Thesis (Th. M.)--Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

This thesis explores the cosmology of physiognomy - a method of telling fortune by inspecting the body and the material world - and its social reception in China in the Ming period. This is accomplished through the analysis of extant manuals as well as stories of fortune-tellers' practices. I focus on the Ming dynasty, because of their richness of historical evidence and the distinctive features of physiognomy developed in these periods, but also take materials about the Song inherited in the Ming in my analysis. The manuals and the anecdotal evidence on its social practices and practitioners show that during the Song and Ming period Chinese physiognomy became more systematic. Chinese Physiognomists also inspected the material world beyond the human body, and used the human body as a paradigm for the inspections in which the whole material world is seen as 'homological' to the body. One of the most representative examples of using this body paradigm to examine material objects is the physiognomy of written characters. In the manuals that deals specifically with the human body, the body is seen as a bridge between society and the cosmos. In this cosmology the human body represents the 'totality' of human existence and social life. Because social life is expressed on the body, someone's fortune can be predicted by examining the body. Different numerological as well as cosmological systems after the Song were subsumed into physiognomy and the body and the cosmos came to be linked in the manuals in a more sophisticated way than before. However, fortune is not seen as totally fixed. Moral cultivation can alter the body and thereby change someone's fortune. The body is seen in physiognomy as both physical and moral. As a technique, physiognomy is not only systematically theorized in the manuals but also highly socialized. Physiognomy was practiced by very diverse groups of people across various religious and social communities including Buddhist monks, Daoist priests, local literati, and so on. Although a popular technique, which was also linked to many different kinds of medical and religious traditions, physiognomy was still contested, and people with different social backgrounds and personal experiences held different views on it.

L’objectif de cette thèse est d’analyser une vaste collection de textes rituels taoïstes, le Guangcheng yizhi, qui a été compilé dans la province du Sichuan au 18e siècle. Cette collection est le fondement d’une tradition liturgique locale toujours vivante. La thèse aborde cette collection à la fois par une approche historique, en donnant le contexte social et religieux et en retraçant le processus de la compilation, de l’impression et de la diffusion, et par une approche de travail sur le terrain pour comprendre sa mise en pratique. Les deux premiers chapitres introduisent l’histoire du taoïsme au Sichuan depuis la dynastie des Qing jusqu’aujourd’hui, et plus précisément l’histoire textuelle du Guangcheng yizhi. Les chapitres suivants développent l’analyse de la tradition Guangcheng en développant la notion de "taoïste Guangcheng", et en explorant la typologie et la structure de ses rituels. Il s’intéresse à la construction d’un grand rituel par la combinaison de rites indépendants, et ce que ce processus nous apprend de la carte mentale que les taoïstes Guangcheng ont du répertoire de leur tradition. Enfin, le chapitre 6 développe le cas des rituels de repaiement de la dette de vie (huanshousheng) dans la tradition Guangcheng. / The basic theme of this dissertation is to understand a large collection of Taoist ritual texts from Sichuan, Guangcheng yizhi, first compiled in the 18th century and forming the basis of a living local ritual tradition. The dissertation uses both the historical approach (looking at the history of compiling, printing and using the collection) and fieldwork. The first two chapters introduce the history of Taoism in Sichuan since the Qing dynasty, and of the Guangcheng texts in particular. Then it explores the Guangcheng tradition developing notions such as “Guangcheng Taoist”, and the structure and typology of rituals. It analyses the building of a grand ritual and its “rundown” made of many smaller rites; this sheds light on the mental map of Taoists as they appropriate the shared ritual repertoire of their tradition. Finally chapter 6 analyses the ritual of repayment of life debt (huanshousheng) in the Guangcheng tradition.

