How did people share arcane, complex, or unfamiliar religious ideas and practices across sociocultural divides throughout Chinese history? Responding to and building on the “praxis turn” in the study of Chinese religions, this panel employs the heuristic notions of vernacularization and techne to further examine the lived processes in which religious knowledge was organized, transmitted, and embodied into practice. Through developing and deploying craft, technique, or skill, religious practitioners, lay people, and what we might call non-specialist users participated in a religious ecology that foregrounded varying forms of efficacies. Informed by preexisting conceptualizations of vernacularization and techne, the four papers in this panel explore case studies from the middle, late imperial, and contemporary periods to analyze Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist, and “popular” attempts to produce and implement broad-based religious knowledge and practices for apotropaic, didactic, healing, and other purposes.
Research pertaining to the quest for Daoist transcendence or xian-hood has raised vital questions about the intersections between religion, pharmacology, and the body in China. Informed by but departing from studies of xian-hood and adjacent medical and soteriological pursuits, this paper delves into vernacular methods and techniques for anti-aging and healthy hair. Focusing on both excavated and transmitted recipes that target the loss or whitening of hair, I query how and why people in medieval China—potentially both religious practitioners and non-specialist users—used animal, vegetal, and mineral substances to create hair care products either through ingestion, topical application, or hair-combing. By paying attention to the technical knowledge undergirding the creation of these products, this paper explores the religious and somatic dimensions of possessing healthy hair and thus becoming spiritually potent.
This paper examines how contemporary incense associations at Mount Tai vernacularize religious knowledge through narrative techniques amid contestations over orthodoxy. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2025, it argues that incense association’s leaders increasingly emphasis storytelling over formal ritual to transmit beliefs surrounding Bixia Yuanjun and the “Four Great Spirit Animals” (fox, weasel, snake, hedgehog). In a context where certain ritual practices are labeled as superstition, storytelling becomes a practical technique through which mediums reinterpret beliefs, and align them with contemporary ethical norms, and further embed them in specific mountain sites. By retelling myths at temples, caves, and scenic markers, they transform sacred spaces into the “lieux de mémoire” and produce embodied, shareable religious knowledge. In this way, pilgrimage is not only a ritual journey but also a process of producing collective memory and vernacular religious knowledge in contemporary China.
This paper examines everyday practices concerning beasts in medieval Chinese religious life. I focus on talismans and divination manuals related to the household or residence (zhai 宅), particularly those from Dunhuang and relevant Daoist scriptures. I begin by clarifying the mechanisms of talismans and divination, emphasizing their efficacy through divine signs and the techniques through which such signs are produced and interpreted. The paper then analyzes three modes of beasts in religious tools: as individual signs, as components of astrological systems, and as (natural) phenomena. Through these three interpretive modes, I demonstrate the distributive agency of beasts across cosmological systems and the interpretations historical actors granted them, highlighting a reciprocal relationship between beasts and humans. I argue that these three modes reflect the role of the beasts channeling the supernormal, divine systems of religious power into the household, rendering complex cosmological knowledge operable for non-specialist users in everyday life.
Confucian ethics idealized both public and private separation of adults, but in reality, even the most devoted Confucian scholars could not avoid encountering women, and the temptations aroused by such contact. This paper explores a small set of Qing morality tales which specifically admonish against illicit sexual encounters, not from a Buddhist or Daoist perspective, but with explicitly Confucian framings, even as they mimic tales of karmic consequence (yinguo). Preface writers, including the original compiler, endorse these stories of Heaven-sent illness, exam failure, and death resulting from violating sexual ethics as bringing to life the abstractions of earlier philosophers’ pronouncements about desire. Through these collections, the paper explores popular Confucian sexual morality, extending beyond ritual abstention in mourning and medical recommendations for restraint to consider how a morally upright man might practically navigate the sea of desire that engulfed him every time he stepped outside his study.
| Elena Valussi | evalussi@luc.edu | View |