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The Word of Life house church movement is considered to be one of the most influential Christian movements in China for the past three decades, with its network touching all 23 provinces and autonomous zones in China. It is also one of the largest house church networks that emerged in central China in the past three decades. This paper gears at investigating the inner dynamics that has underscored the growth and vitality of the movement by incorporating some insights from studies on historical Christian renewal movements. A variety of categories or models are employed, such as paradigm shifts, the role of key leaders, its basic structure, system of training, community, gospel for the poor, dynamic and vitality, through which the WOL movement is closely examined. Hopefully, this paper opens a window of understanding of the Word of Life movement and yields some insights that may be referenced in the larger hermeneutical community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the Compassion Relief Foundation, a charity organisation originating from Taiwan, and tries to understand how it has managed to provide relief to victims of natural disasters for more than ten years in nineteen provinces, autonomous regions, and special municipalities of the People's Republic of China, despite the vicissitudes of cross-Straits relations and amidst recent bouts of religious persecution. The essay starts with an introduction to Compassion Relief: it presents its history as a charity organization, and then situates its activities in the PRC within the context of tense relations between China and Taiwan, as well as economic reforms in the PRC. The paper then questions three hypotheses advanced to explain the acceptance of Compassion Relief's activities by the Chinese government. It discusses the view that such approval results from political calculations directed at Taiwanese; the argument that it heralds change in the Chinese state's approach towards the social role of religion; and the claim that it signals the emergence of an autonomous civil society free of government interference. The essay expresses reservations about these views and concludes that the activities of Compassion Relief in the PRC rather suggests the existence of a symbiotic relationship between society and state officials at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of proselytism as an active practice of shaping other people's identities. Specifically, it looks at the identity discourse promoted by ethnic Chinese evangelicals and compares it to that of Jehovah's Witnesses. Both Christian churches proselytise among contemporary transnational migrants from the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Europe, each making use of a sophisticated organisation adapted to the transnational practices of these migrants. Yet while evangelicals promote a transnational ethnic identity quite compatible with the secular discourse of the global Chinese migrant, Jehovah's Witnesses promote an anti-secular, non-ethnic cosmopolitanism. As a result, global Chinese evangelical ties more easily become part of global migratory and business networks. The paper is based on fieldwork among Chinese evangelical organisations and Jehovah's Witnesses in Italy, Hungary, Russia, and the United Kingdom, supplemented with interviews in the United States (the headquarters of many Chinese evangelical organisations) and a survey of printed and online resources used in proselytising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hair embroidery was a particular technique practiced by lay Buddhist women to create devotional images. The embroiderers used their own hair as threads and applied them on silk to stitch figures. This paper will analyze the religious connotation of hair embroidery, the ritual process and the techniques for making hair embroidery in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. By tracing its appearance in both literary texts and actual surviving objects, this essay will ask how and in what circumstances human hair was applied to embroidery? What was the significance of transferring one's own hair onto an icon? How did hair embroidery combine women's bodies (their hair) with a womanly skill (embroidery) to make a unique gendered practice in late imperial China? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The present study addressed two related problems: The status of the concept of the soul in folk psychological conceptualizations across cultures, and the nature of mind-body dualism within Chinese folk psychology. We compared folk intuitions about three concepts – mind, body, and soul – among adults from China (N=257) and Poland (N=225). The questionnaire study comprised of questions about the functional and ontological nature of the three entities. The results show that the mind and soul are conceptualized differently in the two countries: The Chinese appear to think of the soul similarly to how they view the mind (importantly, they still seem to see it as separate from the body), while Poles differentiate it both in ontological and functional respects. The study provides important insights into cross-cultural differences in conceptualizing the soul as well as into the nature of Chinese mind-body dualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rightly noting that premodern non-Western cultures lacked a version of the modern Western category of “the religious,” some scholars have proposed simply abandoning it. Meanwhile, other scholars continue to wield it uncritically. In this article I propose a middle way, using premodern China as an example. Although China had no category exactly matching “the religious” in meaning and scope, it did, I argue, have an analogous category, one that functioned somewhat similarly in a partially analogous discourse that, like the Western category, formed part of an imperial project. More generally, I suggest that we do well to inquire into the extent to which the cultures we study possessed analogues to the categories and concepts in terms of which we characterize them, rather than assume either that they did or