For.
Welcome everyone to the first of the four sessions this term in which our focus is mainly on revelations in Chinese, Indian and Mongolian religions.
Full details of the program can be found on our website.
Next to him, we will be having to further two mythological speakers Reinier Lang and Peer Kwabena,
and the details of their talks will soon be added to the website.
Our first speaker for this year, fossil crusader needs little introduction.
He's already well known in Oxford and across the world as a scholar of Chinese religions.
Russell is professor of Daoism and Chinese religion at the École Pratique Attitude in Paris, and he's also editor of Toon Power,
a major journal in Scientology and president of the French Association for Chinese Studies.
Most recently, he's focussed his research on late imperial Chinese religious practices and the production and dissemination of religious texts.
His recent book. Making the God Speak, published by Harvard Asia Centre in 2022, is widely acclaimed and I recommend you all to read it.
So Counsel, over to you. The production.
Sort of, yeah, revelation and divine literature across cultures, including within East Asia, but not limited to East Asia.
So even though it might at some point be a rather heavily logical book,
I attempted to reach out and try to start building comparative frameworks for discussion across religion and culture and languages,
and the fact that Rob and Anna and Yago very kindly invited me to present this book today in
this treasure seminar is the proof that maybe this this is an idea that has some future I mean,
comparing ritual means of producing revelation.
So I'm really extremely excited about it and almost thanks again for the invitation.
I will now be sharing my screen because I have a PowerPoint presentation.
Good. This should be working.
Yes. And. So because this is a book that tries to cover a lot of ground, arguably too much, and she's short like 30 or 40 minutes presentation.
I'm going to run a lot of things across a long period of time, about 20 years.
But hopefully we can have more specific focussed questions during the Q&A session.
So I will not go into detail during the presentation,
will try to give a general sense of what I was trying to achieve, to say the first word about with this book.
So depart a point or maybe rather depart a point.
I wrote this book as I was already working for a number of years on Chinese religious literature.
We are an ongoing website, open access website, project, mapping the whole of Chinese religious literature,
which is saying quite a lot and a good part of this religious literature circulating in book form or manuscript all now in digital form is revealed.
It's ascribed to the gods through many different ways and.
So this project is trying to make sense of the ways these books were produced and try to come up with a more useful or
workable typology of regulation that we have and scholars of Chinese region have been using for a number of years,
which really just reveals drive or often media mystique.
And even though some of this literature is in fact the producer of first good possession crossbreed mediums, not all of it is so.
And what I try to do is map the terrain,
even though I have more expertise of more experience of working with certain kind of Texas history spirit writing during the second millennium.
But I still try to place it in a as large as possible, a framework of all kinds of different types of civilisation.
It very much seems that the very idea or revelation that is God's taking the initiative to
impart teaching to humans appears around the the Han dynasty and the second millennium,
B.C., and the first two centuries of our era. And that is closely related to eschatology.
That is, gods produce tribulations because humans are going very fast down a slippery slope toward a final apocalypse,
and therefore it's high time for humans to be given tools to at least try and save themselves in this very close connection between revelation and
eschatology remains salient throughout all of the diverse modes of revelation during the first and second millennium and down to the present day.
So what happens during this 2000 years of regulatory E3 is that we have the continued developments.
Was ever a new modes of regulation appearing but the almost always remaining relevant there is
nothing ever disappears from the scene in terms of ways and means of production revelation.
But the what we might call the regulatory ecology grows ever more complex and diverse.
New modes of care serve fit, new niche, allow people to produce new, new kinds of reveal texts.
But the old modes remain a practice and active.
So I was trying to group with this rather fascinating diversity, an ever evolving diversity of modes of regulation.
I was hoping that maybe comparative work might help me and might help us to pitch the Chinese
ways of producing revelation in a larger framework and to help us think through this.
So this book is not really a full fledged attempt at such a comparative framework,
but I think it's a gesture in that direction and maybe offer a platform on which we can engage in a conversation.
