4 - Divination

Summary

There is no general term in Chinese that describes the class of all the divinatory methods I shall discuss; rather there are separate verbs and objects for nearly every sort. They seem to naturally fall together, however, because they resemble each other in a vague way, and are characterized by an overlapping series of traits: they are efforts to obtain information about the past, present, or future, with regard to one's self or others, by recourse to experts with superior or specialized knowledge or to handbooks containing such knowledge. For reasons of space, rather than principle, I will not include a detailed examination of efforts to obtain medical advice from Chinese-style or western-style doctors.

My first task is to separate divinatory acts that involve interpersonal transactions from those that involve causal or other connections. One set of divinatorymethods should be described as interpersonal in the sense that they are explicitly understood as efforts to communicate with the gods. Another set of methods do not involve forms of communication between sentient beings as a central feature: instead they are concerned with understanding forces and processes that operate in the world. I will begin by describing a range of practices I witnessed in northern Taiwan that are communicative acts and then move to a range of practices that are not, introducing descriptions of these practices from elsewhere in China in a limited way.