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As a child god from Chinese legends, the figure of Nezha has a strong appeal to children, and his story has been adapted to various media. This article examines Nezha's image in three animated films, exploring how this figure has been altered to represent Chinese children and youth and symbolize their subjectivity. From a revolutionary hero to a socialized child and a rebellious adolescent, Nezha's transformations demonstrate how an iconic figure has been reimagined to reflect shifting socio-political contexts in the Chinese socialist and post-socialist eras. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the concept of God with a focus on the translation of God in the Chinese and Yoruba religious contexts. Translating the word God is of the essence when comparing concepts of god(s). The translation of the Christian God as Olodumare misrepresents the latter. As suggested by Africanists, there should be appropriate translations for God, Olodumare, and other African gods. As a preliminary comparative attempt, this article presents a case on the introduction of God to the Chinese people. The translation of God into Chinese reflects different views regarding the correlation between the Christian God and the Chinese gods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the emergence of a local deity named Dingxiang Wang in Qing imperial history in the mid-19th century in the city of Changsha in Hunan, China and proposes that the demobilized Xiang Army soldiers and their descendants retold this deity's story in ways that naturalized and justified their presence as settlers.

Written documents from rural north China are rare. This essay examines the newly-discovered records of a Shanxi village association, which was dedicated to the cult of the Horse King. The manuscripts detail the activities, revenues, and expenditures of the Horse King temple association over a hundred-year period (from 1852 until 1956). The essay examines them from social, cultural, and religious perspectives. The manuscripts reveal the internal workings and communal values of a late imperial village association. They unravel the social and economic structure of the village and the centrality of theater in rural culture. Furthermore, the manuscripts bring to the fore a forgotten cult and its ecological background: the Horse King was among the most widely worshiped deities of late imperial China, his flourishing cult reflecting the significance of his protégés – horses, donkeys, and mules – in the agrarian economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights differing ways of viewing Chinese concept of Tian like as one god among many, as an indifferent creator, or as the approachable God of the Bible. Topics including the God's accessibility and how He reveals Himself to humanity; ways in which communist scholars take Tian as a god who is either superior or inferior to other gods; and the Christian scholars' believe of Tian as the approachable and accessible God revealed by the Bible.

The article discusses Chinese Concept of Tian, and reports the popularity of Tian as indifferent God among animists in China. Topics discussed include views of Chinese concept of Tian, like Tian is a god, indifferent Creator; and ways in which Tian is the Yahweh revealed by the Bible, who desires to have intimate relationship with all Chinese throughout Chinese history.

