Bodies and Structures 2.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History

Sacred Geography

The interface between sacred and physical geographies is the spatial relationship at the heart of this module. But what is sacred geography? Simply put, it is the spaces or territories associated with the divine, and in this case with the gods and deities and rituals of the religions practiced in Taiwan. It is imaginary geography, territory that exists primarily in the minds of believers and practitioners but which has no essential physical form. On its own, because it lacks physicality it cannot be mapped, although representations of sacred geography are common within both Chinese and Japanese religious traditions. (For example, see this website devoted to Chinese hell scrolls, and this Japanese painting of the suffering of hungry ghosts.) Nevertheless, sacred geography manifests within physical geography in many ways, such as temples that are the residences of particular deities, and in the incense-division networks and territorial cults discussed elsewhere in this module. The key spatial characteristic of the interaction between the sacred and profane is that, because sacred spaces have no definitive physical dimension, they can exist anywhere within the physical world. A specific deity has multiple homes across Taiwan, even within the same city or town, and it moves through—or rather, is moved through—a neighborhood or a region in order to re-affirm its relationship with the physical world. The territory that the deity demarcates has mobile and permeable boundaries that can be expanded or contracted, and that can overlap with the terrain of other deities. And yet, those borders can be closed against unwelcome incursions. In other words, sacred geography is inherently fluid, but it can become fixed through its interactions with physical geography.

Within Taiwan during the era of Japanese rule, the physical sacred spaces—the earthly homes of deities—went by many names, each of which was associated with a particular tradition, and a particular ethnic community. On the Taiwanese side, most institutions were (and are) called gong 宮, miao 廟, or simiao 寺廟; on the Japanese side, Shinto institutions were (and are) called jinja 神社. All Buddhist institutions could be called si or ji 寺 (the first term is the Mandarin pronunciation, the second the Japanese), but some Taiwanese sites were also referred to as zhaitang 齋堂. These nuances are largely lost in English, since the words temple and shrine are largely interchangeable in meaning. Within this module, I use “temple” for all sacred spaces, although I reserve “shrine” specifically for those within the Shinto tradition.
 

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