Chinese religious cosmologies are widely recognized as relational, yet how this relationality is enacted and sustained through practice remains underdiscussed. This panel examines four ritual practices across Chinese religions to investigate how these practices, under the influences of their cosmologies, maintain or reconstruct relationships between human and more-than-human beings. The four papers focus on the relational network embodied in Buddhist rainmaking rituals through Dependent Arising; the ethical response and relational reconstruction of Buddhist rituals to road killings; the communication with natural forces through the Daoist talismanic writing; and the relationship maintained through vocalization in Confucian sacrificial rites. We argue that constructing and sustaining relational existence–weaving humans, deities, natural forces, animals, and the deceased into a network–is a core function of Chinese religious rituals. In an era marked by the modern disenchantment that has severed relationships between humans and more-than-human, these traditions offer vital resources for building a more relational future.
This paper examines Buddhist Dragon King rainmaking rituals in China as a ritual response to ecological crisis. Drawing on Huayan Buddhist philosophy—particularly Fazang’s doctrine of Dependent Arising in the Dharmadhātu—it argues that these rituals embody a relational cosmology in which humans, natural forces, and spiritual beings participate in an interconnected ecological network. Combining textual analysis, historical research, and ethnographic observation, the study explores both scriptural rainmaking traditions and a contemporary ritual performed during a drought in northern China in 2023. Engaging ritual theory from Catherine Bell and Victor Turner, the paper interprets rainmaking rituals not simply as petitions for rainfall but as communal practices that cultivate ecological awareness, solidarity, and ethical responsibility toward the natural world. In light of the 2026 AAR Presidential Theme “Future,” the paper suggests that Buddhist ritual traditions offer important resources for reimagining ecological relationships and developing religious responses to the global climate crisis.
Across the world’s expanding road networks, millions of animals are killed by vehicles each year. Despite its scale and visibility, roadkill is widely normalized as an inevitable byproduct of modern transportation infrastructure rather than examined as an ethical or religious problem. This paper asks whether Buddhist ritual traditions offer resources for transforming how humans perceive and respond to roadkill in the ecological conditions of the Anthropocene. Drawing on ritual theory—particularly Catherine Bell’s understanding of ritual as a practice that reshapes perception and social relations—alongside Buddhist cosmology and road ecology, the paper argues that roadkill should be understood not merely as an infrastructural accident but as a form of everyday ecological violence. Examining Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhist practices of animal care—including animal release (fang sheng 放生), chanting rituals, and funerary rites for animals—the paper shows how ritual cultivates attentiveness, mourning, and ethical responsibility toward more-than-human life.
Making talismans, an important tradition in Daoism, involves a series of complex actions during the writing process. The performative characteristics of these actions are central to finalizing the communication with nature and the talisman’s efficacy. I first investigate how Daoist talismanic writing and its associated practices are presented in early medieval Sanhuang texts, and then explore how this tradition was transformed into the later practice of Thunder Rites (leifa 雷法) during the Song dynasty. Drawing on fieldwork, I also consider how Daoist talismanic practices are understood and enacted in contemporary contexts. Building on John Lagerwey’s analysis of the role of Daoist ritual in Chinese society, I argue that making talismans embedded in broader Daoist ritual practice performs efficaciously through its social and cosmological dimensions—one rooted in communication with natural forces. The survival tradition invites reflection on what it might offer to contemporary thinking about ecological futures.
Whether in offerings made to ancestors or whispered words spoken before a grave, ritual presentations directed to the dead in Confucian practice are often accompanied by vocal addresses. This paper examines the practice of speaking to the dead in Confucian ritual, epitomized by the closing invocation “尚飨 (shàng xiǎng),” focusing on how such speech sustains what the Analects calls “offering as if [they were] present,” hereby reinforcing the relational and moral practice that constitutes Confucian social life. Drawing on autoethnography, classical texts, and small-scale ethnographic research, and engaging Roy Rappaport’s theory of ritual’s performative logic alongside Thomas Csordas’s theory of embodiment, this paper argues that spoken address as embodied action does not merely confirm relational obligations between the living and non-living beings—it actively constructs the emotional and relational reality of ongoing connection, producing a felt sense of presence for absent subjects, and builds a future that includes the non-living.