Often referred to as a Victorian sinologist, James Legge has received much critical discussion in the discipline of Chinese studies. Yet few scholars have probed his role as a translator and the transmission of his theological ideas by examining his oeuvre. This article adopts the theoretical concepts of intertextuality and intertextual coherence to investigate Legge’s translation ofTian天,Di帝 andShangdi上帝, the three key terms that, in his view, convey the ancient Chinese notions of a supreme God. Drawing on Legge’s annotatedChinese Classicsand various other works on religious issues in ancient and dynastic China, the article looks at how he establishes an intertextual theology through a coherent synthesis of Ruist (Confucian) hermeneutics and Christian (Congregational Protestant) argumentation. Ultimately, Legge’s vision of a universal God as known in the histories of China and the West reveals his work’s far-reaching implications for contemporary cross-cultural communication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses early beliefs concerning Master Redpine, using his biography in the Uexian zhuan as a point of departure. After briefly discussing the Liexian zhuan account's relationship to ancient rain-making rituals, it illustrates Master Redpine's relationship with other ancient Chinese rain gods, with reference to the findings of Max Kaltenmark (1953), particularly through their associated colors (red and green) and movements. The author concurs with Kaltenmark's description of Master Redpine, on one level, as a kind of tree sprite, specifically of the Chinese tamarisk, and provides more supporting textual evidence for this. This paper then explores Master Redpine's role in the early Higher Clarity Daoism, in which Redpine becomes but one manifestation of a deity who can appear in many different guises--a primordial being of pure energy, the Star of Longevity, the planet Mars, a wandering teacher, and even a terrifying spirit who comes to mete out punishment. The possibility that Master Redpine is effectively the father of Yang Xi's (330-386) celestial spouse, Consort An, is explored. The paper finally returns to consider the significance of the placement of Master Redpine's biography at the head of the Liexian zhuan, and to contrast it with the last biography in order to bring out that text's broader perspective on the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to explore the different symbolic meanings of Nezha in Taiwan and their multiple implications in the socio-cultural context. Nezha, or the Third Prince (Santaizi), is a traditional protector deity in Taiwanese folk religion. According to folklore, Nezha was a rebellious trouble-bound child who eventually severed ties with his family. As a divine being, Nezha is regarded as the prototype of the rebellious youth, the "rebel without a cause," so to speak. The contemporary novelist Xi Song adapted the Nezha legend to a psychological fiction, titled Nezha in the Investiture of the Gods (1971), depicting the deity as a lonely hero. Perhaps it is Nezha's exceptional temperament, as described in mythology, that propelled him to be worshipped as a patron god by gamblers during the eighties and nineties, when the Mark Six Lottery in Taiwan was widespread but illegal. After the lifting of martial law, Nezha's courage in relation to rebellion continued to inspire artists such as Tsai Mingliang and Hou Chunming. Tsai's Rebels of the Neon God (1992) implies the adoption of Nezha as a metaphor to symbolize decadent teenagers in modern metropolitan Taipei. Hou's Anecdotes about Spirits and Immortals (1993) presents a strange Nezha, depicted as a rebellious infant in an avant-garde style. However, since the performance of Techno Nezha at the opening ceremonies of the 2009 World Games in Kaohsiung, these earlier images of Nezha have been transformed into an amusing childlike figure, which has since become an icon of Taiwanese popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary scholars and tourism officials of the Bai nationality in the Dali region of Southwest China's Yunnan Province present their village god (benzhu) worship as part of Bai ethnic religion and use the goddess Baijie as a paradigmatic example. In recent years Baijie has become an increasingly prominent face of Bai culture and religion in the Dali region and in China. Baijie's public face is not only ethnic but also gendered, as she appears as a paragon of feminine virtues. My research in villages that worship Baijie as their benzhu shows that most people involved in her worship--primarily older women--discuss Baijie in gendered terms but not ethnic terms. Furthermore, male and female villagers participate in her worship in different ways and to different degrees. This reveals the danger of uncritically accepting official discourse on ethnic religion, as rhetorics of ethnicity mask diversity within officially designated ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author responds to an article entitled "The Evolutionary Psychology of Chinese Religion: Pre-Qin HIgh Gods as Punishers and Rewarders," by scholars Kelly James Clark and Justin T. Winslett in a previous edition of the journal. He criticizes the article's premise and states that the premise contends that a Hebrew-Bible deity is at the core of early Chinese religion. He argues that the scholars unduly criticize sinologists concerning early Chinese deities and incorrectly assume that cognitive approaches to religious studies demand the recognition of a singular deity.

This article is based on ethnographic and documentary research that concerns shantangs, Chinese charitable temples, in Southeast Asia and in the Chao-Shan region of Guangdong in China. Unlike the shantangs as benevolent societies in late Ming and Qing China, the shantangs described in this article not only emphasize charitable activities, they are also temples that honor Song Dafeng as a deity. I show that the religious nature of these shantangs account for their resilience, while the tradition of charity helps to promote their secular and benevolent image, especially when there is a need to emphasize their existence as non-superstitious organizations. I also describe the agency of the local elite--and especially merchants--in the development of shantangs in Southeast Asia and China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The word "Jia" in "Jia Zhong" in Bao Xun, often found in the literatures, means "the tributes to God" and "Jia Zhong Yu He" refers to acquiring "Zhong" by solemn behaviors of sacrifice ceremony for "He", the river God, which was closely related to "Ming" (the nether world). Offering Sacrifices to gods or ancestors, Shang Jia Wei (the ninth head of the Shang State) not only united the people and gathered strength, but also endowed justice to attack a tribe called You Yi. It is apparent that "us Zhong Yu He" is a practice for acquiring god's justice through sincere worship. Therefore, "Zhong" has the features of fairness, justice, and impartiality, and the obtainment of "Zhong" means fair and just decision, which can be seen from the emperors' deeds of Tang, Yao, Shun, and Zhou Wen-wang. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a case study of Chinese American religious practice focusing on the Bok Kai Temple in Marysville, California. According to the authors, a process of misinterpretation and cultural production resulted in the symbolic transformation of the Chinese God of the North into a Chinese American god of water and flood. Details on the Bok Kai festival and parade associated with the temple are also presented.

