While Daoism is fundamentally a liturgical tradition, scholarship has frequently focused on the history and structure of its rites rather than the precarious mechanisms of their efficacy. This panel interrogates the productive category of “ritual failure” in Chinese religion, Daoist rites in particular, moving beyond functionalist binaries of success versus failure. Taking Catherine Bell’s analysis of Lu Xiujing, specifically her insights on the bureaucratic metaphor and the priesthood’s consolidation of efficacy, as a theoretical departure point, we examine how failure is constructed and managed across three distinct contexts: Song dynasty anecdotal literature, late imperial stele inscriptions, and contemporary Daoist practice in Hunan. The papers argue that ritual breakdown is rarely a void; instead, it serves as a critical diagnostic site where moral boundaries are hardened, institutional authority is reorganized through legal coordination, and divine-human relations are intimately recalibrated through bodily technologies. Collectively, we demonstrate that efficacy in Daoist rituals resides not merely in the completion of a rite, but in the sophisticated management of its potential collapse.
This paper investigates the dynamics of ritual failure in Hong Mai's twelfth-century collection Yijian zhi, situating its anecdotal narratives within the socioreligious context of the Song dynasty. Drawing on Ronald Grimes's taxonomy of ritual "infelicities" and Edward Schieffelin's distinction between procedure- and outcome-oriented failure, the study identifies two categories of failed rites. The first encompasses performance-centered breakdowns—flawed petitions, impure personnel, and procedural errors—that Grimes's framework diagnoses effectively. The second, however, resists such explanations: rituals that are correctly performed yet catastrophically rejected. To account for these cases, the paper introduces the concept of "cosmological invalidation," whereby a ritual's efficacy is nullified not by human error but by a higher moral-bureaucratic order governing karmic debts and underworld adjudication. The paper argues that narratives of inevitable retribution served a theodical function in a period of political instability, challenging the universality of performance-centered and strategic-negotiation models of ritual theory.
This paper examines ritual failure through the practice of jiaobei (珓杯, moon-block divination) in Daoist and local ritual contexts in central Hunan. Jiaobei are routinely cast there at critical moments of ritual performance to confirm divine permission for a ritual to proceed. When divinatory results fail to meet ritual expectations, it produces a publicly visible moment of uncertainty.
Rather than signalling ritual breakdown, such moments initiate a process of negotiation. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork, this paper analyses how ritual masters respond to unfavourable jiaobei results by modifying bodily techniques, e.g. mudras and mantras, and ritual pacing in order to “urge” the divination (cui gua 催卦). These practices reflect a structured compromise between gods and ritual specialists grounded in Daoist ritual logics.
I argue that jiaobei-mediated ritual failure is an anticipated and productive condition that reaffirms relational authority between gods, ritual masters, and the ritual community, rather than undermining ritual efficacy.
Drawing on late imperial steles from southern Shanxi, this study examines a form of ritual failure that emerged when the infrastructural and organizational conditions sustaining ritual life broke down. The inscriptions record recurring disruptions, including failures to enforce festival calendars and service obligations, disputes over offerings and exactions, and the appropriation of temple property, which generated missed or failed rites. This article argues that ritual efficacy depended less on divine responsiveness than on the functioning of coordination mechanisms that allowed ritual to operate across communities. Local ritual was experienced as effective not through greater splendor, but through stable, low-friction routines grounded in predictable rules, manageable costs, clear resource boundaries, and workable inter-community coordination. When these conditions collapsed, officials and local elites intervened, claiming to bring ritual back under governance through regulation and documentation, thereby reorganizing local authority in the name of repairing efficacy. Ritual failure thus provides a window onto local power dynamics.
| David Mozina | dm2072@cam.ac.uk | View |