Loyola at the Spirit-Writing in Chinese History Conference

This summer Dr. Elena Valussi traveled to Erlangen, Germany for the two day Spirit-Writing in Chinese History Conference.  Dr. Valussi is a senior lecturer of Chinese history and teaches various upper level courses on East Asian history. Among her many professional activities, Dr. Valussi organized this international conference and shared her work from Sichuan, China. The “Mapping Religious Diversity in Modern Sichuan: A Spatial and Social Study of Communities and Networks” received a three-year research grant of 100,000 euros from the Taiwanese Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. Dr. Valussi joins a team of scholars to explore rural religious diversity. 

Spirit-writing denotes a Chinese religious practice that stretches back at least to the 10th century AD. Using a wooden implement, practitioners transmit messages in sand or ashes that are attributed to supernatural beings. Research on the practice has progressed substantially in recent years and we now have a good sense of its general role in Chinese history. Spirit-writing has been used to obtain knowledge about the future, to transmit medical prescriptions, or to compose “morality books” (shanshu). Although primarily an expression of lay religiosity, it has also shaped religious communities through the production of scriptures, commentaries, sermons. For this reason, it particularly lends itself to religious innovation. Moreover, it was not restricted to any social group but profited from the ability to draw in a large segment of society. Although facing periods of suppression, especially in mainland China after 1949, its practitioners have been able to adapt spirit-writing to changing social, political, and cultural contexts. It has remained a meaningful practice until this day and thrives in Chinese-speaking communities in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Southeast Asia. There is thus no denying that spirit-writing has been an important factor shaping Chinese history and Chinese religions until this day.

The conference aimed at providing a historical framework for the variety of spirit written materials we have as well as identifying spirit-writing’s place in China’s religious landscape -- in particular, its relation with established religious traditions like Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism.  It also aimed to take into account the broader transcultural context in which the practice was and is situated, first within Asia, with examples from Vietnam and Korea, then, from a comparative perspective, with Western practices of spiritualism.