that they did not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last several decades, there has been a voluminous amount of scholarly literature about the transformation of women and gender, as well as about the reconstruction of Chinese religions in the context of twentieth-century Chinese modernity. The relationship and intersection of these two separated fields, however, remain uncharted territory. This essay is an introduction to three studies which address this lacuna. It places these writings in the existing scholarship on themes related to women, gender, and religion, and outlines the various ways in which they bring together the two hitherto disconnected facets of academic research on women and religion in the study of modern China, with a focus on the period from the 1900s to 1950s. Together they highlight the gender dynamics of the twentieth-century construction of Chinese religions, and forge new gendered understandings of Chinese modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of T'oung Pao is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article argues that the relative absence and trivialization of female diviners apparent in medieval Chinese texts does not accurately reflect the presence of these figures in medieval Chinese society. It further contends that this dearth in representation is the direct result of a more comprehensive and sustained annihilation or marginalization of women in third- through ninth-century Chinese texts. Narrative accounts and the institutional perspectives on divination informing them are critically analyzed and compared to help de-trivialize the roles that female diviners played in medieval China. Comparative theories of divination will be considered to help expand the scope of our inquiry beyond activities explicitly identified as such, and the geographical, social, and practical variety one finds in medieval depictions of female diviners will be used as evidence of a much wider and more pervasive social presence than one finds today in received medieval records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study analyses religious and technological changes that occurred during the last seventy years of the Ming dynasty (1574-1644) around the Hedong Salt Lake, situated south of Yuncheng City in southern Shanxi province. Based on a close reading of inscriptions found on stone steles at the Temple of the God of the Salt Lake and of different kinds of gazetteers, the article documents the processes and analyses the factors that shaped the expanding pantheon of local salt-production-related deities during this period. I argue that these religious changes need to be understood in the context of a wider sociotechnical system around the Salt Lake, especially the emergence of new salt production methods that were introduced at this time under the increasingly affirmative leadership of local salt merchants, as well as the changing conditions of local labour management. The larger methodological point the article makes is about the necessity to take stone steles themselves in their spatial and material dimensions as evidence of historical processes: this will allow us to see that by means of these steles and their inscriptions the temple became an architectural discursive space that facilitated new forms of social participation and of administrative intervention, while offering simultaneously a nexus between the sphere of human intervention and the relevant 'natural' factors of the salt production at the Salt Lake. Accordingly, the article proposes novel ways to understand the role of religious institutions such as temples in their relation to 'natural' and 'technological' processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pioneering historical comparison between Soviet Central Asia and socialist Mongolia in the last decades of socialism, this article aims to assess the role of international factors and regional geopolitics in the policies of socialist states towards religious institutions and communities. It also traces long-term socio-cultural transformations of Muslim and Buddhist communities in comparative perspective, and questions how individuals and groups responded to anti-religious social campaigns, adapted to newly introduced institutions and reframed their religious identities throughout. The research is based on archival and oral-history data, while reflections upon the concepts of secularity and religion assist in working out a critical approach to the sources. The article raises the complex question of fading religiosity in the religious rites and ceremonies which persisted into socialism and beyond, explored alongside the sacral meaning imposed and found in communist commemorations and socialist cults. It argues for the necessity of analysing communities in the shared historical space where foreign state policies and individual histories intersect. While post-Second World War Middle Eastern geopolitics impacted upon the reestablishment of legal Muslim institutions in Soviet Central Asia, the status of socialist Mongolia vis-à-vis Peking became an additional motivation for the Mongolian communists' assault on the lamas. In Soviet Central Asia in the 1970s-1980s, social life was still centred on Islamic rituals, while in Mongolia, where socialist cults laid down deeper roots, the population demonstrated more profound sacral perception of communal commemorations than Central Asians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines some of the published works of the missionary Timothy Richard (1845 - 1919), and analyzes how his mission experience played a foundational role in his study of religion. It argues that his work and his approach to Chinese religions challenged established views of the relationships between the world religions held by his contemporaries. The latter section focuses on his studies of Mahāyāna Buddhism and how they sought a familiar religious revelation clad in foreign clothing. Finally it suggests that his experience might complicate our picture of orientalist scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses experiences of hardship during Hindu pilgrimages in the Nepalese and