Redemptive Societies Research Articles

Text and Context in the Modern History of Chinese Religions: Redemptive Societies and Their Sacred Texts ed. by Philip Clart, David Ownby and Wang Chien-chuan

Text and Context in the Modern History of Chinese Religions: Redemptive Societies and Their Sacred Texts ed. by Philip Clart, David Ownby and Wang Chien-chuan

Handbook on Religion in China ed. by Stephan Feuchtwang

Reviewed by: Handbook on Religion in China ed. by Stephan Feuchtwang Shin-Yi Chao Stephan Feuchtwang, ed., Handbook on Religion in China. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020. vii, 472 pp. US$240 (hb), US$65 (ebook). ISBN 978-1-78643-795-2 The Handbook on Religion in China is part of the series “Handbooks of Research on Contemporary China.” It contains an introduction and nineteen articles divided into four parts: “State Policies, Civic Society and Cultural Revival,” “Revitalized and Modernizing Traditions,” “Daoism, Buddhism, Tibet, the Naxi,” and “Islam and Christianity.” The Introduction, by Stephan Feuchtwang, sets the tone: Religious landscape takes shape on secular ground. This and the following chapters discuss political conditions and socio-economic change as major impetuses in the reshaping of the current religious landscape. The rural-urban contrast runs throughout the book. While the volume’s focus is the post-Mao era, the contributors are not stingy in offering historical background. Part I provides an essential understanding of the politico-economic environments and cultural traditions for approaching the religious landscape of contemporary China. Chapter 1, “Religious Policy in China,” authored by Richard Madsen, analyzes two water-shed events in the PRC’s religious policy: the publication of Document 19 in 1982; and the establishment of Xi Jinping’s regime in 2012. The author perceptively characterizes the underlying principles of the two periods as “ambiguity” and “Sinicizing,” respectively. Chapter 2, by Robert Weller, C. Julia Huang, and Keping Wu, discusses religious philanthropy on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. It argues that activist volunteerism emphasizing good deeds could give religious groups “legitimacy, political support and room to pursue their own agenda from the state” (p. 39). The combination of “political merit-making” and “the rise of a cosmopolitan, civic self” (p. 50) led religious philanthropy to grow to such an enormous scale that it became “industrialized.” Chapter 3, by Anna Iskra, Fabian Winiger, and David A. Palmer, introduces body-mind cultivation movements from qigong 氣功 to Falun gong 法輪功, and movements for living the/attaining a good life including the Crazy English phenomenon and other self-help groups. Whether or not these movements are religious depends on the reader’s own definition of religion. Nevertheless, they are expressions of a desire to cultivate one’s “inner essence” (p. 68) to construct a new self in civic society. Chapter 4, by Sébastien Billioud, investigates the actors in the current revival of Confucianism. The reemergence of popular Confucianism in the 2000s, the author argues, began as a grassroots (minjian 民間) movement that elites (academic, business, and political) subsequently endorsed. In the 2010s, redemptive societies like Yiguandao 一貫道, which uphold Confucian ethics in their core teaching, joined the promotion campaign after losing the stigma of being “reactionary” (fandong 反動). Chapter 5, “Heritage and Religion in China” by Yujie Zhu, elaborates on the vague boundaries between religious and cultural traditions. This has led to compromise and contestation between different agents with overlapping or conflicting goals in promoting cultural/religious practices and sites. Under the Intangible Cultural Heritage program, the author argues, religious activities and celebration are rebranded as cultural heritage and marketed as tourist attractions. Entrepreneurship is thus integrated into the religious sphere. Part II is about “practices that exist outside formal religious organizations” (p. 8) and explores family (chapter 6), community (chapter 7), individual practices (chapter 8), and sectarians (chapter 9). Chapter 6, by Ellen Oxfeld, examines the transformation of rituals of death, marriage, and birth in cities and the countryside. The urban-rural gap is highlighted in death rituals. By the last decade of the twentieth century, traditional religious elements had already reemerged in rural funerals but urban funerals continue to be conducted primarily in the secular form of a memorial service (zhuidao hui 追悼會) managed by the deceased’s work unit (danwei 單位). The author argues that this contrast reflects [End Page 290] “the social distinction between the organization of urban living and the peasant community” (p. 120). The reader wonders what has become of urban funerals in the twenty-first century as danwei have largely disappeared? The discussion on marriage and birth rituals highlights the impact of improvement in general living standards, but scarcely mentions religious elements such as taboos, horoscopes...

