A 'religion' is any tradition that transmits transcendental revelations about the world. It places everyday events in a time of greater scope--cyclical, ancestral, fateful, eternal, or providential--that includes both the living and the dead. Many religious traditions are transmitted through writing. Most are purely ritual, handed down by experts and from elders to juniors. But in cultures of writing, such as the Chinese, textual traditions are considered superior.

The various textual traditions associated most closely with Chinese civilisation have been grouped into three main teachings. Firstly, there are those of Buddhism (Mahayana and Tantric) and also of Daoism, much affected by Buddhism. The third is that of the ancestral, calendrical and life cycle rituals prescribed in texts written by court officials or approved scholars, a tradition consciously derived from writings attributed to Confucius and his followers. All three traditions are liturgical. They include services of offering and response between secular and transcendent subjects.

In chronological order, the three start with the textual record of Confucius (551-479 BCE) teaching the importance of ritual. Next come the earliest texts of philosophical Daoism attributed to the mythical authors Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi about a century after Confucius' death. Full-scale rituals of Daoist religion were first instituted some time later, in the last two centuries BCE. Buddhist texts and rituals were introduced in the third century CE. Each tradition has influenced the others, and Chinese people resort to all three. However, there are also local ritual traditions.

Stephan Feuchtwang

This temple, The Palace of Gathered Harmony, was photographed by Stephan Feuchtwang in 1967. The temple building pictured was finished in 1956 although there has been a temple on this site since at least 1839. It is located in a small town in northern Taiwan. The temple was rebuilt in 1990 and is still the centre for three annual carnival-like festivals.

Popular religions
Popular religion--consisting of household cults, rituals of life-cycle transitions, cults of protector deities, methods of divination and of expelling or placating harmful agents for moral and physical healing--is not reducible to any one tradition or any combination of textual traditions. Nevertheless, scholars, whose vocation and livelihood are dependent on textual learning, are strongly inclined to understand the textual traditions to be purer forms of transmission. So they describe popular religion as a mixture of the textual traditions, as syncretism, or as heterodoxy. But if you just take texts into account but do not privilege them, a more precise description is that textual traditions have affected the practices of popular religion and have in turn drawn from them.

Stephan Feuchtwang

The Palace of Gathered Harmony in 1992.

The states of China turned into an empire during a period of several hundred years, leading to unification more than two thousand years ago. This process involved turning customary rituals into a teaching and also turned these rituals and teachings into an institution. As an institution, a religion consists of three things. One is a set of sacred texts teaching transcendent truths and the disciplines of forming a perfected self. Most closely attached to these texts and disciplines is a body of full-time devotees who learn and perform liturgies of service, which include incantation of the texts. Third, there is the basic support of the devotees, a lay following of their rituals and teachings. Until the word 'religion' entered into the Chinese language early in the twentieth century, the Chinese words for such an institution were either 'way' (dao) or 'teaching' (jiao). Imperial authority was both asserted and established by the formation of these institutions, at the core of which was the establishment of a canon of texts.

Religion sustaining rule
The five R's of writing, ritual, reflection, registration, and reverence sustained imperial rule. Writing was the medium for an archive that determined what was history, what was good and authentic (zheng) and what was inauthentic (xie) and excessive (yin). Among the three registered teachings, the teaching of scholars became the orthodoxy of rule. From the tenth century onwards, the study of a canon of classical texts associated with the writings of Confucius was the basis of knowledge for an imperial bureaucracy. The same writings prescribed the ways in which ordinary people were to conduct their affairs, most importantly through filial obligation, repeated in officially sponsored histories of every locality. This was an effective system because learning to read and memorize these texts--ultimately, for examinations of advanced learning and entry into the imperial bureaucracy--was open to anyone above the rank of slave (a small minority in the lowest ranked occupations, such as certain kinds of musicians, and house-slaves). Though the investment required for such an extended education was beyond the means of all but a few, the ideal of a career open to talents was reproduced in the genealogies of every non-slave family line, in which the greatest prominence was given to holders of degrees. To learn to write and read was therefore to gain high respect, and this knowledge was intimately linked to religious life.

Dragon in procession This dragon is part of the procession photographed in 1967 by Stephan Feuchtwang. It was sponsored by the Gao surname in a large region in Taipei county. It is associated with a temple in what is now a suburb of Taipei. The dragon is a display of the power of the surname.

Lion in procession The lion dance was part of the same procession of the Gao surname for the temple in Taipei county. Both the dragon and the lion were used as a form of exorcism, to clear the road of malign influences.