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The theme of this edited volume is the study of religious practice during the T'ang-Sung transition and its effect on larger social development. Ebrey and Gregory in their introduction theorize, "Religious activities thus were an arena in which the educated and the illiterate routinely came into contact, contact that may have had consequences quite outside the sphere of religion." (p. 6) This study treats religious practice in a way that transcends elite/popular distinctions-- an approach that opens many avenues for future research in the study of religion and society. The volume grew out of a weekly symposium held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign over a two-year period. The inter-disciplinary interests of the various participants are evident in the balanced mix of social and religious historians of Sung and T'ang China represented in the published work. A particular strength of this volume is the attempt to treat Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism as discrete religious traditions that nonetheless cross popular/elite boundaries and commingle at the level of popular religious practice and belief. The editors and authors explicitly focus their inquiries on the interaction of the three religious traditions at the local level as practiced at once -- and sometimes in common - by religious experts, government officials, and the local laity, the latter comprised of both elites and peasants.
This book could be divided in two parts. Chapters two through five deal with religious practice among the laity and their peripheral contacts with officialdom. Chapters six through nine deal with state regulation and co-optation of popular religious practice. Each chapter treats personal religious practice juxtaposed with a public, or state, function: and each
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chapter is concerned with the influence of other religious traditions, especially Taoism, on Buddhism and Confucianism. Thus, Terry F. Kleeman discusses the fourth-century origins of the cult of the God of Literature (Wen-ch'ang), which in the Sung dynasty took on the personae of an official patron of examination candidates and a judge of personal morality. Kleeman demonstrates that the worship of the God of Literature spread from Szechwan throughout China in the twelfth century first among Szechwanese emigre communities and then even more widely in conjunction with widespread government-sponsored Taoist temple building. Valerie Hansen writes about the possible influence of the Indian cult of the office-holding monastic guardian, Vai`sravana, on the origins of Chinese city wall-and-moat gods in the T'ang period. Stephen F. Teiser treats the rise of the religious concept of purgatory in Chinese Buddhist belief. In a chapter on Myth, Ritual, and Monastic Practice in Sung Ch'an Buddhism, T. Griffith Foulk refutes the suggestion that Ch'an iconoclasm and lack of respect for the written word were responsible for the intellectual decline of Buddhism by showing that the study of sutras, commentaries, and Vinaya texts as well as the lives of the Ch'an patriarchs was a major and important part of the training of laymen and Ch'an monks alike.
Through a study of popular funerary practice, Patricia Buckley Ebrey tackles the broad question of why Sung authorities attempted to control or limit certain popular cult practices. She is particularly interested in distinctions drawn by the educated Confucian bureaucratic elite in their supervision of popular religious activity, and the success of those efforts. Judith Magee Boltz discusses the tactics available to the state in its effort to control the supernatural, and in so doing tells a fascinating history of how fire-crackers came to hold such an important place in ritual observance in China. Judith A. Berling writes on the linkages between ritual texts and the textual tradition through which religious belief was transmitted, discussing primarily poetry, discourse records (yu-lu), and inscriptions on places of scenic beauty as definers of religious tradition. Finally, Linda Walton discuses academies in the
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southern Sung dynasty as sacred places. In this last chapter, Walton examines the power of both the bureaucratic state and popular religious practice as they mingled - and competed - in the local academies. She concludes that the Sung state attempted to regulate local academies in much the same way that it tried to limit and co-opt Buddhist and Taoist temples.
This well-crafted volume contains a superabundance of finely documented material that will lead to further inquiry and further study -and, one hopes, to as many monographs as chapters. It is impossible not to notice the importance that each contributor to this volume places on the role that Taoism played in the development of Buddhist and Confucian society in the T'ang and Sung dynasties. If any single theme could be drawn from the wide-ranging research reported in this volume, it would be the key role played by the Taoist tradition in shaping China's Buddhist and Confucian religions and society. But the authors also stress the importance of trade and administrative bureaucracy in the spread of religious belief and social convention from one locality to another. Clearly, the authors of this volume take the view that local differences constituted a greater obstacle to the formation of a cohesive Chinese society than did distinctions between social classes. In any given locality, peasants, townspeople, educated elites, and government officials mixed freely in their religion and society. However, only when religious and social practices transcended the confines of the locality could a distinctly Chinese religion or society come into being.
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