The Cao Đài Deathscape: Reimagining Death, Funerals, and Salvation in Contemporary Vietnam

This article sheds light on the sophisticated funeral process set up by the Cao Đài religion (or Caodaism), combining both a theological and an ethnographical analysis. After introducing how Cao Đài theology represents both the body and the spiritual components of each individual in the specific millenarian conception of existence that characterizes Cao Đài, we trace the ritual process of funerals from the altar and coffin preparation to the collection of prayers and talismanic rituals conveyed to save souls in a Cao Đài manner. Read together, these sources present a genuine project and spirit of reform in the ideas, imaginaries, and practices related to death in Vietnam from the 1920s onwards, crystallizing a specific Cao Đài identity in Vietnamese and also East Asian redemptive societies’ deathscapes.

Ritual Treatment of Fortunate and Unfortunate Dead by the Chinese Redemptive Society Déjiāo in Thailand

This paper compares the ritual management of fortunate and unfortunate dead (hungry ghosts) by a Chinese new religious movement named Déjiāo 徳教 (lit. Teaching of Virtue), which emerged in Chaozhou (the northeast of Guangdong province) in 1939, before spreading to Southeast Asia after World War II. Based on ethnographic data collected in Chaozhou and Thailand between 1993 and 2005, the analysis reveals significant differences concerning both the ideological and performative aspects of the ritual processing of the two categories of dead. The funeral care of orphaned dead by Déjiāo conforms to the Chaozhou tradition of xiū gūgú 修孤骨, a festival of second burial allegedly devised during the Song dynasty by a local Buddhist monk; most of his sequences require the activity of mediums. Turned toward the salvation of the unfortunate dead, this festival was enriched by a universalist ambition through its adaptation to the Thai context. In doing so, it perfectly expresses the moral and religious goals of Déjiāo, one of the most active Chinese redemptive societies.

The “Redemption” of Redemptive Societies

“Redemptive societies” is a term often used to refer to the organized expression of salvationist religious activity in Republican period China. These groups were a major part of Chinese social and cultural life in the decades preceding the Communist revolution, and are related, in ways that remain unclear, to the “White Lotus” sectarian traditions under the dynasties, and to the qigong boom of the 1980s and 1990s. This article assesses the state of the field of studies on redemptive societies, and offers suggestions for its future development.

Printing Cosmopolitanism, Challenging Orthodoxies: Cao Đài Journals in Twentieth Century Vietnam

Abstract In the first part of the twentieth century, some members of the French- or Chinese-educated but indigenous religious, economic, and political elite in southern Vietnam (Cochin-China) intensively engaged in spirit-medium practices. Many of them set up or joined the new Cao Đài religion and its spirit-medium séances. Integrating in their pantheon religious figures from Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and even Catholicism, Cao Đài leaders deliberately challenged the orthodoxies at that time, tactically undermining the local religious elites, but also proposing a universal theological redemption and moral reform through the publication of their new set of spirit medium messages. Very quickly after the creation of Caodaism in 1926, various groups branched off, borrowing and adapting this reformed and orthodox posture within the Cao Đài community itself. While the Cao Đài canon may be well-known to scholars, Cao Đài community journals have yet to be examined in detail, although they often served as incubators for the Cao Đài quest for orthodoxy and a modern path to salvation. Based on archival studies and field research trips to the relevant areas, this paper aims to show how collective and individual actors of these Cao Đài groups have mobilised institutional, rhetorical, ideological, media-based, and other resources to assure and legitimise their authority. Simultaneously, we will see how the Cao Đài religion emerged from very unique kinds of “redemptive societies,” combining both Western and Eastern esotericism to articulate new Asian expressions of orthodoxy, universal values, and cosmopolitanism.