Modern Chinese Muslims’ increasing connections with the Islamic world conditioned and were conditioned by their elites’ integrationist politics in China. Chinese Muslims (the “Hui”) faced a predicament during the Qing and Ottoman empire-to-nation transitions, seeking both increased contact with Muslims outside China and greater physical and sociopolitical security within the new Chinese nation-state. On the one hand, new communication and transport technologies allowed them unprecedented opportunities for transnational dialogue after centuries of real and perceived isolation. On the other, the Qing’s violent suppression of Muslim uprisings in the late nineteenth century loomed over them, as did the inescapable Han-centrism of Chinese nationalism, the ongoing intercommunal tensions between Muslims and Han, and the general territorial instability of China’s Republican era (1911-49). As a result, Islamic modernism—a set of positions emphasizing both reason and orthodoxy, and arguing that true or original Islam is compatible with science, education, democracy, women’s rights, and other “modern” norms—took on new meanings in the context of Chinese nation-making. In an emerging dynamic, ethos, and discourse of “transnationalist integrationism,” leading Chinese Muslims transformed Islamic modernism, a supposedly foreign body of thought meant to promote unity and renewal, into a reservoir of concepts and arguments to explain and justify the place of Islam and Muslims in China, and in so doing made it an integral component of Chinese state- and nation-building. “Islamic Modernism in China” argues that Chinese Muslims’ transregional engagement with Islamic modernism did not subvert but enabled the Chinese government’s domestic and foreign policies toward Muslims, and ultimately facilitated the nationalization of Muslim identity in modern China. From Qing collapse through the Second World War, urban coastal Chinese Muslim religious and political elites imported, read, debated, disseminated, and translated classic Islamic texts and modern Muslim print media, while establishing their own modernist schools and publications. Yet those same figures, through those same practices and institutions, increasingly wielded an image of Islamic authority and authenticity in support of the nationalist Guomindang government’s efforts to develop, integrate, and Sinicize China’s frontiers, including the predominantly Sufi Muslim communities of the Northwest. In the 1930s and early 1940s, integrationist Chinese Muslim elites further mobilized modernist narratives of Islam’s rationality, peacefulness, and past and present “contributions” to China. For example, they responded to Islamophobic misperceptions about halal by arguing that Islamic medicine was an important part of Chinese medicine. They also dispatched nationalistic goodwill delegations to the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China’s own frontiers during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), to pursue cultural cooperation and spread anti-Japanese propaganda. At the same time, in contrast to this instrumentalized Islam, certain Chinese Muslim scholars studying in Cairo instead articulated an expansive, democratized version of the Islamic concept of independent human reason (ijtihad) as the basis for a more inclusive vision of both Chinese nationalism and the global Islamic community (umma). The opportunity to pursue this or any other alternative to mere integrationism soon evaporated, however, as the renewed Chinese Civil War (1945-49) split the Chinese Muslim elites across the Mainland, Taiwan, and a variety of Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Thereafter, the Chinese Muslim elites largely became marginalized from high politics in the era of Cold-War and decolonization. Many of their once-contingent narratives of history and identity, however, have nevertheless been normalized as the canonical truth of Chinese Islam to this day, quietly informing China’s minority policies, foreign relations, and rhetoric of the “New Silk Road.” “Islamic Modernism in China” is a history of the subsumption of modern forms of mobility by modern structures of power. It narrates an assertion of difference in the context of multiple, partially overlapping integrations: the integration of a Han-centric idea of the Chinese nation-state, of an Arabo-centric idea of the Islamic world, and of a Eurocentric system of global infrastructures, institutions, networks, and knowledge. It de-parochializes the modern history of Chinese Muslims, showing how they epitomized aspirations and challenges common to Muslim minorities across many large non-Muslim societies and, to an extent, to modern Muslims everywhere. Using a wide range of new or under-studied archival and published sources in Chinese and Arabic, it connects questions of the meaning and scope of Islam, Islamic community, and Islamic modernism (scholarship on which tends to prioritize the Arab Middle East and relations with the West) to questions of religion and state in modern China (scholarship on which tends to prioritize popular spirituality and the official Confucian system, as well as relations with the West). As such, it presents Sino-Islamic transregional interactions beyond the lens of Western influence, yet also uncovers new trajectories by which Western concepts (“religion,” the “nation-state,” the “Islamic world”) became universalized. Overall, it moves beyond a circulation-based understanding of global encounters, and instead maps the contingent ways in which forms of mobility became pressed into the service of hegemonic processes of state- and nation-building: how flows of people and ideas created borders rather than simply crossing them.