Tibetan Himalayas. Pilgrims have to reach their goal by undertaking a journey. The pilgrimage exposes pilgrims to a variety of experiences. The journey's religious experiences are of significance for the ritual arrangements of the pilgrimage. Cognitive theories and the selectionist approach of 'cultural epidemiology' are adopted to offer explanations for the formation of religious beliefs and values associated with travelling experience, hardship and danger during pilgrimage. Specifically, it is argued that the experience of salient emotional events such as hardship are likely to draw upon evolved social exchange intuitions that impose a selective pressure in the cultural formation and recurrence of beliefs regarding religious merits in pilgrimage. It is further argued that social exchange intuitions are a likely source of beliefs in boons and merits, since pilgrimage is already conceptualised as an interaction with 'supernatural agents.' These accounts modify and elaborate former suggestions regarding hardship and sacrificial notions in pilgrimage studies. Thus the presented arguments may be relevant to understanding some of the features of pilgrimage that also seem to recur cross-culturally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Local Contexts' is the qualifier of 'Global Christianity' as 'the global must become localized' in the process of globalization of Christianity. The case of Bishop Ting, together with the Three-Self Patriotic Movement and the National Christian Council in China will be studied for illustration. Ting was well aware of his socio-political realities and his mission to work out ways to keep alive Christian faith in the Communist state of China. He was committed to serve the Church and the Christians in China and to work out 'Christianity with Chinese socialist characteristics'. It was found that Chinese Christianity must fulfil its bi-characteristic functions, namely the 'Chinese' and 'Christian' functions. Regarding the mission of Chinese theology, Chinese theologians must address to the socio-political and cultural contexts, to the needs of Chinese Christians, as well as to bear witness to the Christian faith within the living contexts of the Church in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youxian shi (poetry on roaming as a transcendent) has long been a conventional poetic genre in Chinese literature. It has been the common conception that youxian poetry was most popular from the Wei dynasty (220-265) through the Tang dynasty (618-907), and up until now, scholarly studies on the genre seemed to focus exclusively on Tang and pre-Tang periods. This gives the impression that after the Tang nothing of interest was written in this particular genre. Consequently, very little scholarly attention has been given to the youxian poems composed in post-Tang periods. This article examines youxian poems by Qing (1644-1911) women, specifically those poems entitled Nü youxian (roaming as a female transcendent). With the increasing consciousness of "self," the rise of groups of women writers, and the popularity of women's culture in late imperial China, youxian poems provided a unique literary space for women's poetic and autobiographical voices, certainly deserving more scholarly attention. I argue that by presenting female transcendents or women pursuing transcendence at the center of a poem and re-inscribing the traditional literary images, the poets created a stronger female subjectivity that reflected women's desires in their intellectual and spiritual lives. I also propose that nü youxian was a new subgenre of youxian poetry, emerging only in the context of the efflorescence of women's poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an exploration of a tradition of Daoist self-cultivation, directed exclusively to women, which flourished in China from the seventeenth century. Nüdan, or female alchemy, is described here through the close analysis of one of its more representative collections, the Nüdan hebian, first printed in Chengdu, Sichuan, in 1906. The detailed discussion of its editorial history, its contents and its preface, as well as the presentation of its editor, He Longxiang, shed light on the interrelated issues of gender, religion and visions of the body in late imperial China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late imperial officials, from the highest-ranking ministers in Peking down to the county magistrates, repeatedly issued proclamations prohibiting women from visiting temples. Such bans were often ignored, but both normative and anecdotal evidence from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries documents a number of sustained attempts at enforcement. This article summarizes interpretations given to such bans by historians and analyzes the parameters of enforcement. While all-out bans were rarely envisioned, because of the total lack of public support, some officials tried to curb certain types of female participation in temple life that were considered particularly offensive (ritual roles for women, staying overnight, spectacular penitential practices, and so forth). This article argues that while outright repression of women (jailing and punishing all women entering temples or joining festivals) or temples (closure or destruction) was difficult to maintain on a long-term basis, it might serve as a threat in negotiations between official and local elites. In the course of such negotiations, elite members agreed to try to curb some “excessive” female practices in temples in exchange for official approval for temple festivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a textual history of Chinese author Hong Mai's massive compendium of anomalous events, the "Yijian zhi" (YJZ). It is a collection of what post-Enlightenment Western-trained scholars would call supernatural events, as well as newsworthy accounts and anecdotes, originally featuring 420 juan, or chapters. The collection focuses on contemporary religious ideas, and helps understand much about Song Dynasty's women's social status, Confucian scholars' religious tenets, the ruling elite's understanding of the fall of the Northern Song.

