East Asian folk religion

What it is

The everyday religious practice of ordinary people across China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Vietnam and the Chinese diaspora — ancestor veneration, local deities, temple festivals, divination and spirit mediumship.

It has no agreed name, which is part of why it is invisible. Scholars call it Chinese popular religion, folk religion, or shenjiao, the teaching of the gods. Practitioners generally do not call it anything; they simply do it.

Estimates of adherents run from four hundred million to nearly a billion, which would make it among the largest religious traditions on earth. It appears in almost no survey, because surveys ask which religion you belong to, and the answer is a category error.

Where it came from

From continuous local practice, interpenetrating the three teachings — Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism — without being any of them. A single family may consult a Daoist priest for a funeral, a Buddhist temple for merit, Confucian propriety for the ancestors and a spirit medium for a problem, and see no inconsistency, because there is none.

Its structure mirrors the imperial state. The unseen world is a bureaucracy: gods hold offices, have jurisdictions and rank, receive petitions in written form, can be promoted and demoted, and can be complained about to their superiors. The Tudigong, the earth god, is the local official; the Chenghuang, the city god, is his superior. Paper money is burned to pay what is owed.

Many gods are deified humans. Mazu, the sea goddess with thousands of temples across the Chinese-speaking world and a UNESCO intangible heritage listing, is a tenth-century Fujianese woman named Lin Moniang who by tradition died young rescuing sailors. Guandi is a third-century general. The pantheon is populated by promotion.

How it is practised

At temples and at home. Incense, offerings of food and drink, and the burning of joss paper.

Divination is routine and public. Jiaobei — two crescent-shaped blocks thrown to obtain a yes, no or laughing answer — and kau chim, the shaking of a numbered bamboo stick from a cylinder to obtain a corresponding oracle slip, are used by ordinary people in ordinary temples for ordinary decisions. Both are versions of the practice described under casting lots, performed daily by millions.

Festivals structure the year: Qingming, when families sweep and repair ancestral graves; the Ghost Festival, when the dead are fed; and local temple birthdays with processions, opera and spirit mediums.

Related traditions across the region:

Korea's Muism — the mudang, overwhelmingly women, who perform gut, elaborate ceremonies of song, dance and possession lasting many hours. It was suppressed under Japanese occupation and again during the anti-superstition campaigns of the 1970s, and is now partly protected as intangible cultural heritage.

Japan's Shugendō — mountain asceticism practised by yamabushi, combining Buddhist, Shinto and folk elements, banned outright in 1872 during the Meiji separation of Buddhism and Shinto, and revived in the twentieth century. And the itako of Tōhoku, blind women trained as mediums to speak for the dead, now reduced to a handful of practitioners.

Vietnam's Đạo Mẫu, mother goddess worship, whose hầu đồng possession ritual received UNESCO recognition in 2016.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the census categories fail here, and the failure is instructive. Asking a Chinese family whether they are religious frequently produces "no", followed by tomb-sweeping at Qingming, incense at the local temple, a shrine at home and consultation of the blocks before a business decision. The same mismatch appears in Shinto, and for the same reason: the operative category is practice, not membership or belief.

We can say it is genuinely enormous and genuinely under-studied relative to its size.

We can say the state relationship is complicated. Chinese folk religion was targeted as superstition in the twentieth century, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, and has revived substantially since — partly tolerated as intangible cultural heritage and local custom rather than recognised as religion, a status that offers protection and denies standing at the same time.

We cannot describe mediumship or ritual in operative detail, for the reasons this section has given throughout.

Further reading

• Adam Yuet Chau, Miraculous Response (2006) — ethnography of a temple cult in Shaanxi.
• Laurel Kendall, Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF (2009) — Korean mudang in modern life.
• Stephen Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (1988).