Evil in Chinese Religion

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies presents a workshop on the topic of Evil in Chinese religion.

"Evil" in Chinese religion has attracted surprisingly little attention. We plan to examine the concept in both its exorcistic and its political frames. Evil entities like ghosts or fox spirits possess people and destroy lives. Some Chinese Christians have a related discourse of the satanic. Evil cults possess followers and destroy social order. We will ask workshop participants to address questions that include: (1) Has the nature of evil changed over time? (2) How do modern uses of "evil cult" relate to those in the Qing Dynasty or earlier? (3) How do understandings of evil help to shape understandings of the good, and how might this have changed over time?

Poul Andersen, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Why are Images Evil?
Poul Andersen will raise questions and make suggestions concerning the definition, the etymologies, and the history of the concept of evil—both in general and with reference to Chinese religion. His point of departure is in the ethics and the philosophy of truth of Alain Badiou, and in the ontology of images of Jean-Luc Nancy. The specific Chinese materials include the narrative illustrations found in the Scripture of the Jade Pivot, Yushu jing, which contain portrayals of “evil” cults in the form of simulacra of “proper” cults; texts from the Ming dynasty concerning Confucian iconoclasm and the (lack of) “reasoning” behind it; and the “twelve statutes of [transgressions to be punished by] Celestial Thunders,” tianlei shier tiao, listed in the Ming dynasty Scripture for the Propitiation of Thunder, Xielei jing.

Xiaofei Kang, George Washington University
"Gaixie guizheng": Gender and the Anti-Medium Campaign in Yan’an, 1944-1945
In the summer of 1944, the Chinese Communist Party in Yan’an launched an anti-medium campaign that targeted mainly male spirit mediums. Party newspapers devoted much space to expose the evil doings (zui’e) of spirit mediums and to publicize confessions made by reformed mediums for the sake of helping them “gaixie guizheng—give up evil and return to the correct path.” Xiaofei Kang takes a gender perspective to explore how the anti-medium campaign was part of the CCP’s efforts to use modern science to establish the hegemonic masculine authority of the emerging party-state over the “backward” peasant traditions. The male spirit mediums, as well as the traditional ritual order they embodied, were attacked as a flawed masculine power subject to feminization and emasculation. As obstacles of modernization, the evils of spirit mediums remained central to CCP’s social reforms to ensure its wartime survival, yet the prospect of “gaixie guizheng” kept the mediums within the realm of the People and deemed them first and foremost a potential source of the much needed male labor and occasionally, rural medical workers. The campaign set up a useful precedent for CCP’s thought reforms of the Chinese masses, yet as the CCP moved class struggle into the center stage of the land reform and the subsequent PRC revolutions, spirit mediums lost their evil masculinity to the Nationalist and the ruling class as the Enemy of the People.

Eugenio Menegon, Boston University
Christians as "Evil" in Late Imperial China: Qing State Control, Foreign Presence, and Native Agency during the Yongzheng Reign
Catholicism developed in fits and starts in the Chinese empire during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. By 1700, the Chinese Catholic church counted a following of around 250,000 faithful (1.5% of the population at the time), concentrated in China’s main economic macro-regions. A setback soon followed: in 1724, the Yongzheng emperor issued a formal prohibition against Christian propagation in the provinces. In spite of this new policy, missionaries continued to serve the imperial court in Beijing as scientific and artistic experts, and underground priests, both foreign and Chinese, maintained the faith alive with the support of provincial communities into the nineteenth century, when the Opium Wars ushered in a new age of imperialist encroachment and foreign missionary impetus. Eugenio Menegon’s preliminary investigation focuses on the specific Qing political circumstances that surrounded the prohibition of Christianity by Yongzheng. Guided by concerns about court factionalism, native heterodox activities, and European military and commercial threats, the Qing state labelled Christians as both religious heretics and political traitors. This is reflected in a famous speech pronounced by Yongzheng in 1727 on the occasion of the visit of a Portuguese ambassador. Menegon will analyze this text in multiple Chinese and European versions, trying to clarify the context in which it was pronounced, and how heresy was defined there. In spite of this frontal attack, Christianity survived as a minoritarian component of late imperial religious life, partly because the same Qing state that prohibited it, also maintained an ambiguous relationship with missionary presence in the capital.