And I hope that's what we will do today and we continue doing.
In the future. Hmm. Okay.
Now, the book begins with this very simple question, which is one entry point into the other, the various questions I just put to you.
And is what happens when the God is present or is made present?
An event described with words such as this, a God and I use God in most general sense, I mean a divine entity.
And that might include vivid eyes and body survivors and immortals and ancestors and all kind of beings.
And I'm not going into a theoretical typology here that would be very interesting, but it's not the topic for today.
So we have all these various divine entities arriving in the world and creating events described with words such as John, Pauline and Sasha.
And these verbs are extremely interesting because thanks to the the the peculiarities of Chinese grammar,
they can be both direct, acquisitive right and can mean both a God sense of its own accord or East Coast descent.
Right. So we can see I don't I dissent and you can also add the very same verb being used to describe a priest who makes a godly sign.
A priest, John, such and such aggression.
So this description roots are extremely numerous throughout Chinese literature,
including a geography and stories and official histories and so on and so forth,
clearly points to the fact that events were perceived as being extremely frequent.
But we are describing rather generic terms, and this is just an example I took from the introductory section of the book Taking from Geographic
Work beginning in the 13th century about a major God from China called Transcendent Lord,
who is private named Shushan. We have been ascribed numerous revelation of doctrinal scriptures, liturgical texts and other things as well.
And here we have a short extract that says In the year 1224, this transcendent law, John,
descended at a place called jingling and showed the teachings of loyalty and piety,
and all the throngs of people converted to him and followed is teaching, right?
So we here we are the remnants or even three scribe by just the single word meaning to descend.
To descend. So how can we analyse that kind of descriptions?
Um, of course, it would be possible to reconstruct a kind of stage event where priests or other people,
as just created, theatrically, created an event where God was felt to be present.
But I don't think that would lead us so very far.
I'm not so interested in the sort of we just phenomenology to try to understand
what happens in the minds of the people who witness to that event and reported it.
Because I think we just don't have phenomenology is absolutely fine if based on fieldwork here for even to the 13th century,
we just don't have the sources to do that.
What we have forever is indication on how regional specialists actually created the conditions for such events to take place.
Okay, so I've been conducting my analyses of regulatory events with within as much as possible.
And of course, we don't always have the three elements, but as much as possible within the triangle of sources,
the first accounts of the events themselves, either sometimes appended within the revealed text or embedded in the text or appended to it as sort of.
And that's quite common in the Chinese case. And at the end of the text, you have a short story describing the regulatory events,
or you have a geographic sources telling about saints and practitioners receiving regulations.
And you have all kinds of big stories or records of strange and anomalous and remarkable events.
Stories, basically. So we have lots of those.
And of course, we have contents of the regulation themselves.
And that's the two kind of sources that most scholars who have been interested in Chinese regulation have looked at.
What they have much less often paid attention to is the third tip of our triangle, which is the liturgical prescriptions,
the ritual methods through which these events are produced or at least made possible.
That's not always available in all modes of regulation.
But there is a surprising, surprisingly rich and diverse body of such liturgical prescription and looking closely at those and liturgical
texts in connection to the contents of the relation and the narrative accounts below is to go and deep,
go further into an understanding.
What really happened in the story, such as the one I just mentioned,
where we say that the God was as it descended or was made to descend and teach to humans.
So because I think this is the maybe the the more original aspect of my work,
I will focus more on this question of the ritual methods and what the manuals,
the liturgical manuals tell us about the the context, the conditions and the procedures for producing the revelations.
Okay. Now, based on this question of the the existence or lack thereof of the known codified ritual maidens for ritual production,
the the fact that the circumstances for the relation might be described or not.
And a third. Criteria for building ecology of relation, which is the presence and witness.
Winter different was a collective event or if only one person was made and counter God or the text itself without the presence of other human beings.