Scholarship on religion in Early China (pre-220 BCE) has been predominantly concerned with the issue of ritual and has tended to be more concerned with placing this within the framework of Chinese history than that of religious studies. As such, other topics, such as deities, have either been neglected or subject to untested claims—often that deities do not exist and that Early China represents an atheist society, an argument that makes little sense in light of contemporary scholarship on religion in the field of cognitive science. This paper addresses the issue of deities in Early China by looking at how the High Deities of Early Chinese societies are represented in pre-Qin (pre-221 BCE) texts through statistical analysis of the corpus of texts and close readings of selected passages featuring High Deities. This paper shows that in contrast to some earlier appraisals of an absence of such agents, these texts are rife with depictions of the High Deities, and that they are often represented as moralizing agents that punish vice and reward virtue in others, something that is argued to be expected in evolutionary psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers the author's insights on the evolution of Chinese temples during the Chinese diaspora. The author says that Chinese migrants in Singapore have built temples which were dedicated to several gods including Qingshui Zushi, Mazu, and Xuantianma in the 1920s and 1930s. He states that the Chinese temples were affected by the urbanization in the country after 1965, in which some have disappeared while others have joined into different United Temples.

This article focuses on the Lingbao Scripture on the Numinous Stanzas of the Cavern Heavens, one of the fundamental texts of the Lingbao corpus. The title of the scripture was listed in the Wondrous Scriptures in the Perfect Script of Lingbao in Ten Sections, and the present text corresponds to number 3 of the Lingbao corpus. This scripture of the canonical Lingbao corpus is not included in the Ming Daoist Canon, and the present work appears to be incomplete. Two versions have been found among the Dunhuang manuscripts. Most of the scripture is in Pelliot 2399, but the opening passages are missing. Stein 2915 also includes part of this scripture, and Wushang piyao contains the Numinous Stanzas of the thirty-two heavens, which forms the core of this scripture. The scripture includes the Numinous Stanzas of the thirty-two heavens and a legend of deities chanting these stanzas. The legend describes a gathering at the court of Celestial Worthy and the sovereigns of the Thirty-Two Heavens sings hymns extolling the blissful joy. These stanzas occupy the major part of the present scripture and are reproduced here in sacred words, corresponding to the esoteric sounds of the heavens. This paper analyses the content of the Numinous Stanzas of the Cavern Heavens from various perspectives: cosmology, philology, the concept of salvation, the structure of the scripture, the reciting tradition, etc. I investigate these issues in order to reveal the main ideas of the Lingbao scriptural tradition in the Six Dynasties Period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis deals mainly with the reception of the film within and beyond the culture within which it originated, along the lines of Hans Robert Jauss's ‘Aesthetics of Reception.’ On the one hand, this ‘Wu-xia’ genre film, which is very popular in Chinese culture, set off a national and nationalistic fever in Taiwan, all the while stirring up controversies in the Chinese-speaking world. On the other hand, this same film that was quite foreign to Western culture nonetheless had a commercial success without precedent in France, all the while also inciting equally vehement contradictory reactions, for reasons totally alien to movie audiences from Chinese culture. Our analysis, which is centered on what in Chinese is called ‘qing-gong’ or, in a more or less scientific language, ‘the art of weightlessness,’ will attempt to get to the crux of these two systems of reference on which Chinese and French viewers depend. An examination and comparison of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix will lead us to the problem of the fabrication of the image of the perfect, supreme or even divine Superior Being, in both the Chinese and Western cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of god icons created by the Chinese villagers in Taiwan. The villagers believed that making god icons will maintain their relationships with the people and places as they symbolize the meeting ground of the human and the god-like agencies. They created these icons through figurines and statues. The villagers also conceived that spirit mediums mutually inflect and share their powers. Their belief is that gods inhabit icons, as well as talk to and through the villagers.

The article discusses the history of the political and military development of the Ming Dynasty in China. The article describes the political tensions between feudalistic and despotic tendencies among various factions among the Ming imperial state, focusing on the development of the Ming imperial army, the nature and characteristics of Ming imperial ideology, and the relation between imperial leaders and the local militia leaders. Also discussed are the economic systems of pre-Ming rural communities and the opportunities a Ming imperial state could offer their economies, the religious worldview of Ming imperialists and their understanding of animistic forces in the world, and the leadership of Ming general Ming T'ai-tsu.

The article focuses on the first of the constellations in the Star District System of ancient Chinese, which they regarded as the God of Longevity and was called Nan-ji-xian-weng. It describes Nan-ji-xian-weng as an old man with a bitemporal bossing of his forehead. It relates the bitemporal bossing of Nan-ji-xian-weng to the patients with craniosynostosis. It is speculated that the frontal mass is a benign growing tumor instead of a bony lesion.

Presents several developments related to medical science. Construction of an outhouse; Celebration of the chinese god's birthday; Substitution of sorbitol and fructose for ordinary sugar.