During interludes between rituals,my Daoist friends enjoy trying to decipher the weird squiggles in my notebook. Talking with Chinese people, when one doesn’t understand a bit of dialect or an obscure term, they sometimes adopt a device that supposedly solves the problem, as the wise Victor Mair describes in his recent post on Language Log ..read more

Taipei: Daoist priests working for the Hsien-miao altar 顯妙壇,led by master Chu K’un-ts’an 朱堃燦, “open the eyes” of a god statue damaged in a temple fire. All images courtesy of Yves Menheere. [1] Pursuing a major theme that I broached in my superficial survey of music-ritual cultures in Taiwan, I learn much from Yves Menheere ..read more

It’s always worth consulting the Taiwan series Minsu quyi (Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre, and Folklore”, introduced here). I look forward to reading the two volumes (2023, vols. 221 and 222) of “Special issue on popular beliefs, religious texts, and local communities in the sinophone world: in memory of Professor Daniel L. Overmyer” 民間信仰、宗教經典與地方社會：紀念歐大年教授專輯. Indeed ..read more

I still find it worth reminding you of my page on Rethinking Zhengyi and Quanzhen, for its fundamental rethink of Daoist ritual practice. In my book In search of the folk Daoists of north China (2011) I began exploring the false dichotomy between Orthodox Unity (Zhengyi 正一) and Complete Perfection (Quanzhen 全真) branches (note especially pp.17–18 ..read more

For Roger Federer, click here.In snooker, another instance of “effortless grace” is Ronnie O’Sullivan. Always (nonchalantly) on the trail of non-action, I came across the stimulating article Helen De Cruz, “Sprezzatura and wuwei: a Daoist approach to European courtly grace” (2023). While Daoism and Zen have long become glib buzzwords in the West, some such ..read more

Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheelNever ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel […] Or the ripples from a pebble someone tosses in a stream […] Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind! —The windmills of your mind. I’m both amused and bemused ..read more

Fujian province in southeast China is one of the most vibrant areas to explore folk and ritual expressive cultures, which its local scholars have been particularly avid in documenting. Its traditions—always rooted in life-cycle and calendrical ceremonies—are known to outsiders largely through the Minnan region in the south of the province, particularly the treasury of ..read more

Itinerant beggars performing for funeral, north Shanxi 2018. My photo. In vocal traditions of Chinese expressive culture (as I keep harping, or drumming, on), the neat pigeon-holes of folk-song, narrative-singing, and opera disguise a continuum from solo singing though to fully-staged genres with larger forces, all oscillating between a range of points along the ceremonial–entertainment ..read more

Music is not a thing at all but an activity, something that people do —Christopher Small, Musicking Through the Maoist decades after the 1949 Communist takeover, while the society of mainland China was constantly beset by a succession of iconoclastic traumas, the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan was considered a bastion for ..read more

Precious scrolls of village ritual associations near Houshan, Hebei:left, “Demon-queller scroll”, Lijiafen;right, “Ten Kings scroll”, Jijiagou. My sideline in “precious scrolls” (baojuan 寶卷) [1] goes back to our 1990s’ field project on the central Hebei plain, when we were impressed to find a substantial treasure-trove of early editions in villages of Yixian and Laishui counties—and particularly ..read more