This panel presents a topically and historically diverse array of papers for the sake of bringing a methodological point into focus. We examine how literary, cinematic, visual, and ritual arts have not merely transmitted but creatively engaged and reshaped Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, and so-called popular-religious thought in China from the medieval period to the present. In each case, we consider how the formal and conceptual affordances of artistic media respond to the needs of their respective practitioners. By engaging these affordances, practitioners have synthesized concepts from disparate traditions; redefined or reinterpreted pre-existing concepts; and illuminated ideas in ways that are uniquely accessible through certain art forms. To make sense of such artistic adaptations of religious thought, it does not suffice to have a grasp of the religious traditions at play. Instead, arts should be understood as actively intervening in and contributing to the repertoires of Chinese religions.
Cao Yanlu, ruler of Dunhuang from 976 CE to 1002 CE, performed a dwelling-securing ritual as a response to a portentous incident that happened in his house. In this paper, I analyze the characteristics of the ritual by noting Cao’s consultation with the occult arts and the practical logic of his religious eclecticism. The ritual is testimony to the complexities of medieval Chinese religious life, in which the occult arts featured prominently. I then propose to take Cao’s dwelling-securing ritual as an instance of household religion that cuts across the distinction between popular religion and elite religion. When we appreciate Cao’s ritual in light of the continuing tradition of household religion in ancient and medieval China, we can go beyond the framework of interreligious interactions in accounting for the inclusion of Buddhist and Daoist spirits in the ritual but rather understand these spirits as new demonological idioms adopted by household religion.
_Soushan tu_ (literally “painting of a search in the mountains”) is a Chinese narrative painting tradition that derives its name from the central scene of a group of ferocious-looking heavenly soldiers expelling animal spirits led by a commanding deity and his retinue in the mountains. The commanding deities featured in the paintings have been variously identified in previous scholarship as the Buddhist protective deity Vaiśravaṇa, a group of Daoist divinities (_sisheng_), Erlang—a “syncretic” deity capable of controlling floods and subduing mountain ghosts, and Guan Yu, the Chinese god of war. This paper examines one little studied _soushan tu_ painting dated to the Ming era. Through iconographical analysis and close reading of the colophon, the paper demonstrates how the painting constructs a visual narrative without a fixed grounding text, and how it may have communicated new religio-mythological and political messages through a creative reworking of pre-existing visual tropes.
In 1626–27, in the wake of court eunuch Wei Zhongxian’s (1568–1627) persecutions, scholar-official Zhang Nai (_jinshi_ 1604) published a multigenre anthology of writings elucidating the relationship between writing and morality. Confucian thinkers had long regarded the former half of this dyad warily, as that which conveyed sagely morality yet risked giving way to personal interest. In this context, writing was a site of contest between the moral mind embodying the Way and the human mind’s inclination to exceed the square and compass of sagely teachings. I show how Zhang Nai and his collaborators engaged the anthology’s formal features to synthesize an aesthetically esteemed tradition of enmity and indignation (_yuan_, _fen_) with sagely teachings traditionally resistant to these extreme affects. In doing so, they redrew the moral mind’s boundaries to incorporate writing’s expressive affordances into Confucian moral discourse, allowing space for the moral mind’s outrage in late-Ming political life.
In _Running on Karma_, the Hong Kong commercial auteur Johnnie To and his partner Wai Ka-fai offer a meditation on the themes of agency and theodicy within a karmic worldview that sheds fresh light precisely through its improbable pastiche of genres and themes drawn from both Chinese and Western cinematic and literary traditions. By framing the tropes of superhero movies and film noir within a karmic universe, To and Wai subvert those genres’ expectations and assumptions to create a Buddhist morality tale for a global, twenty-first century Asia in which force is futile and nihilism is overcome with compassion.