Chapter 11 Spirit-Writing and the Daoyuan’s Gendered Teachings
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Abstract
The Daoyuan 道院, a major religious and charitable organization in Republican China, used the ritual of spirit-writing to instruct its female members on various issues related to self-cultivation. An investigation of those deities’ exhortations can bring a much-needed gendered perspective to the twentieth-century history of spirit writing, revealing how this powerful medium was regularly applied to give authoritative instructions to their female members, most of whom were domestic-focused, relatively older married women without (modern) educations, who joined the organization along with their husbands to seek spiritual salvation. Often written in colloquial language more accessible to women, these instructions redefined Confucian gender doctrines to accommodate the challenges of modern gender ideologies and promoted charity as an alternative method to accumulate religious merit over those “superstitious” activities long favored by the female populace. Therefore, the Daoyuan’s use of spirit writing did not merely aim to seek deities’ protection and blessings to avoid personal calamities, which had been a common pursuit among many “secret societies” and sectarian religious groups in Chinese history. It had a broader mission to save the crisis of the world and edify society through reconstructing gendered morality in a period of social flux and instability.