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

Sacred Geography and the Everyday

In the preceding two pages, I have made numerous references to human activity in defining sacred geography and placing limits on the actions of deities, and I have noted the territorial or human bonds that anchor divinities to specific locations or communities. What these references mean is that sacred and physical geographies often intersect and overlap with each other. To put it another way, aspects of sacred geography are called upon and sometimes brought into the world through human activity. Traffic moves in both directions, in fact: the hell scrolls referenced in the previous page are based upon journeys to hell taken by spirit mediums and others, including the Tang Emperor Taizong. (Such journeys are, of course, common across cultures; see, for example, Dante’s Grand Tour of European sacred geographies.) The most important interfaces between the sacred and the profane (cf., Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion) occur at the sites of temples, in everyday devotional acts, and in annual festivals.

Temples are the earthly homes of deities and the most socially significant nodes of intersection between the different types of geography. Although they are clearly physical structures, because they house manifestations of divine beings, they take on a sacred aura; that is, they become—or rather, societies define them to be—sacred places. The map below indicates the locations of the most important temples in Jilong, and readers should zoom in and pan around in order to also see the locations of the Jilong temples, and the parent temples and other locations in Japan and China to which the Jilong institutions held important connections. In all cases, the deities are moved from location to location in conjunction with human migration. When Chinese settled in Taiwan, they carried their gods with them and built them new homes in new lands. When Japanese colonized Taiwan, they built Shinto shrines and enshrined particular deities within them; even though the kami were everywhere, they had to be invited to Taiwan.



Within Taiwan during the era of Japanese rule, temples 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 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.

When people perform everyday devotional acts—burning incense or ghost money, or offering food, at a Taiwanese temple; invoking a kami with sake or a written prayer at a Japanese shrine—they open pathways to sacred realms and invite divine intervention. Annual rituals, such as the summer Ghost Festival referenced in the hungry ghosts scroll on the preceding page (Bon matsuri or O-bon in Japanese; Zhongyuan jie or Yulan penhui in Chinese), or the temple festivals examined later in the module, also bring together sacred and profane space. During such events, rituals open gates in the boundaries between worlds and allow sacred geography to spill into the physical and act upon it.

These practices and institutions reinforce an earlier point: sacred space as imaginative geography is a manifestation of power. In the setting of colonial Jilong, building and renovating temples, and performing festivals, were not simply acts of faith. They were tools, or weapons, in a much larger struggle over the physical geography of Taiwan and the identities of its residents.

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