Tian Hai talks about The Guan Yu Faith in China

Tian Hai (Barend ter Haar) (Zhang Jing)

Guan Yu was defeated and captured by the Wu army, and then became an important deity in the long history of evolution, revered as Guan Gong or Guan Emperor, and is still revered by the people. Barend ter Haar, a professor of sinology at the University of Hamburg in Germany, combines a large number of historical relics and fieldwork materials to examine Guan Yu's path to godhood, trace the historical evolution of related beliefs, and reveal the key role of oral culture in it. Professor Tian Hai has taught at Leiden University and Heidelberg University, and from 2013 to 2018, he was the Shaw Chair Professor of Chinese of Oxford University, and his main research areas include traditional Chinese religious culture, shamanic culture, contemporary Chinese religion, Chinese literature, etc., and his representative works include "White Lotus Religion in Chinese History", "Storytelling: Witchcraft and Scapegoating in Chinese History", "Rituals and Myths of the Heaven and Earth Society: Creating Identity", etc. On the occasion of the publication of the Chinese translation of Guan Yu, the Shanghai Review of Books invited Professor Tian Hai's protégé and Associate Professor Wang Xing of the Department of History of Fudan University to interview Mr. Tian Hai on the traditional Chinese belief in Guan Yu.

Guan Yu: History and Imagination by All Mortals, by Tian Hai[Netherlands], translated by Wang Jian, Yin Wei, Yan Aiping, qu Xiaoyu, Nova Publishing House, February 2022, 348 pp. 78.00 yuan

Can you please briefly introduce the origin and research experience of the book "Guan Yu: History and Imagination from All Gods"?

Tian Hai: The background of the study is more complicated, and I can only briefly say it. My interest in this topic first began in the period of staying in Japan in 1982-1984. I was interested in solving historical problems with maps and statistics, and that was before computers became widespread. At that time, I thought that scholars could answer the question of the succession of oral and written traditions of cultural phenomena by studying the distribution of a certain cultural phenomenon on the geographical image and the timeline of these geographical distribution changes, especially how the oral and written texts corresponding to the beliefs of certain important gods in religious cultures were produced—and the important deity belief of Guandi should be understood in such a framework. But the plan was interrupted by a doctoral dissertation on the White Lotus Cult, and at the same time another American sinologist, Valerie Hansen, was doing similar research, so I did not continue the project. In addition, the material about the Guandi faith was huge, and it was difficult for me to find a better narrative mode to integrate such a large amount of material, and the whole study was temporarily shelved. To my dismay, I had found a lot of interesting material about Guan Yu's faith in Japanese libraries, but I didn't publish the results at that time. When I reopened the study in 2012-2016, I found that many scholars, especially their Chinese counterparts, had begun to take a very active turn on the topic and published a lot of research literature. At this point, it has become very easy to integrate research materials using electronic tools, especially databases, so my research results seem to be a completely new research based on the previous research and database data of the past two years, but in fact my idea of understanding the relationship between the oral history of the Guan Yu faith and the geographical and cultural distribution was conceived about forty years ago when I was conducting literature research in Japan. In addition, the study of Guan Yu's sacred transmission is another source of inspiration for me, which is mentioned in my book.

In your research and fieldwork, which region and historical period did you most impress the Guan Gong faith? Can you briefly describe the more interesting experience?

Tian Hai: When I started this research, especially when I started to get in touch with first-hand historical materials, I found a lot of interesting content. For me, the entire historical evolution of the Guan Yu faith in China is like a huge puzzle. But if I had to choose the places that impressed me the most in my research, there were many interesting clues that could help me understand the overall context of Guan Yu's faith. For example, the discovery of a legend of a dragon in a certain site helped me better understand the early guanyu myth. Behind these seemingly small clues is actually a microcosm of the entire Guan Yu belief context in a certain period. I was also surprised that the religious common sense we have always known about Emperor Guan was actually based on religious traditions that emerged very late rather than ancient customs. Another topic that amazes me the most but is not detailed in the book is the new dimension of The Guandi faith that developed in the late Qing Dynasty—the Guandi as a savior and the god of support. Fortunately, another French sinologist, Vincent Goossaert, and other scholars have been discussing the topic on an ongoing basis.

In your book, it is mentioned that the Guan Gong faith, which is based on oral culture, may be the earliest basic form of transmission, rather than the belief of Buddhism and Taoism, can you explain in detail the basic ideas of studying oral transmission of religion through historical texts? What is a "verbally transmitted" religion?