Combining this three area allowed me to build this five fold typology,
and I'm going to go through it and describe each of the five types quickly and obviously
these as both the beauty and limitation of ideal types in obviously in most cases,
relation kind of overlap the boundaries and do not sit very neatly and squarely with one particular types.
But I still think that these are useful for us to understand this ecology and how different modes of creating regulation are also regulated
to relate to the content of the relation and feel different needs and serve different purposes and can be complementary to each other.
Right? So these five types are not at all this way of seeing how different religious traditions do regulations of think of regulations differently.
Each of these five types can be, I mean, very often within one given religious tradition in the Chinese world,
the different types can be found next to each other, and they serve different purposes and they complement each other.
Okay. Okay. So first the the first type of mode will be extremely familiar with all of you.
So I don't need to explain much further.
I call that the supra type for obvious reasons.
The fact that this type was suddenly imported into the Chinese cultural world through
my expansion into China beginning of the first second century of the common era,
we don't see any similar thing existing in the Chinese world before that.
And I, as you can see from this table,
I define a certain type of relation as a revealed text that do not that does
not say anything about the circumstances in which it was revealed to humans.
Surprise, I usually reveal or spoken by the Buddha as to or deities or very sad of or divine entity in a not a time and not a place.
So the scene of the relation is not a scene that takes place in human history and we are not told of the where and when,
how this text first preached in heaven reached humanity.
And if so, did this model prove extremely popular as the widespread circulation of sutras in Chinese world attest,
both translated to tries and homemade so-called apocryphal sutras, which, as you all know, are extremely numerous and varied.
And this model was adopted by the diaries to have their own similar.
They're not called sutras, of course, but they are clearly of the same type.
We also have scenes of passion, large or primordial, various gods preaching in heaven to other gods.
And then we are not told when this was translated because this open often implied a process of translation into human language.
How this translation, what mission it was done.
So that's type one to encounter.
Here we have an event that is situated within human history.
We are told who, when and where a given human obtained encounter with the divine being transmitted either
orally or in a writing teaching because that particular human deserves such initiation,
often as a result of his high merits in terms of, you know, moral good actions and or spiritual self cultivation.
And this encounter, even though it might be located often on sacred mountains,
what happened in far away in remote places, off limits to ordinary humans.
And there was no witness. So this person may even then go back among ordinary mortals and tell them how he benefited from this revelation.
But there was no witness, and we don't know how this happened.
And sometimes this is described actually a chance encounter,
not necessarily something that was predictable from the degree of spiritual maturity or advancement of that particular aesthetic.
Sometimes people just encounter gods by chance and the gods teach them certain practices.
Useful knowledge, first encounter, third type is spirit possession.
Then this is of course extremely common because spirit mediums have been probably the most common type of
ritual specialist in Chinese society for as long as we have written evidence and they still are today,
and respected mediums enter and let gods possess them and answer specific question pertaining to topical questions from individual clients.
And that would not qualify as regulation as I define it, which needs to have some sort of universal value and import.
But sometimes it does, and we have written evidence for this as early as the medieval periods, which in Chinese terms would be third to sixth century.
We have story of spirit, medium revealing future events in terms of dynastic change or major wars,
or providing teachings about self cultivation or telling humans about retribution
after death and the way this would cultivate to avoid punishment in house.
So that kind of contents that qualify as a revelation in my definition open can happen through spirit possession.
And so in that particular type we have circumstances described because we know not necessarily the name of the spirit mediums sometimes,
but at least where and when. And we have witnesses.
So people spirit possession normally, not necessarily, but usually happens in a community setting.
And we have people acting as a witness and writing reports about it because the mediums and like the shaman,
the medium himself or herself cannot remember anything that happens during possession.
That's the very principal possession.
And therefore we actually need witness to have a revelation through spirit possession to be recorded because we are suffering self cannot recall it.
Right? So. So gods come to humans to speak to humans.
As encounters with and liking encounters in possession.
That's a communal event, not a solitary event type for which I call visualisation is in many ways parallel and opposed to possession.