David Mozina, Boston College
Ritual Grapplings with “Evil” in Local Daoist Ritual in Hunan Province
David Mozina will present part of a monograph-in-progress that examines ritual performance in central Hunan Province. His research shows how contemporary performances of thunder ritual by local Zhengyi Daoists in central Hunan conceptualize "noxious qi" and work to neutralize its pervasive attacks on topographical and bodily spaces.

Michael Szonyi, Harvard University
Chinese Ghosts and the Evil that Men Do
In much of the Chinese religion tradition, ghosts are the spirits of dead humans who are hostile and dangerous but can be propitiated or at least expelled by performance of the right rituals. But there is also a type of ghost who punishes people who have done evil. They demand and obtain justice, if not from the evil-doer himself then from his descendants. Stories of avenging ghosts thus provide an index to how evil is understood in different social contexts. Their stories suggest that with ghosts as with gods, a transactional or eudaemonistic model of the cosmos co-exists in tension with the idea of a moral cosmos. Unlike other types of ghosts, avenging ghosts cannot be exorcised; offering sacrifice will not persuade them to change their ways or just to go away. Stories of avenging ghosts are thus a reminder that ritual is limited in its capacity to reorder the world.

Barend ter Haar, University of Oxford
Giving Believers Back Their Voice: Agency and Heresy in Late Imperial China
New religious groups and networks in traditional and contemporary China are traditionally seen as a separate phenomenon, to be studied by social historians and independent of mainstream Buddhist and Daoist traditions. Moreover, because these groups are still prohibited today and at best tolerated, fieldwork is largely impossible. The situation in Hong Kong is much more open, although such groups as the Falun Gong and even the much older Yiguandao or Unity Way still occupy a socially and political sensitive position in local society. On Taiwan there is indeed total freedom, although that ironically also changes the social context in which these groups operate and makes the case less relevant for the mainland. Only by taking a very conscious step to argue from inside these groups and take their own points of view, in so far as an outsider can know them, is Barend ter Haar’s point of departure. The concept of heresy (heterodoxy, evil, or other versions of this type of “othering” vocabulary) takes away the agency of such groups and networks, and focuses on the state’s outside point of view. Much of Barend ter Haar’s career has been an attempt to give believers back their voice, although in the final analysis he, too, is an “other” and definitely sees things differently from the groups and networks themselves.

Robert P. Weller, Boston University, and Keping Wu, National University of SingaporeA Monkey Demon Battles the Banality of Good
There is no good without evil in most Chinese religious practices. One important kind of Chinese good/evil is community based. If the "good" is the social group, represented and created through temple rituals, its forms of evil are (1) the total individual who refuses social life, and (2) the incompatible community. Other forms of difference are accepted as long as they can be absorbed through ritual. Weller and Wu will illustrate this primarily through a case of possession by a monkey demon, and another case of ghost attacks on a Pentecostal preacher. Beginning in the late twentieth century, however, a very different image of what counts as the good became important: a universal, individual-based, secular, "neoliberal" good. Unlike most older ideas of the good, this one does not admit a corresponding form of evil—the universe is instead a world of infinite love, a banality of good. Examples include large Buddhist and Christian philanthropic organizations, which stress universal love within an isomorphic civic space offered by the state. This "good" leaves no room for real difference of any kind. Evil here is denied, eliminated, and kept at bay, such as we see in human rights movements against “evil” states, “good” states' wars on terror, and “good” religions' attacks against “evil” cults. Nevertheless, monkey demons and other alternative views of good and evil continue to exist. These evils sketch the limits to the neoliberal project, which generates its own critique. Evil continues, even in a world of the banality of good.

Workshop organizers: Robert Weller, Boston University, and Michael Puett, Harvard University
Cosponsored with the Center for the Study of Asia, Boston University