Chinese Religious Culture, Digital and Material Approaches

In late imperial China, while permanent vegetarianism was often criticized, periodic fasting gained widespread state and social acceptance. Central to this practice were widely circulated fasting calendars, which mapped sacred dates to encourage ritual purity, accumulate merit, and foster divine connections. This presentation explores the construction, circulation, and reception of knowledge concerning "divine time." Focusing on the representative Yuxiaji (玉匣記) and analyzing editions from 1684 to 1891, the study reveals how a shared repertoire of fasting days was created, transcending strict regional and confessional divides. Furthermore, by juxtaposing these prescriptive texts with descriptive historical sources from Suzhou—a major publishing and religious hub—this research demonstrates how fasting calendars were actively employed in daily practice, ultimately shedding light on the sanctification of everyday life and the temporal experience of spirituality.

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.

Through an analysis of the online circulation of short videos produced by Chinese lay Buddhists featuring their temple visits, this paper explores how such audio-visual artifacts mediate religious experiences and serve as a reflexive process in (re)constructing the interplay between religious traditions and ethical experiences. I focus on videos posted on one of China’s biggest social networking platforms, RedNote, which is especially popular for sharing tips on travel, makeup and fashion, to examine how lay Buddhist videos circulated in a media environment, where mass culture, consumer culture, and religious traditions interact with each other, reconstruct the concepts of religious experience, authenticity, and legitimacy. I also situate these videos within the context of the revival of Buddhism in reform-era China to see how they, embodying the renewed interest in traditional Buddhist self-cultivation, reveal the nexus of personhood construction and the social project of moral cultivation in contemporary China. 

This paper extends current scholarly discussions of embodiment and healing in religious studies to the domain of material objects. By analyzing a corpus of medieval Chinese narratives that foreground the vulnerability and pain of Buddhist statues, the paper redefines disability not as a marker of alterity but as a vulnerable phase of existence shared by both sentient beings and Buddhist icons. The analysis further demonstrates that religious agents in medieval China often occupied simultaneous roles as caregivers and care-receivers, allowing healing to emerge through reciprocal relationships. This paper also shows that medieval Chinese monks employed Buddhist narratives to transform the material vulnerability of Buddhist images into sites of compassion and doctrinal reflection, thereby highlighting the significance of Buddhist literature beyond being mere didactic tools or records of social memory.

How do memories leave their traces on the land? And how does the landscape in turn render memories legible? This paper examines the emergence of the legend of the “Nodding Stones,” a hagiographic episode in the famous 4-5th century monk Zhu Daosheng’s biography, in which his sermons are so powerful that even rocks bow in assent. Although now firmly associated with Daosheng’s activity in Tiger Hill, Suzhou, the episode is absent from early biographies of him. Through a close reading of local gazetteers, Tang poetry, and sectarian biographies, I propose a new trajectory for the legend’s development from earlier materials to its later mature form. This paper shows that sacred geography is not a passive backdrop of narrative, and texts and spaces co-produce one another over time. Religious memory endures not simply through repetition in writing, but through its capacity to become anchored in place.