It's the kind of practice that some scholars have described as self-possession.
It's about creating encounters with gods in one's mind.
And so inviting guards to join the subject within his own internal mental space.
And it's a circumstance as described because the idea the virtuoso private practising visualisation is named.
We know when where all of this happens. There was witness that cannot be witness in any witnessing visualisation because this happens not in public.
It is not accessible. The event is not accessible through the senses to order people.
Other people might be present, but they would not feel or anything because the event is taking place within the mind of the of the practitioner.
Nothing and no, nothing audible, visible, sensible, would be accessible to others.
And by contrast, the spirit possession, the ritual meadows is known and codified.
I'm not saying that's a strict possession is not a codified method, but it's not supposed to be something that is reproduced.
The whole story of the narration of events,
of sacred possession is that the gods as full agency and decides whether they
should come down and possess the medium or not and what they are going to say.
By contrast, because it's the arejust specialists who as well as agency and who can call and summon gods to come.
And for that reason, the visualisation is qualified or there is a method.
Then you can learn and train your self in and follow and that will produce the desired event.
And finally, type 535.
Yeah, thank you for bearing with me through this rather long winded transcription of my typology.
That's really the core of what I wanted to share with you today type physical presence, type revelation,
because we have all three elements and that that is the document that seems to appear in the historical records later than to the first four type,
all of which are already present in a well-documented medieval time.
So again, through a sixth century presence type seems to appear around the 10th century.
It is very closely linked to a new wave of Daoist ritual methods and practices largely linked to.
Exhausted, seeking therapeutic rights that is based on the active and sensible presence of martial dogs.
Very useful deities.
Especially not as it not only. But especially son of.
Who are the actors of Divine Law. And therefore any sinners and demons and demons and attacks their followers.
The presence type revealed that revelatory events are so described in terms of where and where they happen.
They are usually come in all but its part of communal celebration and rituals for the eyewitnesses and the actually
a major element in presence upregulation is that the audience can be made to feel the presence of the gods,
either see them or hear them, or feel them in another way.
And quite often all of those sensory experiences together and the ritual methods
for producing the divine presence is known and actually described in the writer,
which details in the ritual liturgical manuals of these new Daoist movements that was alluding to and that are found in the Daoist canon.
Okay. So here we have a typology that is chronological in a certain way.
It tells about the the gradual unfolding of a full array of different modes that produce different kinds of text and that uh,
uh, certain sometimes like cross fertilise and stone, all kinds of new ways of producing reveal text.
But these are the three and five main types under which I think we can sort out the,
the stories that we have and the texts, the text that that we have.
Okay. So now I'm and maybe I'll use like ten more minutes to talk a little bit more about this.
The last of these five type represents Ty because this is the one I've been working most with.
And actually the bulk of the book is about this.
Um, so in this particular type, the presence type, the role of the priest creating the divine presence that lead to regulation is, is crucial.
And so these priests rely on qualified methods.
They are trained for this, and they are often described in the historical sources, actually masters of creating divine presence.
And people go to them saying, Yeah, master, please, I would like to see or hear decent that of God, please make it present for us.
Right. So this is really. They are. They are.
The tool of their trade, right?
Making people feel the presence of the God and being able to converse with the God and receive teachings or instructions from the gods.
So these techniques are very formalised, which does not mean that it's common knowledge.
These mythological manuals were transmitted within priestly lineages from ascetic disciples, so they were not like open access and pursue knowledge.
But still there are the qualified and copied and now they are available to us because
the diaries canon has become fully available to scholars during the 20th century.
So witnesses and so and within because they are often we have lots of descriptions that that
show that these were group events and and really shaped by group dynamics orchestrated by
the identity of the priest and also the agency of the God in these prison style rituals that
God is usually described as a light to the priest with different kinds of relationship,
sometimes swear and brothers or uh, initiated, um, priest as initiated disciples of the gods.