Tian Hai: Generally speaking, the study of oral traditions will face great difficulties, because the oral things of the past cannot leave too many historical clues, let alone the video and audio materials of modern society. But oral traditions are often easy to imagine and deduce with common sense. For example, in a family or large kinship clan unit, it is very common to raise children and spread some gossip and anecdotes within the family. In my own family, we often tell a story about my great-grandfather (my grandfather's grandfather), who lived most of his life in the nineteenth century and died in 1925. He was a very active Dutch politician of the late nineteenth century. He once received a hare hunted by his constituents as a gift, but this can also be interpreted as a bribe. My great-grandfather had a strong sense of morality and principle, so that even the suspicion of taking bribes was unacceptable to him, but he could not return the gift, because the hare had begun to decay when it reached him. So his family ate the hare and sent the equivalent cash to the voter. I'm telling this interesting family anecdote here to show that my family has been repeatedly orally spreading the story for more than a century, and it's interesting to note that today's interview is the only source of the story written in the twentieth century, and it was translated into a Chinese version (hence the huge time difference between oral and written traditions).

It can be seen that there are obvious difficulties in studying oral traditions, but they are not entirely impossible. Once a written text is involved in a culture at a certain point, it is possible that the content transmitted orally will be written down by chance. Writing texts may affect people's lives, but the more common phenomenon is that oral culture actually dominated people's lives (at least in ancient times). Understanding spoken texts through written texts is a very important shift in research thinking. The problem, then, is only for those who study history—and I am personally a group of people who are well versed in the written and higher education system of thought—and it is actually very difficult for these professional historians to accept the importance of oral tradition psychologically. I have detailed the enormous influence of oral storytelling in another book, Storytelling: Witchcraft and Scapegoating in Chinese History, and Guan Yu's research is another powerful example. When I started my first professional research project in 1983 as an international student in Japan, I was already highly skeptical (an accepted academic view) that the cult of gods in late Chinese empire originated in written texts like the Ming Dynasty Romance of the Three Kingdoms. So I began to collect information on the dates of the establishment and reconstruction of various Guan Yu shrines. As I have explained in detail in my own book, if the guan yu cult continued to spread under the influence of printed books, then we should be able to find evidence that Guan Yu worship activities and shrines were centered on literati groups—for example, the Guan Yu faith in the early lower Yangtze River should have the largest number of literati followers—but this was not the case. In addition, the legend of Guan Yu should also be consistent with the printed novel, but unfortunately the historical data cannot support this. I have explained all of this in detail in this book.

Can it be understood that The Guan Emperor, who appeared as the protector of Buddhism and Taoism, was actually a result of the increasingly mature oral transmission of guan yu beliefs that influenced elite religions?

Tian Hai: Actually, the terms "Buddhism" and "Taoism" here are very problematic, because the ancient Chinese rarely regarded them as independent and unrelated religious categories. But more importantly, I'm trying to suggest that there's actually no difference between the Buddhist and Taoist versions of Guan Yu. In any context, Guan Yu's main role is to exorcise demons—whether it's the evil dragon that causes drought (a legend related to the Tendai Sect's Wisdom) or the demon that causes natural disasters in Xiezhou Salt Lake in Shanxi or anywhere else—and this image was originally unrelated to Buddhism and Taoism.

You mention in the book that not only the religious discourse of Buddhism and Taoism, but even the history books and literature related to the Three Kingdoms period are not the origin of the earliest Guan Gong belief, but rather the miracle of spiritual experience that contributed to the collective worship of Emperor Guan in different regions. But it may seem counterintuitive in this respect that a region, when establishing a belief in a certain deity and figurifying it through religious objects, spaces, and rituals, does not seek information about the identity of the deity from the archetypes of some elite text? Or is there a historical narrative of oral beliefs that actually persists for a long time between different faith groups?

Tian Hai: It's very interesting, in fact, your question should be a presupposition that most readers of my book will have in their minds. But why don't literate people necessarily create their own culture from written texts? This in itself is counterintuitive. If this is the case, how exactly do religious cultures in areas with very low literacy rates draw inspiration from written texts? I am not opposed to the influence and importance of the written text on religious life, but I also believe that this influence of the written text has gradually developed over time, and that we need to carefully assess and study the extent of this influence. We cannot assume that written texts will always be the sole source of oral culture and practice. Guan Yu's case provides us with strong evidence that the spread of religious worship is very different from the cultural distribution of novels and reading texts. In contrast, I think theatrical culture is very relevant to the spread of such beliefs, but the characters with obvious religious symbols in a series of Guan Yu plays are Yama and Guan Yu, not important deities in Guan Yu worship. So I think any researcher doing fieldwork in relatively remote and low-literacy villages will emphasize that oral culture is still very important. I have just told my family anecdotes, even if it is not a low literacy rate family, oral transmission has always been the main body of family history. My ancestors immigrated to the Netherlands from Germany in the seventeenth century (i.e., the late Ming Dynasty of China), mostly experts in legal literature, and for more than two hundred years after the seventeenth century, they were also rich elite families in the Netherlands. My politician grandfather, who was just mentioned, was a judge and law professor and a university superintendent. It is clear that telling and passing on an oral history that is completely detached from the text is also very common in the so-called "cultural family". So as a response to your question and to your Chinese readers, I can only say that the culture of writing may have had an influence on oral culture, but the extent of this influence needs to be proven (or falsified). Until then, we cannot assume that the phenomenon of oral culture must have originated from writing.

