**Preface to "Religion and Folk Belief in Chinese Literature and Theatre "**

This edited volume of Religions is a reprint of the articles published in the Special Issue on 'Religion and Folk Belief in Chinese Literature and Theatre'. The issue attracted more than twenty submissions from a broad range of scholars at different stages of their academic career. I am delighted that after going through a rigorous peer review, ten of them were accepted for publication in the issue, thereby constituting ten chapters of this volume.

This collection of essays offers a historical, textual and ethnoanthropological exploration of the meaning and value of religion and ritual and their form and function in relation to Chinese literature and theatre. The term 'theatre' is used here to refer broadly to various types of live performances—theatrical and non-theatrical; sacred and profane—presented in a religious setting, thus including ritual performance and oral performance. Likewise, literature in this volume broadly encompasses both written and oral literatures, including drama, poetry, hagiography, legend, mythology and prosimetric narrative or chantefable for telling and singing. The contributors to the issue draw on a wide range of materials from historical, philosophical and literary texts to field reports and archaeological finds to archived documents and local gazetteers to personal interviews and participant observations. While all the essays are collected under the theme of 'Religion and Folk Belief in Chinese Literature and Theatre', they differ from each other in subject matter, source material and research approach. Rich and varied as they are, these essays fall into two main categories, namely, a historical approach to religion and ritual recorded in (written and visual) texts and an integrated approach that combines historical inquiries into written and visual texts with ethnoanthropological fieldwork on religious rituals and associated performances. Contributions from Jinhua Jia, Noga Ganany, Qian Wang and Qiong Yang, Xing Lan, Xiaoyang Wang and Shixiao Wang and Ludi Wang and Yongfeng Huang may be classified into the first type, whereas those from Rostislav Berezkin, Chao Guo et al., Thomas Riccio and Xiaohuan Zhao the second type.

This edited volume begins with an article by Jinhua Jia, Adjunct Professor of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Macau and Professor of College of Humanities at Yangzhou University. In this chapter, Jia provides an exhaustive examination of philosophical, philological and literary texts from early China in search of the religious-ritual origin of cheng (sincerity), a key concept and code of conduct at the core of Confucian ethics and aesthetics that also finds expression in ritual practice of various religious traditions in China. Jia effectively employs a synthetic approach of etymological, religious, philosophical and literary studies and successfully generates from early Chinese texts' and religious rituals' four-layered meanings and implications of cheng, thus unravelling the mysteries that have long surrounded it.

In Chapter 2, and in a similar vein, Noga Ganany, University Assistant Professor in the Study of Late Imperial China at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the University of Cambridge, conducts a critical analysis of the textual hybridity of Deng Zhimo's (fl. late sixteenth century to early seventeenth century) Saints Trilogy, i.e., three illustrated hagiographies of Daoist immortals, Lu Dongbin (The Flying Sword), Xu Xun (The Iron Tree) and Sa Shoujian (The Enchanted Date). ¨ The trilogy, Canany argues convincingly, 'offers encyclopedic, practical, and entertaining guidebooks for worshipping the three immortals and pursuing Daoist attainment', thus 'highlighting the close interplay between "literature" and "religion" in late-imperial China'.

The following two chapters deal with religion and drama. In Chapter 3, Qian Wang, Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Yangzhou University, and Qiong Yang, Academic Editor at Social Sciences in China Press, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), closely examine three types of willow narratives (the ritual shooting of willow trees; the deliverance of willow spirits by the Daoist immortal Lu Dongbin; and the figurative use of the word 'willow' to refer to women) in ¨ Yuan zaju (variety play)—the earliest mature form of Chinese musical theatre or xiqu in northern style that rose in the early to mid-thirteenth century and predominated Chinese theatre during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). They demonstrate beyond doubt that willow narratives in Yuan zaju are an artistic manifestation and combination of centuries-old myths and legends, religious rituals and folk beliefs and historical and literary works about the willow.

In Chapter 4, Xing Lan, a PhD candidate in Chinese Studies at the University of Edinburgh, opens a new avenue of research in religion and drama. With focus on Daoism in Chuanju or Sichuan Opera, a regional form of Chinese theatre prevalent in southwestern China since the eighteenth century, this chapter studies the influence of Daoism in the dramatisation of Liaozhaixi, a group of cycle plays adapted from the Liaozhai zhiyi (Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio), a collection of classical tales of gods, ghosts and spirits written by Pu Songling (1640-1715) mainly based on myths, legends, folktales and local histories. From a large body of newly recovered playscripts of Liaozhaixi in Chuanju and a close comparison of them with the original tales in the Liaozhai, Lan formulates two basic modes of theatrical adaptation in the Liaozhaixi of Chuanju, that is, 'transplantation' and 'improvement', the former being an attempt at integrating the belief and worship of Daoist immortals into the storyline of the original tale and the latter an attempt at improving and refining ordinary Daoist priests and practitioners in the original tales into perfected saints and immortals in line with Sichuan local Daoist beliefs.