The article presents a commentary of the books "The Structure of Chinese Rural Society: Lineage and Village in the Eastern New Territories," and "Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China," by David Faure. For thirty years, Faure has worked at the deconstruction of an image of an eternal, unchanging China. China, according to that image, was a society dominated by Confucian literati from powerful lineages, the gentry.

This article discusses the religious career and self-immolation (which involved public acts of burning the fingers and body) of the sixth-century monk, Sengyai. The author discusses the sources for a study of his life, and translates the extant biographical materials. He demonstrates that self-immolation was a practice open to multiple interpretations, and that Sengyai's act was understood as one of cosmic significance in a religious milieu in which recent political events such as the fall of the Liang dynasty were interpreted as signs of the decline of the dharma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the nature and cultural meaning of agriculturally produced grains in late classical and early medieval China. Dietary regimens of practitioners during those periods to make them transcendents; Religious practices in offering sacrifices to the gods and spirits of grains in the country; Implication of cultivating and eating grains for the social status of dwellers in agricultural communities.

How far can wings of belief carry us? What kinds of new social and moral systems evolve out of transnational religious movements? The recent literature on globalisation has shown only little interest in religion, in spite of the cutting-edge global role of beliefs like evangelical Christianity. The literature has attended even less to the movement of non-Western traditions. We do, however, have numerous alternative models of how global ideas in general spread: they can seep through the cracks within and between systems of control based in nation-states; they can flow through mobile cosmopolitans with a global sense of belonging; they can reside in diasporas centred around the idea of a common homeland; they can exist in the institutions of transnational villages; and so on. These various images of global culture are not mutually exclusive, of course, and none of them alone captures the full complexity of the possibilities. Here I want to explore briefly just two dialectical relationships that characterise some of the features of the. transnational Chinese religions discussed in the essays collected here. The first is the relationship between global culture and the continuing institutional power of the nation-state. The second is the counterintuitive combination of universalising beliefs with a strong sense of rootedness in specific places or ethnicities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on largely uninvestigated archival material in the First Historical Archives in Beijing. It addresses the following issues: (1) How and why an internal office, the Nanfu, which was responsible for drama performances inside the palace, expanded its functions to become a monitoring organisation, the Shengpingshu, which exercised censorship over all the drama groups in the capital. (2) How political events were reflected in drama performed on both public and private occasions, thus shedding light on the inner world of individual emperors. (3) How these institutional changes led to the Qing court playing an active role in the transformation of a regional lower-class entertainment into Peking opera, a national art form appreciated by all classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the use of the label Ru among twentieth-century popular Chinese religious groups, specifically Confucianism. Ru in Taiwanese popular religion; Spirit-writing movement in Taiwan and on mainland China; Teachings of the Confucian tradition.

Argues that there is little evidence of anything resembling an independent or self-conscious Pure Land tradition in medieval China. Views on how scholars misconstrued the notion of 'Ch'an/Pure Land syncretism; Role of Amitabha's Pure Land in Chinese Buddhism.

Investigates Buddhist-inspired options that were offered to lay people and at people's motivations for making specific religious decisions in the Lower Yangzi region in China during the period from A.D. 1100 until 1340. Definition of a religious option; Origin of the important monastic Tiantai tradition of Buddhism; Factors contributing to the success or failure of beliefs and practices.