Bureaucratie et salut: Devenir un dieu en Chine by Vincent Goossaert

Reviewed by: Bureaucratie et salut: Devenir un dieu en Chine by Vincent Goossaert Pan Junliang Vincent Goossaert, Bureaucratie et salut: Devenir un dieu en Chine. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2017. 192 pp. €12.99 (PB). ISBN 978-2-8309-1629-4 Known as a specialist of Daoism, Vincent Goossaert has also worked on other religious forms such as Buddhism and redemptive societies as well as Chinese religion as a whole. This book is the result of his many years’ research on state power, bureaucracy, religious institutions, and their relations in Chinese religion. Although Vincent Goossaert says in the introduction that the book is neither a history of death cults, nor a history of practices related to death or immortality and salvation, anyone working on those areas should read and benefit from this original book. In his comprehensive work, Goossaert surveys previous studies and builds his arguments on Daoist scriptures as well as writings of literati in late imperial China. The book begins with a discussion of how Goossaert defines “transcendence,” “salvation,” and “god” in the context of Chinese religion. Salvation is considered as access to transcendence, which is a new ontological state in which eternal existence is assured, while a god is described as a deceased individual who receives worship from non-genealogically related people and intervenes in their life in a legitimate way and is thus different from ancestors and the dead (gui 鬼). The rest of the book follows a chronological order with an emphasis on the late imperial period. The first chapter covers the period from antiquity to medieval China. Goossaert shows that the idea of deifying extraordinary human beings (especially emperors) can be traced back to ancient times, and was closely related to ancestor worship. The birth of bureaucracy—the first revolution as Goossaert calls it—and the invention of an immortality associated with an individual consciousness opened up a path to deification for powerful people who longed to be accepted into the pantheon. This would be broadened later by Daoism with its religious-merit-based bureaucracy, which is the second revolution according to Goossaert. The second chapter deals with the early modern period (from the tenth to the nine-teenth century), as Goossaert terms it, when the third revolution spectacularly changed the religious landscape in China. The third revolution involves a “second stage of bureaucracy” characterized by the rationalization and moralization of the religious bureaucratic system along with the expansion of the pantheon, which tended to integrate popular dimensions of Chinese religion by accepting numerous [End Page 201] local gods. Goossaert argues that the modern merit-based religious bureaucracy, co-created by the state and the Zhang family-led-Daoist institution, allowed a good person to become a god which made self-deification possible and pursuable. The chronological survey then leads to a synchronic analysis of soteriology in “the modern period” (from the end of the Qing Dynasty through the Republic) in the third and last chapter. Goossaert suggests that the techniques of immortality continue to be transmitted and practiced in Chinese society, while deification is facilitated by several institutional mechanisms such as canonization, ordination, and self-promotion. Several ante-mortem practices enable more ordinary people to gain a position in the bureaucracy of the Other World. Goossaert concludes by indicating that deification is a limited salvation for it does not bring the dead transcendent immortality and leaves them subject to the rules of divine bureaucracy. Nevertheless, people still long for deification. Vincent Goossaert’s thesis is undoubtedly illuminating. However, his arguments are not sufficiently convincing and his thesis is applicable only in a limited scope. First, his definition of deification is so broad that even scribes, myrmidons, and soldiers are regarded as deities. If, according to Goossaert, deification is a path that many people wanted to pursue, it should not have included low-ranking officers. No one wants to become a scribe, myrmidon, or soldier in the Other World, who will have to suffer endless drudgery and are not considered divine (shen 神) but simply dead (gui 鬼),1 as Goossaert himself shows in the introduction. To cite just one example, “Impermanence” (Wuchang 無常) is an emblematic employee of the Other World and always known as...

Bureaucratie et salut: Devenir un dieu en Chine

Known as a specialist of Daoism, Vincent Goossaert has also worked on other religious forms such as Buddhism and redemptive societies as well as Chinese religion as a whole. This book is the result...

Syncretic Sects and Redemptive Societies

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that “sectarian religion” can be regarded as one of the most important strands in China’s religious landscape. Notwithstanding the consensus about the religious, political, and social significance of sectarian religion in Chinese history, academics disagree sharply over questions of both definition and terminology. Building on the theories of Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu, this article defines a new approach for the understanding of sectarian religion in imperial and modern China. In the first part, I discuss four primary assumptions that have led to many misunderstandings and distortions in previous research. In the second part, I demonstrate the shortcomings of the recently introduced concept of “redemptive societies,” which implies a discontinuity between premodern sects and modern redemptive societies. In the last part, I construct a novel approach that aims to understand the workings of sectarian religion in sociological terms. 摘要 “民间教门”是中国宗教中最重要部分之一。尽管大部分学者已就民间教门的宗教、政治、社会意义达成了共识，但对于如何定义“民间教门”还莫衷一是。本文根据韦伯 (Max Weber) 与布迪厄 (Pierre Bourdieu) 的宗教社会学理论，提出一个新路径，来理解历史与当代的民间教门。第一，本文将讨论欧美学者民间教门研究中的四个引起误解的假设；第二，本文认为应放弃“救世团体”概念，因为它否定了传统社会“教门”与当代中国“救世团体”之间的连续性；第三，本文以宗教社会学为基础，提出一个新路径来促进对于“教门/教派”的跨时代、跨文化理解。

An Unjealous God?