But know, I think whatever is the case, having a very close bond and a relationship that where the the rights and duties of both parties,
priests and gods hockey is spelled out, and therefore even the gods of course have their own agency and can decide what to do in and what they say.
But priest are some sort of control over them and can make them speak and read depending on the mastery of their ritual, not just on their own merits.
And so there are several subtypes of this present presence type of creating divine presence and revelation.
And I should add one extremely important point, which is these ritual techniques were and still are,
because these are all living traditions usually used to create divine presence without any particular desire for full fledged revelation, right?
They are usually used in the course of producing rituals for asking for a salvation for the dead or healing of the humans,
or expelling of plague demons or all that kind of things.
And that does not, as I use the term, in the time of revelation, but they can in certain circumstances.
If if one is really interesting in obtaining teaching instruction from the gods, then the gods.
My priest can use the same techniques to ask for scriptures or instructions or other kinds of discursive contents from the gods.
But they are usually the statements are usually used for creating divine presence without a revelation.
Okay. There are several subtypes, all using the same word, same verb, gene descent or make descent,
which I introduced earlier in the year in a talk in which are qualified by the
kind of sensory events that this ritual prediction of divine presence leads to.
And of course, these are not exclusive. Often we have a combination of these different sensory experiences.
So one is the physical appearance we see, the gods we see is shaped, we see moving.
Right. The voice, the Jungian or you means talk or talk.
So we hear. And then the priest produce the event of hearing the voice of the gods, the writing,
which by the 12th 13th century, becomes the most common mode because it's practically useful in ritual context.
The Irish ritual is all about exchanging documents between humans and gods to the humans burned petitions, prayers and so on and so forth.
And the gods respond in kind, right? So they approve the documents in the right answer.
So the issue formal documents like ordination documents or that kind of problems, that kind of things, right?
So making the gods variety actually are extremely a crucial in making Daoist ritual work.
So spirit writing becomes the most common subtype of presence type ritual.
But still we have to understand it in a framework of order subtext.
And another important means is dreams inducing dreams, and they are also rituals.
For that time. We are in Chinese world about temples where people go to obtain dreams from the gods.
And this is also induced by priests in pretty much the same way that the priests also produced the writing.
All the speaking presence of the gods.
And so I was saying just a moment ago, this.
Even scriptwriting can obviously be used for all kinds of purposes writing poetry, conversing with the dead,
for using scriptures for all kinds of things, and in the modern period, using spirit photography or spray painting all kinds of documents on paper.
I think the original impetus for the development of this technique that eventually became the most common way of producing
revelation in Chinese societies originally was getting a written response from the gods in the course of performing in ritual,
and so making sure that the ritual worked its purpose.
And in many liturgical manuals from the early modern period, which means elevens to 15th century.
We have a clear and straightforward explanation saying that when a priest sends the documents to the gods,
there are several ways through which he or she usually he can obtain a response.
Technical degree, spiritual term is boring and that can be divination blocks.
This is very easy to manipulate, but it's it's a bit crude.
You basically when you throw the blocks,
you basically get a yes or no visual visualisation that is getting an audience with the God and hearing the gods response to the to the repressed,
the dreams or writing.
But when you do documents like ordination or appointment among the divine bureaucracy certificates, that kind of things then spread.
Writing is most definitely the most convenient way to obtain what one needs from the gods.
There are some early cases where a spread writing is not yet full fledged writing that is legible Chinese language,
but are signs but written on an active, active table covered with ash that is prepared for the gods to walk onto what to write into.
And here, in a ritual liturgical manual of the Mongolian period, 13 and 15, 14th century.
We add here.
Description. For all the signs that the gods might write on the ash and how to translate this into normal language, so we have that kind of thing.
But then this quickly gave way to real, directly written and legible language written with Chinese characters.
And so this is spirit writing. And so we see spirit writing appearing as a ritual tool among the exhausted priests of the early modern period.