Chapters 5 and 6 are broadly concerned with religion and poetry. In Chapter 5, Xiaoyang Wang, Chair Professor of Art and Archaeology at Southeast University in Nanjing, and Shixiao Wang, Assistant Research Fellow in the School of Arts, Nanjing University, perform a careful examination of the portrayal of the Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu) in Han Rhapsodies (fu) and Han tomb paintings, the two major genres of art that give form to her cult in the Han era (206BC–AD 220). Arguably the most popular deity in Han China, the Queen Mother of the West has long been a hot topic for scholars of Chinese mythology, religion and literature, but to my knowledge, hardly any serious research has been conducted to compare literary and visual representations of the goddess. From the differences in the depiction of the deity between Han Rhapsodies and Han tomb paintings, among other primary sources, they conclude that there exist two Queen Mothers of the West in the Han era: 'one worshipped as a goddess of longevity and immortality by people from the upper class; the other worshipped by the ordinary people as a seemingly omnipotent deity with divine power over both the immortal world and the mortal world'.

In Chapter 6, Ludi Wang, Post-doctoral Fellow of the Department of Philosophy, and Yongfeng Huang, Professor of the Department of Philosophy, Director of the Research Centre for Daoism and Traditional Chinese Culture and Director of the Research Institute for Religious Studies, both at Xiamen University, undertake a detailed survey of a group of shi poems written to monks by Pei Yue (fl. 906), a lesser-known late Tang poet. These poems, they find, reveal Pei's longing for the pure land and his frustration over failure to free himself from earthbound life, a mindset commonly shared among grea<sup>t</sup> Tang poets such as Wang Wei (700–761), Bai Juyi (722–846) and Li Shangyin (813–858). Chapter 7, the first essay in the second category, is devoted to a study of Xuehu baojuan or Precious Scroll of the Blood Pond, a newly discovered manuscript dating from the nineteenth century and identified as a text for the performance of jiangjing ('telling scripture'), a form of ritual storytelling and storysinging based on the narrative prosimetrum called baojuan ('precious scroll'). This study

comes as part of a series of research projects carried out by Rostislav Berezkin, Professor of Chinese Popular Religion and Social History at the National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Fudan University, on the ritual performance of precious scrolls in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, where 'telling scripture' is a centuries-old living tradition. The author scrutinises the text and context of this newly discovered manuscript and showcases it as 'a precious scroll functioning in the context of modern telling scripture in Changshu' and also as evidence for 'the local varieties of this type of storytelling in connection with ritual practices'.

There are two chapters, Chapters 8–9, in this volume that deal with religion and ritual of the Hmong (Miao), an ethnic group of people living in the Southwest of China. In Chapter 8, Chao Guo, Associate Professor at the Department of Chinese (Zhuhai) of Sun Yat-sen University, examines in detail, with the assistance of two young scholars, the Xiu Yax Lus Qim or Yalu wang (Ode to King Yalu), a newly discovered 'heroic epic' that had long been orally transmitted, performed and circulated in fragments of varying degree among various subgroups of the Miao people for ritual performances in association with Miao festivals and particularly funerals. 'Embedded in Miao sorcery beliefs and practices', they argue—forcefully and authoritatively—¬¬the Yalu wang is first and foremost a ritual text for Miao funerals rather than an 'heroic epic' as officially described; any attempt to disassociate it from its primary function at Miao funeral rites and study and stage it as an epic about the origin and history of the Miao people will hollow out its soul and will inevitably result in 'the erosion, dilution, or even elimination' of this grea<sup>t</sup> oral tradition.

In Chapter 9, Thomas Riccio, Professor of Visual and Performing Arts, Director of Theatre Programme at the University of Texas at Dallas, USA, and Visiting Professor of Ethnography at Jishou University, China, provides a fieldwork-informed case study of the zhuiniu ritual of 'killing of the water buffalo with a spear', one of the most important religious rituals still performed across Miao communities in Xiangxi or Western Hunan with its roots traceable to 'the worship of spirits and natural elements' in prehistorical times. In this chapter, Riccio describes the zhuiniu ritual as 'an adaptative and interpretative cultural narrative' embodied and expressed through performance, arguing that the survival of this ancient sacrificial ritual into the twentieth-first century is owing to its modularity and adaptability, and above all, its ability to cater for 'the practical and spiritual needs' of the Miao.

The last chapter in this volume is a richly illustrated study of village temples and temple festivals in northern China based on the fieldwork conducted by its author, Xiaohuan Zhao, Associate Professor of Chinese Literature and Theatre at the University of Sydney and Distinguished Overseas Professor of the Research Institute for Xiqu and Xiqu Relics at Shanxi Normal University. In this chapter, Zhao first traces the historical development of temple festivals (saishe, shehuo, miaosai or yingshen saishe) from ancient wu-shamanic rituals to a highly integrated form of ritual performance and theatrical entertainment and then proceeds to a case study of temple culture and temple theatre in rural northern China. This study represents his most recent effort to explore the ritual roots of Chinese theatre and the mechanism for the integration of ritual into and from theatre.

> **Xiaohuan Zhao** *Editor*