Despite the immense success of Christianity in many parts of the Global South, Asian intellectuals have often resisted actual conversion by incorporating Christian elements into new, more universal forms of spirituality. Caodaism, a syncretistic religion that emerged in French Indochina, offers one case study of this process, which is also found in Hinduism, Bahaism, and several Chinese redemptive societies. The place of Jesus within this new pantheon is explored in this paper by looking at the ways in which Christian ideas have influenced the organization, doctrine, and self-image of Caodaists in Vietnam and how these ideas have gained new force among Caodaists in the North American diaspora. Caodai “saints” famously incorporate prominent historical and literary figures as spiritual teachers, including Victor Hugo, Jeanne d’Arc, Vladimir Lenin, and (in the United States) Joseph Smith. They provide new scriptures through spiritist séances, and through this mechanism they are able to “modernize” Caodai doctrine and expand it to fit new circumstances.

Le sūtra des contemplations du Buddha Vie-Infinie: essai d’interprétation textuelle et iconographique par Jérôme Ducor, Helen Loveday (review)

situated to the north rather than the west of the Chahar, whereas the most important Western Mongolian group, the Zunghars, are not mentioned despite their significance for Qing empire-building. The chronology of Japan’s k ominka 皇民化 policy in Korea (pp. 187–190) remains unclear to non-specialists—one could be led to believe that it took place much earlier than the 1930s. Marx never theorized about ‘‘a shift of real power from the crown to the dollar’’ (p. 197); in fact, he saw all political systems (including that of feudalism) as part of a superstructure determined by the relations of production. And finally, DuBois gives the impression that Tibet was an autonomous entity within China between 1912 and 1950, rather than a de facto independent state, even though it did not comprise all ethnic Tibetans and the diplomatic and legal foundations of Tibetan independence were disputed by China. Secondly, these problems spill over into the conceptual realm. The ‘‘Unity of the Three Teachings’’ (sanjiao heyi 三教合一) is taken at face value rather than as a propagandistic device (pp. 34–36); and even if one believes that most Chinese ways of ‘‘doing’’ religion can be subsumed under Daoism (as the discussion on pp. 25– 30 appears to indicate), the concept of ‘‘folk religion’’ or ‘‘popular religion’’ deserves at least a critical mention. In the discussion of the relationship between religion and politics in the twentieth century, the all-important distinction between ‘‘religion’’ and ‘‘superstition’’ does not feature at all, although it underlay the religious policies of both Nationalists and Communists. Thirdly, the book’s focus on exemplary cases and individual actors and organizations also has as its downside the occasional lack of systematic discussion. While DuBois does mention the ‘‘new religions’’ in post-1900 Japan, he fails to comprehensively discuss the Chinese ‘‘redemptive societies’’ (which are in some ways their counterpart) and even the ‘‘new-new religions,’’ despite their upsurge in post-war Japan being a consequence of the dismantling of state Shint o, which is described at some length. In a few instances, this also affects chapter organization. The chapter on Chinese Communist religious policy contains a lengthy description of the campaign against one particular organization, the Yiguandao, while we learn virtually nothing about the sea change in religious policy after 1978 and the ensuing ‘‘religion fever.’’ This is not to downplay the merits of the book: DuBois provides a fresh look at East Asian history that establishes religion’s rightful place therein for a broader audience. His study is highly informative and provides intriguing and insightful details for both specialists and non-specialists. On the other hand, it is far from comprehensive and must be read with a pinch of salt. THORALF KLEIN Loughborough University JÉRÔME DUCOR AND HELEN LOVEDAY, Le s utra des contemplations du Buddha VieInfinie : essai d’interprétation textuelle et iconographique. Turnhout (Belgium): Brepols, 2011. 466 pp. J69 (pb). ISBN 978-2-503-54116-7 This weighty volume, coauthored by two prolific scholars accomplished in different fields, really combines two books in one. The first portion, by Ducor, BOOK REVIEWS 119 provides a copiously annotated French translation of one of the central texts of East Asian Buddhism, The S utra on the Visualization of the Buddha of Infinite Life Preached by the Buddha (Foshuo guan wuliangshou Fo jing 佛說觀無量壽佛 經, T.12.365), whose translation from Sanskrit into Chinese is usually attributed to K alaya sas (Jiangliangyeshe 畺良耶舍) in 424. The text was extremely important in China from the sixth through the tenth centuries and was later canonized by H onen 法然 (1133–1212) of the Japanese Pure Land School (and its progeny, the True Pure Land School) as one of the ‘‘three s utras on the pure land’’ (j odo sanbu ky o 淨土三部經). The s utra is famous for its narrative of King Aj ata satru (Asheshi 阿闍世) nearly killing his father and imprisoning his mother, S akyamuni Buddha’s preaching of sixteen different objects of contemplation to help the mother make present the western pure land of Amit ayus Buddha, the exhortation to chant the name of Amit ayus, and the ranking of practices and their respective forms of rebirth into three major grades, each with...