You mention in the book that you oppose the "standardization" of religious deities in the late Chinese Empire in academic circles, can you talk about it in detail in conjunction with the issue of Guan Yu's faith?

Tian Hai: Since 1985, the famous sinologist James Watson has raised the issue of the "standardization" of Chinese folk religions. In fact, this is a mistake that anthropologists often make when reading historical materials uncritically. In Hua Chen's theory, he mainly examined fang zhi in the Fujian region of the late empire, and then found that the beliefs of Tianhou Niangniang or Mazu were widely spread here, and the literature in these areas no longer made much reference to the beliefs of other gods. Therefore, he believes that this proves the standardization of the folk theological system in late imperial China. He actually made a very obvious mistake, that is, he ignored that the local chronicle itself only respected the local beliefs recognized by the government's official titles, and basically did not contain beliefs that were not included in the orthodox theological system by the government and elite groups. Since the Mazu faith was a regional religion recognized by several officially recognized regions in the region at that time (like the Guan Yu cult), this belief actually seems to be constantly replacing some of the original worship systems. But I've already proven Warachia's conjecture false in a series of papers from the 1990s (e.g. "The Genesis and Spread of Temple Cults in Fukien", in: E.B. Vermeer ed., Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th Centuries, Leiden, pages 349 – 390；"Local Society and the Organization of Cults in Early Modern China: A Preliminary Study" in: Studies in Central and East Asian Religions 8: pages 1-43）。 In fact, Hua Chen's conjecture is basically inaccurate in southern China, especially in the Yangtze River Basin, and only has a certain applicability in parts of northern China. My own paper was not taken seriously at first, and Hua Chen's work had a huge impact, resulting in the acceptance of a standardized research framework by the academic community.

How do you understand the American scholar Valerie Hansen's assertion that religions in China have become more practical and market-oriented since the Song Dynasty? Do you think that the beliefs of Guan Yu in the three generations of the Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties have become more and more practical?

Tian Hai: Actually, Rui Lewei is a very good friend of mine (see the preface to this book for details), but I don't completely agree with her point of view, and I think she probably won't mind. Chinese religious culture, including what we call doctrinal Buddhism, Taoism, and other types of religions, has a very practical side. Both Ian Reader and George Tanabe have proposed that Buddhism has had a very practical aspect since its inception. If we read the Lotus Sutra, we will find out how much "practical" content there is for life in this world! Of course, this is not surprising at all. Only a very, very, very small number of people are concerned with the philosophical, doctrinal aspects of religious culture. Most people have specific, personal demands and purposes for religious practice. What we can speculate is that the unprecedented commercial expansion that began in the eleventh century clearly affected the religious life of Chinese. People's practical needs, including those at the commercial level, are also increasingly complex, so it's no surprise that we can certainly find growing themes about miracles and spiritual stories. But this is not because the nature of religion in China has changed since the eleventh century, religious life has always been closely linked to social, economic, and political development. I can only say that I am still a fan of Max Weber and Karl Marx on this subject, because the cultural thinking shaped by economic life has always interacted with religious ethics in terms of the practical aspects of religion.

Do you think that on the whole, the Guan Yu faith in china in history can reflect some characteristics of the spiritual world and cultural life of the Chinese?

Tian Hai: I'm not quite sure how to evaluate the spiritual world, but many people are inspired by Guan Yu's story. I may see these stories as stories that are historically distorted, but that doesn't mean the content and impact of the stories can be ignored. Case in point: I personally don't think Guan Yu was really a very loyal man, as he joined an early third-century uprising against tianzi and the imperial court. But perhaps according to historical records, he was extremely loyal to the small group headed by Liu Bei. In the sacred religious narrative of Emperor Guandi's history, he is not only a representative of loyalty and integrity, but also a compassionate deity who is very concerned about the fate of the local people, which I think is the reason for Guan Yu's prominent position in the activities of the 19th and twentieth centuries, because he is regarded as a reliable prophet. This is probably a detail that reflects the common value orientation of Chinese.

How do you understand Guan Yu beliefs in the contemporary Chinese-speaking world? Are there any new changes and phenomena in Guan Yu beliefs in the north and south of the mainland, as well as in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and other places?

Tian Hai: My monograph does not focus on the development of Guan Yu's faith outside of ancient China. This is another grand topic. But I'm very interested in a phenomenon that continues to spread outside of Chinese mainland, Guan Yu, which has a long history even in Vietnam.

What would you like to say to readers of the Chinese translation? How would you like Chinese readers to read your book?

Tian Hai: I hope that Chinese readers, through my book, will begin to really pay attention to the oral traditions in their own culture, rather than seeing them as an unimportant phenomenon under the writing tradition. In addition, I am very happy to be able to share my own analysis and ideas with others. I have benefited greatly from my previous field research in China and Japan, but I also have some differences with Chinese and Japanese scholars. So I think it's a great pleasure to be able to continue the good, healthy academic debate through the Chinese translation of this book. I look forward to being able to travel to China again!