The panel examines the experiences of Chinese local communities in disasters and their attempts to interpret and respond to these natural and social crises. These responses take various forms: religious texts, sacred images, and rituals shaped through negotiation among different actors over sacred authority and ritual efficacy. Many of these practices had visual, embodied, and emotional dimensions. The panel explores these responses in a global, cross-cultural, and historical context, examining the diverse ways in which people have experienced and navigated moments of crisis. It investigates tensions between missionaries and local communities over rainmaking rituals between the late seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, contention over Tibetan esoteric ceremonies to pacify calamities in the 1920s, and the evolving meanings of a popular Japanese image of Guanyin in post-war Taiwan. From a perspective of cross-cultural religious encounters, it presents natural disaster as a site where religious authority, political agenda, and communal obligation intersect.
This project examines drought and rainmaking rituals in Qing China and treats these rituals as a site where religious authority, political responsibility, and communal obligation intersected. Drawing on missionary records, Qing judicial archives, and local gazetteers, I reconstruct episodes of drought and religious responses between the late seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, when environmental crises brought officials, villagers, and Christian missionaries into direct competition over divine power. I argue that rainmaking functioned both as a political performance and as a communal practice, and that encounters between missionaries and local communities through rainmaking practices produced recurring tensions over ritual participation and communal obligation within village society. Through the lens of rainmaking, this study traces a longer genealogy of religious conflict surrounding natural disasters and reinterprets early modern religious encounters in China as a process rooted in local ritual practice and the rural moral economy.
The paper investigates the calamity-pacifying ceremonies 息災法會 conducted by Tibetan esoteric Buddhists in Chinese cities from the 1920s to the 1940s. It examines a series of ceremonies conducted by Lama Bai Puren 白普仁 (1870 –1929), who conducted the Dharma Ceremony of Golden Light 金光明法會 in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Hubei, and Hunan as these regions endured natural disasters and wars between 1916 and 1927. In particular, it focuses on his performing ceremonies to cope with a severe drought in Hunan in 1926. Drawing from influential newspapers and Buddhist periodicals, the paper suggests that these ceremonies played a crucial role in the dissemination of Tibetan esoteric Buddhism in Chinese Buddhist communities. It also argues that the popularity of esoteric rituals in Chinese cities in the first decades of the twentieth century challenges the common assumptions of de-ritualization and demythologization in Buddhist modernity.
This project investigates the relationship between natural disasters and religion, examining how disasters catalyze the transformation of religious symbols. Moving beyond traditional iconography, the study adopts a social-contextual approach to analyze Harada Naojirō’s 1890 painting, Guanyin Riding the Dragon. While its Japanese origins have vanished from Taiwanese memory, the image became a ubiquitous icon of “Efficacy” following the devastating August 7 of 1959.
The research argues that this dissemination was driven by the interplay between the flood's collective memory and the influx of mainland Chinese Buddhist monastics and lay devotees in the 1950s, who integrated miracle tales with the image. By using black-and-white photography blurring original painting, the icon became embedded in everyday life—from temple ornaments to medicine jars. Ultimately, the study posits that modern religious transmission is rooted not only in technological progress, but in the nexus of collective experience, textual representation, and environmental crisis.