De Jiao: A Religious Movement in Contemporary China and Overseas: Purple Qi from the East by Bernard Formoso (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 91 De Jiao: A Religious Movement in Contemporary China and Overseas: Purple Qi from the East BERNARD FORMOSO. Singapore: NUS Press, 2010. xvii, 259 pages. ISBN 9789971 -69-492-0. US$28.00, S$38.00 paper. “Purple qi is coming from the East and is sending an auspicious branch, as well as a beautiful and pure landscape to bodhisattvas. A pavilion must be erected in the Southern breeze and brightness of the good yang; from this time on, the virtue will be prized in this world”. Thus spoke the oracle of a Tang dynasty Taoist master to an early founder of the De Jiao 德教 movement. Bernard Formoso’s remarkable book examines a religious movement which had first started as a response to the Sino-Japanese war and creeping secular materialism in the Chao-Shan 潮汕 region of Guangdong province, and the dynamics of its development overseas, particularly in Southeast Asia. For many specialists as well as the general public, Chinese popular religion tends to revolve around shenism or baibai (拜拜): the seeking of favors from an array of deities for often personalized benefits such as health, good fortune, and luck, through methods such as divination, offering of sacrifices, and the burning of paper money and incense. This is the commonly known aspect of Chinese popular religion that can be found in countless public temples that promise responsiveness to all requests (you qiu bi ying 有求必應) and embodied in the religious festivals scattered throughout the Chinese lunar calendar. In contrast, Formoso’s study of the De Jiao, a religious movement based on spirit-writing and on the tradition of charitable associations (shantang 善堂), offers us precious insights into another important aspect of Chinese popular religion that has tended to be overlooked: the universalist and salvationist orientation that is the main feature of what has been variously termed “redemptive religious societies” or “moral uplifting societies.” These religious movements are usually highly syncretic in nature, and some, like both the De Jiao and the Yiguan Dao 一貫 道 in Malaysia and Singapore, combine the Prophet Mohammad and Jesus Christ with Śākyamuni, Confucius, and Laozi as part of their religious doctrine of the unity of the Five Teachings (wujiao heyi 五教合一). One of the most impressive aspects of the book is its multi-site ethnography. Over three periods, Formoso conducted extensive surveys among the De Jiao congregations in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and mainland China. He shows how the diffusion of a religion can be intimately linked with economic and political processes by examining the spread of De Jiao in Southeast Asia in the context of regional economic boom (when Chinese entrepreneurship was favored) and important political changes (democratization in Thailand and political stabilization in Malaysia and Singapore). Formoso’s multi-site approach provides him an almost unparalleled comparative perspective of the De Jiao movement, and hence he is able to offer analyses of considerable breadth. 92 Journal of Chinese Religions In the case of Thailand, Formoso finds that the De Jiao adopts a relatively outward orientation focusing on charitable work, receiving crucial support from important members of the Thai political, business, and religious elite. According to him, this is a reflection of the success of the assimilation of the Chinese community into the larger Thai society, such that ethnic Chinese generally do not feel a strong need to “preserve Chineseness” by means of their religious and cultural practices. Hence, the De Jiao congregations in Thailand, unlike those in Malaysia, do not offer classes on Chinese calligraphy or poetry, taijiquan 太極拳, and qigong 氣功, and are not engaged in active sponsorship of Chinese local schools. The situation in Malaysia is substantially different, in that the assimilation of the Chinese community into a national culture defined primarily in terms of Malay cultural practices and Islam is fraught with a certain degree of tension. The two chapters that offer detailed surveys of the situation in Thailand and Malaysia reveal that the De Jiao, as a religious movement, crucially takes on certain national characteristics depending on factors such as the degree of assimilation of the minority Chinese community and the nature of its economic and political ties with the national elites. The movement’s reliance on spirit-writing (fuji 扶乩) also imbues it...