The ongoing nature of divine revelation in China has produced a bewildering array of texts and sects emanating from a variety of gods. This work aims to navigate the nature of change in these texts over the course of a millennium by demonstrating how revelation in the form of spirit-writing emerged from the milieu of earlier practices and how it evolved into pervasive forms and ideas that can be seen across the Chinese world today. Ambitious in scope, the book tells this story by drawing on a wide range of texts with a focus on revelation narratives, revealed texts and liturgical documents. In broad terms, it is the story of a general trend in the direction from divine agency to human agency, from unpredictable events to regular ritual, from secret to public, and, in some ways, from individual to universal concerns. The challenge is that the appearance of spirit writing in Chinese religious practice led to the ready production of revealed texts, perhaps almost print-ready. To trace the evolution of texts produced in such great volume over so long a period, this book examines variations in process, message and reception to demonstrate how any particular text might draw on past precedent and present possibilities for the future.
In order to trace this change over so many centuries, the book first sets out a brief typology of divine presence, the ongoing application of which allows the identification of inflections in the trajectory of Chinese religious change. To get to the book's proper starting point of around 1000, it then traces the history of revelation from the Han dynasty up until the start of the Song, starting with the earliest Daoist revelations and moving through the contributions of Buddhism after its arrival in China. Building on an earlier study, the author constructs a typology of revelations by examining representative examples from this early period belonging to various traditions. The author puts forward five ideal types of revelation: sutra type, an ahistorical text preached in cosmic time; encounter type, a text revealed in this world by a deity to one or more people with the circumstances and the time described; possession type, produced through the pronouncements of a possessed medium; visualization type, involving precise techniques with internalized results; and presence type, produced through ritual in which the process is controlled by qualified religious practitioners. Among other differences, the author notes: “The first three types emphasize divine agency in the revelation; the last two emphasize human agency”. Crucially, this difference in agency distinguishes possession and presence types from each other: both involve the use of a medium, but the presence type of revelation – of which the prime example is spirit-writing – is defined as produced by humans through a regular ritual format.
The appearance of the new presence types of revelation is placed in the tenth century with the daofa practised by fashi. The work outlines how fashi obtained their texts through encounters with the divine, but once obtained, these texts regularized their engagement with gods through a dependably efficacious ritual with the potential for an audience of followers. The scene having now been set, the book outlines the rise of the innovation of spirit-writing across China from the eleventh through fourteenth centuries by examining the content and context of ritual, as well as the performers of this ritual and the gods in question. With this form of revelation came the jitan or “altar”, an ongoing grouping of adherents for the performance of the relevant rituals. For the period 1000–1400, the number of texts remains relatively small and they still exist within a broader “ecology of revelation” alongside the more dominant encounter and sutra types. But major change comes with “the late Ming turn” when the Wanli period (1573–1620) saw the sudden appearance of large numbers of spirit-written texts. After the liturgical methods of fashi priests were widely adopted in simplified form, altars produced an array of scriptures, liturgies, morality texts and instructions. These works were generally directed towards a universal audience and jitan groups published them to benefit the world and gain merit for themselves.
The book explains that the expansion in the publication of spirit-written revelations leads to production of canons and to the canonization of the gods concerned in the period from 1700 to 1858. These published canons reflect the growing doctrinal complexity of the products of spirit writing. The final section of the book examines the impact of the period of the Taiping War. Spirit writing materials now addressed divine intervention in conflict, morality and self-cultivation, and these ideas merged with sectarian eschatology and millenarianism. This led to what the author terms “hybrid eschatologies”, ultimately producing the redemptive societies of the twentieth century and the teachings which have remained so widespread until today.
In focusing on spirit writing as a religious innovation, the author acknowledges but does not engage in discussions of the economic, cultural and material changes that may have contributed to its rise, or of the significance for it of the nature of Chinese script and its role in Chinese tradition. Furthermore, in combining a large swathe of primary and secondary materials dating across many centuries into a meaningful narrative of change, the author readily anticipates the obvious reservations. Due to the ambitious scope of this relatively short work and to the nature of evidence available, not all avenues are adequately explored, some evidence remains suggestive rather than conclusive, and many gaps remain to be filled. The last chapter in particular – on the revelatory outcomes of the Taiping War period – covers such a broad range of under-researched material that it appears as a thin catalogue of rich possibility. But a reader familiar with any particular instance of revelation will be able to consider where that instance might slot into the flow of change using the models presented here and cast it profitably against the rich array of evidence so ably presented.