This dissertation explores how Chan Buddhists made the unprecedented claim to a level of religious authority on par with the historical Buddha Śākyamuni and, in the process, invented what it means to be a buddha in China. This claim helped propel the Chan tradition to dominance of elite monastic Buddhism during the Song dynasty (960-1279), licensed an outpouring of Chan literature treated as equivalent to scripture, and changed the way Chinese Buddhists understood their own capacity for religious authority in relation to the historical Buddha and the Indian homeland of Buddhism. But the claim itself was fraught with complication. After all, according to canonical Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha was easily recognizable by the “marks of the great man” that adorned his body, while the same could not be said for Chan masters in the Song. What, then, distinguished Chan masters from everyone else? What authorized their elite status and granted them the authority of buddhas? According to what normative ideals did Chan aspirants pursue liberation, and by what standards did Chan masters evaluate their students to determine who was worthy of admission into an elite Chan lineage? How, in short, could one recognize a buddha in Song-dynasty China? The Chan tradition never answered this question once and for all; instead, the question broadly animated Chan rituals, institutional norms, literary practices, and visual cultures. My dissertation takes a performative approach to the analysis of Chan hagiographies, discourse records, commentarial collections, and visual materials, mobilizing the tradition’s rich archive to measure how Chan interventions in Buddhist tradition changed the landscape of elite Chinese Buddhism and participated in the epochal changes attending China’s Tang-to-Song transition.

The “one-many” problem is ontological rather than logical. The thesis is a dialogue between thinkers who never met, investigating the question of what reality fundamentally is in the context of change. Textual studies distinguishing Ge Hong’s relational ontology from Platonic causational ontology lead to the conclusion that Daoist cosmogony, moving “from nothing into being” offers an evolutionary solution to Plato’s problem of change “from being to becoming”.

Issued also as thesis, Universit́e de Paris. / "Bibliographie": p. [121]-122.

abstract: This dissertation is a study and translation of the Hereditary Household of the Han Celestial Master (Han tianshi shijia 漢天師世家), a hagiographical account of successive generations of the Zhang family patriarchs of Celestial Masters Daoism (Tianshi dao 天師道) at Dragon and Tiger Mountain (Longhu shan 龍虎山) in Jiangxi province that was compiled in stages between the late fourteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Zhang family emerged in the late Tang or early Five dynasties period and rose to great prominence and power through the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties on the basis of the claim of direct and unbroken lineal descent from Zhang Daoling 張道陵 the ancestral Celestial Master whose covenant with the deified Laozi in 142 C.E. is a founding event of the Daoist religion. In this study I trace the lineal history of the Zhang family as presented in the Hereditary Household in chronological parallel to contrasting narratives found in official histories, epigraphy, and the literary record. This approach affords insight into the polemical nature of the text as an assertion of legitimacy and allows for a demonstration of how the work represents an attempt to create in writing an idealized past in order to win prestige in the present. It also affords the opportunity to scour the historical record in an attempt to ascertain a plausible timeframe for the origin of the movement and to explore the relationship of the Hereditary Household to earlier hagiographic works that may have informed it. This study also contextualizes the Hereditary Household in the post-Tang religious climate of China. In that period the establishment of lineal authenticity and institutional charisma through narratives of descent became a widespread tool of legitimation employed by Buddhists, Daoists, and Confucians in hopes of obtaining imperial recognition and patronage. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Religious Studies 2016

