What’s that “Dog” Doing in the Ritual? How Meaning Gets Made and Remade in Daoist Liturgical Literature

This paper examines how meaning in Daoist liturgical manuals gets made, unmade, and remade. It builds on an article from 2019, titled “Living Redactions: The Salvationist Roots of Daoist Practice in Central Hunan.” That piece interrogates the “secret instructions'' (*mizhi* 秘旨/密旨) of a particular Daoist lineage working these days in north-central Hunan province. These secret instructions direct Daoists how to perform one of their most fundamental liturgical tasks—transforming into a deity in order to communicate with exorcistic thunder gods (*leishen* 雷神) who can protect and heal bodies or spaces, and can make rain or prevent floods. The piece shows that secret instructions are not in fact rigid codifications of core liturgical knowledge, despite the fact that they are preciously maintained down the generations of lineage. Instead they are active processes of redaction—“living redactions”—by Daoist masters doing their best to make intellectual sense of arcane liturgical data they inherit in the pages of the ritual manuals recopied from previous generations within their lineages. Rather than frozen in writing, secret instructions are intertextual fabrics of text continually being rewoven by inventive Daoist masters drawing on a wide repertoire of cultural resources. 

This paper continues to explore how meaning gets made—and remade—in Daoist liturgical manuals, but this time it focuses on the nexus of talismans (*fuming* 符命) and hagiography (*zhuan* 傳). It zeroes in on one puzzling graph, the character for “dog” (*gou* 狗), which is inscribed in a talisman designed to summon Celestial General Yin Jiao 殷郊天君, one of the thirty-six thunder gods typically called upon to lead an army of spirit soldiers to heal and protect clients in central Hunan. The paper examines how one lineage in north-central Hunan interprets the character in terms of its received hagiography of Yin Jiao. The paper then compares that interpretation with that of a cousin lineage in north-central Hunan that performs the same summoning rite, which is historically related. The paper continues on to compare those interpretations with those of lineages farther afield in the south in Hunan, and even outside the province.

All this close reading will show wildly different interpretations, which goes to show how alive liturgical literature really is. Ritual manuals are traces of Daoists’ hermeneutical work by which received meanings get lost and then creatively reworked to make new meanings. Looking at ritual manuals as living redactions by real people, then, pushes back on our scholarly tendency to interpret them as floating texts disconnected from time and place, which is easy to do.