Mirrors, Mobility, and the Shushu Repertoire in Tang Religious Practice

Much scholarship on Chinese bronze mirrors emphasizes their Daoist associations. This paper highlights two overlooked cases that situate mirrors instead within the broader shushu數術 repertoire. The first concerns two ninth-century mirrors inscribed with a hemerological diagram used to select auspicious departure dates, a method widely attested in Chinese and Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts. Their portability suggests that mirrors functioned as practical tools for managing travel risk. The second case, preserved in Tang poems and later ritual descriptions, involves a domestic divination in which a woman listens for chance speech after orienting herself through a spinning ladle in water; the square stove, round pot, and rotating ladle cosmologically map Earth, Heaven, and the Dipper. Together, these cases show the multivalence of mirror use beyond Daoism. They also reveal the gendered distribution of travel ritual, linking mobility, divination, and household practice in Tang China.