Prenant principalement appui sur des matériaux de terrain et des documents historiques, la présente étude examine la tradition des maîtres rituels taoïstes. Celle-ci a été une des traditions religieuses les plus vivantes en Chine méridionale, depuis la dynastie des Song (960-1279). Il s’agit d’une tradition d’exorcisme qui a emprunté beaucoup d’éléments au tantrisme. Elle s’est bien intégrée au taoïsme tout en révélant des relations subtiles entre le taoïsme et la religion populaire. D’un point de vue ethnographique, les maîtres rituels constituent un groupe important de spécialistes de rituels à l’ouest du Fujian, au sud-est de la Chine. D’un point de vue historique, chez les maîtres rituels contemporains se trouvent des éléments qui remontent à l’antiquité. Ainsi, la céation et la maîtrise de soldats du monde invisible pour conjurer les êtres malfaisants en faveur du peuple constituent un trait caractéristique. La tradition des maîtres rituels a joué un rôle important non seulement dans la vie quotidienne du peuple, mais aussi dans les processus socio-culturels régionaux. Le présent travail étudie notamment un mythe de « batailles de méthodes » entre des maîtres rituels et des mauvais esprits qui a trouvé sa place dans un contexte de conflits ethniques à l’ouest du Fujian. Il examine aussi un culte des maîtres rituels qui a donné l’occasion aux différents groupes sociaux d’exprimer leurs compréhensions de leur légitimité, ainsi que des rituels d’ordination et des rituels servant à cacher les âmes humaines des mauvais esprits, rites de vie qui contribuent aussi à la construction de la communauté. / Relying mainly on field materials and historical documents, this study examines the tradition of Daoist ritual masters; one of the liveliest religious traditions in South China since the Song Dynasty (960-1279). It is a tradition of exorcism which borrowed many elements from Tantrism; but it is also well integrated into Daoism while revealing subtle relations between Daoism and popular religion. From an ethnographic perspective, ritual masters are an important group of ritual specialists in western Fujian in Southeast China. From a historical point of view, among contemporary ritual masters, we can find many elements that date back to antiquity. Thus the making and mastery of soldiers of the invisible world for exorcising evil beings to save the people is a characteristic feature. The tradition of ritual masters has played an important role not only in the daily life of the people, but also in regional socio-cultural processes. In this regard, the present work studies a myth of “magic warfare” between ritual masters and evil spirits that has found its place in a context of ethnic conflict in western Fujian. It also examines a cult of ritual masters which gave the opportunity for different groups to express their understandings regarding legitimacy, as well as ordination rituals and rituals to hide human souls from evil spirits, that is, life rites which contribute also to the construction of community life.

Sin Ka Kwan Almond. / Thesis (M.Div.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.ii / INTRODUCTION --- p.5 / Chapter Chapter 1: --- Chinese Community in Germany --- p.6 / Chapter 1. --- Historical Development of Chinese Settlement in Germany --- p.6 / Chapter 1.1. --- Chinese Labor Migration before WWII --- p.7 / Chapter 1.2. --- Chinese People in Germany in the Post WWII period --- p.8 / Chapter 1.3. --- Growing Chinese Migration since 1980s --- p.9 / Chapter 1.4. --- The Chinese in Germany Today --- p.10 / Chapter 2. --- Chinese Migrant Groups in Germany --- p.13 / Chapter 2.1. --- Chinese Students: --- p.14 / Chapter 2.2. --- Migrant Businesses: --- p.16 / Chapter 2.3. --- Illegal Immigrants / Asylum Seekers --- p.17 / Chapter 2.4. --- Chinese Descendants in Germany --- p.18 / Chapter 3. --- Conclusion --- p.18 / Chapter Chapter 2: --- Chinese Migrant Churches in Germany --- p.20 / Chapter 1. --- Terminology: Migrant Churches --- p.20 / Chapter 2. --- Chinese Christian Communities in Germany --- p.20 / Chapter 2.1. --- The F.M.C.D.-Centered Evangelical Network (德華福音友會） --- p.27 / Chapter 2.2. --- European- Chinese Theological Seminary (歐華神學院） --- p.29 / Chapter 2.3. --- The Chinese Overseas Christian Mission (基督教華僑佈道會) --- p.30 / Chapter 2.4. --- Chinese German Christian Fellowship (中德基督徒使團) --- p.31 / Chapter 2.5. --- Other Publications --- p.31 / Chapter Chapter 3: --- Difficulties Encountered by Chinese Missionaries --- p.32 / Chapter 1. --- Cultural Shock --- p.32 / Chapter 2. --- Missionary's Children --- p.33 / Chapter 3. --- Lack of Satisfaction - Mobility of the members --- p.34 / Chapter 4. --- Different Expectations on the Role of the Pastor --- p.35 / Chapter 5. --- Source of Funding --- p.36 / Chapter 6. --- Insufficient Attention Given by Church Authorities.. --- p.37 / Chapter Chapter 4: --- Reflections on Mission Strategies --- p.38 / Chapter 1. --- Openness to Inculturation --- p.38 / Chapter 2. --- Language and Theological Training --- p.40 / Chapter 3. --- Interreligious Dialogue --- p.41 / Chapter 4. --- Globalization and Mission --- p.42 / Chapter 5. --- Case Study ´ؤ Reflection for the Mission Strategy of a Local Church --- p.43 / Chapter 6. --- Is Pentecostalism a Way Out? --- p.46 / Conclusion --- p.48 / Bibliography --- p.49