And then it becomes much more popular and much more widely practised around the turn of the 16th to 17th century.
And by the time it becomes the year, by and large, the most common way of producing revelation, of producing morality books,
doctrinal scriptures, poetry, instruction for self cultivation, and so on and so forth in Chinese world.
And we have and this is still the case today in spell running is very much a living tradition.
Expanding in the PRC, in the People's Republic of China, still practised more or less discretely in certain parts.
But it's practised very openly and very commonly through the rest of the Chinese world and Taiwan, Hong Kong, Asia and Europe, North America, etc.
Um, and we have, and this is a rather this both common and easy.
These are reasonably easy ritual techniques to learn.
And as a result, we have tens of thousands of books that are produced,
full speed of writing and still new ones appearing by the day and usually immediately published on the Internet.
And so we have all kinds of groups, all kind of contents. But the key element is that the disciples are here.
We have the picture that was taken in, in a small spread writing shrine in an apartment in Hong Kong.
We have one medium who we are the there the writing instrument, writing on the ash table so that one person.
But we have other techniques which two mediums and you have also techniques without a medium.
We are doing the writing in just the writing increments and move by itself.
So it's actually the whole family of different spirit writing techniques that we encompass within the larger category of spirit writing.
One thing, all of those different practices and traditions for writing have in common is that the members.
So that includes the medium here and the person sitting next to her, which are also a very crucial role,
is noting down what is written character by character on the table onto paper.
And of course the guard can ask, do that, do proofreading and correct anything that was written down mistakenly,
but also the other members of the group that are not necessarily acting as medium themselves but are still,
you know, taking part in the event, co-producing the event,
maybe paying for the printing of this revelation and performing rituals and doing charity works and all that kind of things.
And all of the members are taken as personal disciples by the gods.
And issued this personal bond between disciple and God that explained the whole emotional charge and the dynamics of the spirit writing groups.
This is an opportunity for inspiration is always there in the spirit of writing tradition, sometimes more prominently.
Sometimes I can background, but it's always there.
Spirit writing is described by the God themselves as a very efficient and time effective
and cost effective techniques to reaching out to many humans in a short period of time.
And he gives a voice to literally thousands of different spirits from the high gods that speaks to him
throughout the Chinese world to more local gods who only have one particular mediums giving a voice to them.
So we got through three writing wise, all kind of things.
So this is a very quick typology of contents morality, books, scriptures, liturgy, angiography,
spiritual conservation instructions, records of discussion between the humans and their divine masters.
And once. And time is running short.
Maybe one more minute about the kind of things that are not actually in the book, but which I am doing now,
is just a preview of the next step of my work around sort of running in the whispered writing shapes the life of individuals that take part in them.
As, as I said before, looking at the,
the intense emotional sociability between the human and the gods and how this shapes individual and collective lives and the way through it.
Writing allows for activation of both the humans who build themselves into unique,
strong personas through their interaction with the gods to the God themselves as
well grow into personas the more they speak and interact and talk to humans.
And so the gods express themselves. They all want to have their personal style.
They all speak and write in their own personal style, their own individual stories,
and the love to tell you stories and to remind our humans who you are, to take part of wisdom in those writing societies of how how unique they are.
And this is not really last. I'm one of the things I'm doing now is using a circle social network analysis to look
at the connections between humans and gods and also between the gods themselves.
And this is just a visually visualisation of a dataset.
I've made of 13 different sprites writing outers that involves almost 500 gods, and all the black dots on this visualisation are gods.
So you see smaller gods only on the outside of the visualisation.
At the centre you have larger gods with very a strongly connected between each other and to all of different human groups.
And this kind of is yours. And I think all of us understand the dynamics of through the writing and how this is a self producing dynamic.
And the more gods become central and talk to different gods and different humans, then they grow into bigger person and then want to speak even more.
So I'll stop at that. Well, thank you for the song.
That was a really wonderful summary of your work and thanks for that extra bit.
That's not in the book. Very interesting.