This panel highlights the complicated relationships sacred spaces have with their broader social-cultural contexts. Rather than viewing space as static, authors in this panel will reveal sacred spaces as dynamic, being shaped by the great variety of individuals who frequent them. Taken together, the case studies provide an important examination of the interconnected nature of Chinese religious landscapes with diverse facets of religion, culture, politics, and society. Authors furthermore push scholarship on space and place, as they complicate the understanding of: how sacrality is imagined in medieval China; the gendering and multifaceted identities of Buddhist nunneries; the mobility of rituals and place-making in motion; political ecology as a means of providing comprehensive overviews of sacred sites; and how religious geography is influenced by linguistic characteristics. Spanning across time periods and disciplines, these case studies will collectively provide important insight into the complexity of space, place, and sacrality in Chinese religions.
This paper investigates important aspects of the Buddhist re-imagining of China’s
sacred geography by analyzing relevant narratives in the medieval monk Daoxuan’s 道宣
collection of miracle tales, the Ji Shenzhou sanbao gantong lu 集神州三寶感通錄 (abbr. Record
of Miracles). The question of Daoxuan’s relation to ‘place’ and how he wrote about different
sacred sites will inform much of this discussion. There will be three parts to this paper, of which
the first will provide background information on two sacred structure types: monasteries and
pagodas. The second section will give a brief Buddhist history of ‘place’ in China, examining
mountains in the medieval Chinese imaginaire as well as the figure of Liu Sahe 劉薩河 and his
role in localising Buddhist sacred geography. The final part will investigate Daoxuan’s relation
to ‘place’, with particular attention directed at Mount Zhongnan 終南山.
Although monastic spaces in the Song have received some scholarly attention, monasteries and nunneries are often treated without distinction, despite their well-documented physical separation during this period. Relying on a diversity of Song sources, rather than focusing exclusively on nuns and their activities, this paper examines the nunnery as a socio-religious center. In this context, I seek to highlight the various functions the Buddhist nunnery fulfilled during the Song, including religious, medical, economic, and even penal functions. I also seek to complicate the persisting notion that nunneries often acted as sanctuaries offering Chinese women an alternative and more self-directed lifestyle. My overarching aim is to demonstrate how this space intersected people from different social strata who utilized it in diverse ways and ascribed it different imports.
Since at least the fifth century, ethical concern for animals and the aspiration to generate karmic merit have inspired people in China to release animals into nature and save them from the butcher’s knife. Animal release, especially when conducted as a communal event that follows a set of procedures, could take place in rivers, lakes, as well as artificial and natural ponds in monastic and non-monastic spaces. Focusing on the period from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries, this paper investigates the changing sites for performing animal release in Chinese Buddhist and Daoist contexts. Drawing mainly on ritual manuals, anecdotal accounts, and temple gazetteers, this paper points out that the selection of sites for releasing animals was informed by an interplay of political, ritual, geomantic, and ecological considerations. The history of the specialized animal-release pond demonstrates how a religious practice could shape monastic and natural landscapes in concrete ways.
This paper situates temple cults at the core of processes generating different types of landscapes, including: 1) Natural landscapes consisting of geomantic forces and scenic locations that inspire people to write poetry and construct monuments, including sites for ritual activities; 2) Sacred landscapes featuring temples, rotational worship and pilgrimage systems that are linked to commercial, irrigation, and marriage networks. I explore these issues through a case study of the Lianzuoshan
Guanyin Temple (蓮座山觀音寺/觀音亭), a leading Hakka sacred site in Daxi 大溪 (Taoyuan City, northern Taiwan). Founded during the late eighteenth century, this temple’s scenic setting attracted financial and literary patronage from a wide range of local elites, while its location along northern Taiwan’s tea and camphor trade routes resulted in its growth into a vital node of ritual activities for Hakka inhabitants throughout the region.
The empirical research linking linguistic geography with spatial analysis of Chinese religion has been suggested and undertaken by Willem Grootaers 賀登崧 (1919-1999) and his students (Thomas) Li Shiyu 李世瑜and Wang Fushi王輔世 in the 1940s. They conducted an extensive survey on local dialect and folklore in North China, including fieldwork in Datong 大同, Wanquan 萬全, and Xuanhua 宣化. However, their research was neglected by both linguists and religion scholars for a long time. Grootaers’ contributions to religious geography, what he calls “folklore geography,” have not yet been properly assessed. This paper proposes to revisit Willem Grootaers’ contributions to the study of Chinese religious spaces and landscapes. It will assess Grootaers’ innovative findings and discuss the potential for further research based on his method.