Emotionally and Bodily Correlated: Intimacy in the Precious Scrolls about the Goddess of Mount Tai

This paper explores how the affective aspects of reciprocity in the deity-human relationship are essential to understanding the vitality of pilgrimage practices in the cult of the Goddess of Mount Tai. Inspired by Monique Scheer’s use of practice theory in the history of emotions and Barbara Rosewein’s work on emotional communities, this paper explores how exhortations about pilgrimage practices in three widely circulated baojuan 寶卷(precious scrolls) shape what devotees do and feel. I showcase how these texts use the word gandong 感動 (stimulate and move) to depict the Goddess as physically stimulated and emotionally moved by her devotees’ prayers, and propose to appropriate the indigenous notion of gandong as an interpretive lens to capture an intimate deity-human relationship unmediated by the impersonal, metaphysical correlation of cosmos and virtue.