Text and Context

In recent years, scholars of modern and contemporary Chinese religion have turned their attention to the subject of “redemptive societies”, a term coined by Prasenjit Duara in 2001 to refer to groups such as the Yiguandao, the Daoyuan, the Tongshanshe , the Wushanshe, and others which had a major socio-religious impact during the Republican period. Spiritually authoritative or sacred texts play a number of crucial roles within redemptive societies. First and foremost, of course, they record and codify a redemptive society’s beliefs and rituals and are thus key sources for the analysis of these aspects of a specific religious system. As obvious as this may appear, such analyses have not been carried out for many of these texts, which more commonly serve as quarries in which to collect data on the organizational structure or social and political history of a particular group. Research that takes the doctrinal systems encoded in modern redemptive societies’ sacred texts seriously has been fairly rare. We have therefore put together an international team of scholars from Europe, Taiwan, Canada, China, Hong Kong, and Japan to focus on the textual and contextual histories of redemptive societies, with an eye toward giving their past – and their future – the attention they deserve.

Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity by Rebecca Nedostup (review)

128 Journal of Chinese Religions Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity REBECCA NEDOSTUP. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2009. Harvard East Asian Monographs 322. xiv, 459 pages. ISBN 978-0-674-03599-7. US$45.00,£33.95, €40.50 hardcover. In Superstitious Regimes, Rebecca Nedostup sketches the history of secularism during the Nanjing decade of the Republic of China, from 1927 to 1937. In the opening of the book, she evokes how miraculous signs, reported by the press following the victory of the Northern expedition in 1928—a chicken laying an egg with a twelve-pointed KMT star on it; a crab with the markings “unite all under heaven” (統一天下)—caused a malaise among secular KMT officials. While such signs were the auspicious omens of a new dynasty’s mandate of heaven, the new republican regime could only claim the mandate of the people, not of heaven—and so, one official, Zhang Zhenzhi 張振之, glossed the reports as signs of the hopes and expectations of the “psyches” 心 理 of the people (pp. 2–3)—recasting the traditional, spiritual legitimation into an expression of the peoples’ will. This story shows the dilemmas faced by the KMT, as it attempted to build a new nation on foundations entirely alien to those which had integrated and legitimized the Chinese empire and local societies for over 2000 years—unable to brush away the old forms of legitimation, it could only try to recast them into its own mold. On the one hand, this project entailed applying the Westernderived concepts of “religion” and “superstition,” institutionalizing the one and eradicating the other—the temples, rituals, and religious specialists which had been essential components of the social fabric. Superstitious Regimes provides a meticulously researched account of this process of elaborating new categories and imposing them on society, as it played itself out in debates among intellectuals, religious activists and politicians; as it found bureaucratic expression through surveys and regulations on temple registration and ritual specialists; as it influenced redemptive societies such as the Daoyuan 道院 and the Tongshanshe 同善社; and as its implementation encountered the resistance and creative adaptations of local communities. On the other hand, this was also a sacralizing process, involving the elaboration of new rituals and sacred places and times, to mould the citizens of the nation into a new “affective regime.” But, since the nation could not be built in a vacuum, it could only have recourse to elements of past tradition, on the condition that they be purged of their position within the traditional cosmology, and recast within the limits of the secular ideology of the nation-state. Figures such as the Yellow Emperor, Confucius, and Guan Yu 關羽 could thus be honored, but only as “worthies” and “heroes,” intended to be remembered as symbols of the nation, but which people continued to worship as spiritual powers for themselves and their Book Reviews 129 families. Nedostup considers the imposition of the new, Gregorian calendar and the banning of the Chinese lunar calendar, the New Year celebrations, the Ghost festival, funerals, cemeteries, and commemorative ceremonies for ancient heroes and sages of the nation. But, as she aptly points out, “the ritual environment in China, centered as it was on the concept of efficacy, raised a very particular question regarding nationalist ceremony: what would it do?” (p. 284). The desired “efficacy” of the nationalist rituals was, of course, to give body and life to the nation, through its own self-representation. Nedostup’s account, and the questions she raises, may lead us to reflect on how the KMT were, in fact, Durkheimian modernists. Recall that Durkheim argued that religion is the expression of social unity, it is society’s worship of itself; the deity or totem is the society’s unconscious self-representation. And he implied that a modern society, conscious of its own reality, would be able to assure its cohesion through a civil religion, eliminating the need for a supernatural reference. The KMT project thus appears as an attempt to engineer such a civil religion as an expression of a self-referential nation, replacing the ancestors and deities who were the expression of family, clan, local and regional...

