggests that even if one is on the wrong side of the “Mandate of Heaven,” one deserves respect for one’s virtue and integrity.

What has always struck me about this story, though, is that Zhao Gong Ming is described as a “hermit.” That seems to be almost the opposite of a god of worldly wealth, and yet that’s what he ends up becoming

Then again, as the novel describes literally scene after scene of magical warfare, it seems like one had to be a practitioner of sorcery to be a character worth mentioning in the story, and recluses in the mountains would be the typical possessors of those skills.

Furthermore, a total of 365 gods are appointed from the slain at the end of the novel, so at that point there were probably bound to be some matches that didn’t make the most apparent sense.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the statue shown above resides, discusses the origin of Zhao Gong Ming: “The figure probably represents the Heavenly Marshal Zhao (Zhao Gong Ming), a popular local god of wealth who was absorbed into the Daoist pantheon.” Notice that they translate “Gong Ming” as a title: I’m not sure if this is the only way to understand the name, but I will look into it.

Another thing the MMA’s short description brought up was the thought that probably all gods began as local gods, even if they arose in the context of a centralized empire and their cultus rapidly spread throughout that empire. It may be a little redundant to draw attention to this fact, if that is indeed the case, but it hadn’t really crossed my mind previously.

Wan Pin Pin’s 1987 dissertation on Investiture of the Gods says that the novel may have been written in the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) rather than the Ming and by a different author than traditionally assumed (2-3). Be that as it may, the part of the dissertation that concerns me right now is the appendix, where Wan provides a chapter-by-chapter summary.

First, it must be noted that in the opening chapter of the novel, the king blasphemes Nu Wa while in her temple, she divines that his dynasty was already predestined to fall in 28 years, and she sends a fox demon and two other demons to “seduce him and confuse his mind, but not harm the people” (437).

Chapter 46 is where Zhao Gong Ming makes his entrance, as he is recruited to the cause of the Shang Dynasty. On his way to the battlefield, “Zhao subdued a black tiger and rode it” (480). Many contemporary statues of Zhao Gong Ming depict him riding a tiger:

Zhao Gong Ming seated on tiger

Chapter 47’s summary describes Zhao Gong Ming using a “magic whip” as well as a magic “Sea Pacifying Pearl” (480); according to a different but less reliable source, his weapon is a “lightning staff” and he possesses 24 of the pearls, which force “all foes present to their knees in blindness.” At one point, he loses both the whip (staff) and the pearl(s) as a result of running afoul of “two Taoists playing chess [or Go, weiqi in Chinese]” (481).

He then has to borrow the “Dragon Scissors” from his sisters, which “were transformed from two dragons and had the power to cut any immortal body into pieces” (481) That’s when Jiang Ziya, with the aid of another hermit named Lu Ya, uses magic to kill Zhao Gong Ming:

A Taoist Lu Ya came to visit, saying that he came to subdue Zhao Gong ming. He told Ziya to build an altar and bond a straw man with Zhao’s name written on it. He wrote charms on a book and set one lamp on the head of the straw man and one at the end of his feet. Ziya chanted the spell and exercised the magic accordingly. After three days or so, Zhao became restless and uneasy. […] After Ziya had exercised his magic for twenty days, Lu Ya came to see him. Lu brought with him a small peach wood bow and three peach-wood arrows; he told Ziya to use it at noon on the twenty-first day. When the time came, Ziya first shot at the left eye of the straw man, then the right eye, and finally at the heart. In Wen’s camp Zhao died at noon, with blood flowing from his two eyes and heart. (481)

Zhao Gong Ming’s sisters, whom he borrowed the Dragon Scissors from, are described as “fairies” and they set out to avenge his death, but prove unsuccessful as Laozi himself intervenes (482).

In Chapter 99, Jiang Ziya and the new Zhou Dynasty have won the war, and Yuan Shi decrees that 365 gods would be “canonized” from the “souls and spirits” of the slain, divided into “eight departments,” each one “in charge of one aspect of the human world” (516). Wan’s summary doesn’t mention Zhao Gong Ming by name, but presumably the novel does at this point. This scene is also where the title of the novel comes from.

Yuan Shi, or Yuan Shi Tian Zun, is one of the “Three Pure Ones” or supreme deities of Daoism. Deng Ming-Dao, in The Lunar Tao, translates his name as “Heavenly Lord of the Primal Origin” and describes how “he set the stars and planets into motion and was the main god until he retired and the Jade Emperor […] became the celestial ruler” (12). Deng Ming-Dao also says that Yuan Shi is ” a personification of […] the abstract notion of an impersonal and mysterious beginning to all things” (12).

The Lunar Tao also contains a photograph of the Changchun Temple in Wuhan, where Guan Gong, Zhao Gong Ming and Bi Gan stand side-by-side on an altar to the Gods of Wealth (9), thus proving that the Encyclopædia Brittanica is correct to identify both Zhao Gong Ming and Bi Gan as gods of wealth, but hasty in implying that one or the other must be “Cai Shen.” Deng Ming-Dao states plainly, “there are several different gods of wealth” (9).

He also reminds us:

The God of Wealth doesn’t merely dole out riches. While people make offerings to him in their homes, and businesspeople keep him in their stores, everyone still has to work. Great wealth is earned.

To be wealthy, we have to work hard and we have to be smart. The God of Wealth may accept the offerings on the altar, inhale the incense, and thrill to the firecrackers, but the real offering he requires is hard work. (9)

Hard work can apply to many different paths, from a reclusive hermit practicing sorcery in the mountains, to a warrior defending what they believe in, to a homesteader creating true wealth by working with the land.

Disclaimer on Apotheosis and Ancestor Veneration

A lot of my posts have been tagged apotheosis. I write about the ascension of mortals to godhood because I find it theologically interesting, not because it is my ambition.

Ancestor veneration is the foundation of my religious practice, but I’ve avoided writing about it because it’s highly personal. Becoming an ancestral spirit in the afterlife is good enough for me though.

Ancestors must have descendants. It would be nice if my descendants did not live in a worse version of the alienated dystopia we live in today, but that is unlikely to be the case except in the event of a general “uncovering” (or in ancient Greek, ἀποκάλυψις – apocálypsis). What form that will take, only the gods know.