Practicing Salvation: Meat-Eating, Martyrdom, and Sacrifice as Religious Ideals in the Zhenkongjiao

Abstract

The Zhenkongjiao is a Chinese sectarian religion that was founded in Jiangxi in 1862. By the 1950s, the movement expanded into the lower Yangzi region, Guangdong province, and among the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. Unlike many sectarian religions and Buddhist movements in late-imperial and Republican China, the movement advocated non-vegetarianism and performed animal sacrifice. This article first sheds light on how the Zhenkongjiao’s promoters structured its belief system to address and challenge prevalent discourses of vegetarianism and nonkilling as markers of religious practice. I also propose that the Zhenkongjiao’s repertoire of thaumaturgical rituals—which include animal sacrifice—cannot be studied in isolation, but should be situated within a sectarian religious paradigm where sacrifice was exalted as a soteriological ideal. This study demonstrates the agency exercised by the Zhenkongjiao’s apologists, who appropriated and hybridized dominant religious discourses and cultural images characteristic of Republican China (1911–1949) to justify their beliefs and ritual systems.