Falun Gong and the Future of China by David Ownby (review)

Book Reviews 127 Falun Gong and the Future of China DAVID OWNBY. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xi, 291 pages. ISBN 978-019532905 -6. US$29.95, £15.99 hardcover. In the immediate aftermath of the 1999 Chinese crackdown on Falun Dafa 法輪大法—known more commonly in the US as Falun Gong 法輪功—journalists wrote a great deal about the movement, on balance perhaps generating more heat than light. The prevailing discourse was framed largely in terms of human rights and religious freedom, with little analysis of the origins and history of the teachings and practices. Expatriate Chinese practitioners of Falun Gong’s distinctive system of qigong 氣功 managed to keep the ongoing suppression of the movement in the headlines for several years, but now, a decade after the movement was outlawed in the PRC, the world seems to have lost interest, weary of the unremittingly bad news coming from China. This is unfortunate, because in recent years scholars have made great strides in understanding the qigong movement and the decisive role Falun Gong played in its demise.1 In Falun Gong and the Future of China, David Ownby pursues several complementary agendas. One of the most important is his ongoing effort to determine the antecedents of Falun Gong in order to establish its proper place within the history of Chinese popular religion.2 Ownby’s conclusion, argued with subtlety and nuance, is that Falun Gong (and the larger qigong movement) represent a post-Mao revival of the moral teachings, general worldview, and body-centered spiritual practices that characterized late Imperial and Republican era “redemptive societies.” The thousands of groups, large and small, that Ownby calls “redemptive societies” (following Prasenjit Duara) have been collectively categorized under a variety of names in the past, including White Lotus, sectarian, folk Buddhist, syncretic, etc. All these names are problematic. By classifying these societies under a neutral, descriptive heading and recognizing their family resemblances, it becomes possible to identify their shared features—charismatic founders; a sense of uniqueness; body-based “cultivation” techniques leading to health, happiness, and salvation; traditional moral values, etc.—and rethink their place and role in the last several hundred years of Chinese religious history.3 Many of the redemptive societies were severely attacked under both Republican and Communist rule—especially during the Cultural Revolution—and most were assumed by outside observers to have been annihilated, but their teachings appear to have survived far better than nearly anyone suspected. Ownby makes a convincing case here that should lead to 1 See especially David Palmer’s excellent La fièvre du Qigong (Paris: Éditions de l'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2005) as well as this book, of course. Editor’s note: Palmer’s book was reviewed by Benoît Vermander in vol.33 (2005) of this journal. 2 For an earlier effort see, David Ownby, “A History for Falun Gong: Popular Religion and the Chinese State Since the Ming Dynasty,” Nova Religio 6.2 (April 2003): 223-243. 3 Ownby convincingly argues that these groups are “religious,” at least in western terms, even if they are not by Chinese definitions and their own self-understanding. 128 Journal of Chinese Religions a major reworking of the history of late Imperial, Republican, and contemporary Chinese popular religion. A second, related concern is to provide an overview and analysis of the qigong boom of the 1980s and 1990s and sketch a preliminary history of Falun Gong. In this effort, Ownby nicely summarizes relevant findings from David Palmer’s La fièvre du qigong while adding his own insights and research. Ownby’s analysis of the complex teachings of Li Hongzhi 李 洪志, the founder and sole “master” of Falun Gong, is especially illuminating. In addition, Ownby provides a chapter-long discussion of social scientific fieldwork he conducted among North American practitioners of Falun Gong, mostly diaspora Chinese, who have worked tirelessly to keep the cause of Falun Gong alive. This North American fieldwork helps clarify the crucial differences between the apocalyptic rhetoric and “gnostic” teachings of Li Hongzhi and the relatively “normal” lives of practitioners. When objectively described and analyzed, the beliefs of Falun Gong appear bizarre, at least to most Westerners; however, the followers of...