Arts and/as Chinese Religious Repertoires

This panel assembles a topically and historically diverse array of papers for the sake of highlighting a focused methodological point about the arts and Chinese religions. Namely, the formal features and conceptual associations of artistic media allow for creative reconfigurations of what Robert Campany terms religious repertoires. Attending to these reconfigurations sheds light on lived dimensions of religious experience that are otherwise difficult to observe. From this standpoint, the arts are not subordinate to religious traditions, but stand alongside religious repertoires as artistic repertoires that actively combine with and contribute to the toolkits upon which practitioners draw. By presenting papers on diverse subjects, we invite our interlocutors to reflect on how the formal and conceptual features of different artistic interventions have met the needs of practitioners’ respective moments.

The papers comprising this panel analyze the interplay of Buddhism and cinema, Confucianism and writing, Daoism and painting, and so-called “popular religion” and ritual. Collectively, we illuminate three methodological points for the study of arts and/as Chinese religious repertoires. Firstly, by attending to the formal features of  artistic media, we demonstrate how different art forms allow for distinctive reconfigurations of concepts. Secondly, we show how the cultural associations that accrete over the course of an artistic tradition’s development contribute their own toolkits of ideas and practices to the religious tradition(s) with which an artistic form engages. Finally, our papers suggest that creative expressions of religious thought offer windows into vernacular religion—religious thought and practice adapted to the contingencies of lived experiences and cultural needs. In many cases, artworks might provide clearer windows onto realities of religious experience than official religious texts, which often set forth idealized prescriptions.

The panel commences chronologically, with a dwelling-securing ritual formulated by Cao Yanlu, ruler of Dunhuang from 976 CE to 1002 CE. While we acknowledge that some might take issue with identifying a ritual as an art form, we have placed this form of creative practice on par with more conventional artistic practices to highlight a commonality: ritual, like other forms of creative practice, also allows for reconfigurations and re-presentations of religious repertoires adapted to the contingencies of the practitioner’s experience. In Cao Yanlu’s case, when Yinyang specialists and diviners could not advise him on how to negotiate a portentous incident in his home, Cao developed a ritual that invoked a diverse assembly of spirits, calling upon them to expel every possible demonic force that might be harming his residence. Ritual here serves as a creative form that configures a diverse repertoire of protective means to address a household emergency that religious and occult specialists could not resolve independently. Cao’s creative ritual intervention complicates scholarly categories that traditionally apply to his context, as it integrates “elite” and “popular” religion as well as the occult arts, Buddhism, and Daoism. By attending to what ritual’s formal features allowed Cao to do, rather than attempting to describe his ritual with respect to established categories, we gain insight into the lived dimensions of Cao’s religious experience.

A second paper examines a Ming-dynasty (1368–1644) handscroll painting depicting the popular theme of “Searching the Mountains.” This traditional painting theme, which incorporates the Buddhist protective deity Vaiśravaṇa, a group of Daoist divinities (_sisheng_), Erlang—a “syncretic” deity capable of controlling floods and subduing mountain ghosts, and Chinese god of war Guan Yu, is itself an assemblage of visual tropes that appear in isolated form in paintings of earlier periods. The handscroll discussed in this paper reconfigures this diverse assemblage to transform the narrative of “Searching the Mountains,” representing the painting’s animal-quelling divinities as an immoral mob, among other adjustments. The handscroll also engages the title and colophon, formal conventions attendant to this medium, to associate this Search in the Mountains with the mythological trope of Yu the Great, who controlled ancient floods. Rather than read this juxtaposition as a mismatch of image and text, as previous scholars have done, the panelist considers how this pairing generates a new reading of the painting’s constituent themes in ways that might have been meaningful in the Ming context.

The third paper considers how the formal affordances of the late-Ming anthology combine with the conceptual affordances of an aesthetically esteemed tradition of composing out of indignation to redraw the bounds of Confucian morality. Zhang Nai’s (_jinshi_ 1604) multigenre compendium _Must-Read Works of Classical Literature_ (1626–27) was published in the wake of powerful court eunuch Wei Zhongxian’s persecutions of scholars, including Zhang Nai and many of his associates. Zhang and his editorial collaborators marshall the anthology’s paratextual materials—title page, prefaces, and categorized tables of contents—to align their work with an entrenched Confucian discourse on the relationship between writing and morality. The anthology’s contents, however, incorporate writings characterized by extreme negative affects of enmity (_yuan_) and indignation (_fen_), prioritizing authors whom Confucian progenitors Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming had identified as problematic from the standpoint of transmitting the Way. Zhang Nai’s creative deployment of the anthology form integrates this aesthetic tradition with Confucian moral discourse to propose an understanding of Confucian morality suited to his political moment.

The panel’s fourth paper situates Buddhist teachings against a backdrop of 21st-century nihilism, where the forces fuelling the injustices of lived experience are too powerful for even a Buddhist superhuman to overcome. By assembling a pastiche of tropes attendant to cinematic genres, in particular noir, superhero, and martial-arts films, Hong Kong film _Running on Karma_ offers a meditation on Buddhist themes of agency and theodicy. Cinema’s formal affordances invite the audience’s sympathy with (and, perhaps, worldly attachment to) the film’s doomed female protagonist, whom a cartoonishly muscular superhuman monk is powerless to save from her karmic predestiny. In this respect, the film simultaneously engages and subverts the masculine-savior ideals of noir and superhero films, proposing that agency resides not in violent acts of heroism attempting to thwart the system, but in the small acts of kindness that might lead others closer to a realization of Buddha nature, such that the system itself eventually dissolves.