Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

The study deals with the competition over perceiving and interpreting sacred Taishan (Mount Tai) by different groups. Taishan is one of the most prominent sacred sites and national symbols in China. Since the end of the first century B.C., Taishan had been conceived as the homeland of the dead which governed by the Lord of Taishan. The same mountain God had ever been the only focus of worshiping, as suggested in several screenplays dating to the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. Usually a mountain is governed by one major deity without change. However according to the folklore, a competition over the sovereignty of the peak of Taishan took place and eventually the religious popularity of the underworld God was overtaken by the newly-emerged fertility and childbirth Goddess in the sixteenth century. Such phenomenon was especially unusual in a patriarchal society. By embodied mobility and devoted ritual participation, the women’s appropriation of the temples and sacred landscape performed the transgression of the ideology of domesticity in Chinese moral standards. Taishan was gifted the meaning of death at first and then replaced by the interpretation of birth-giving. This makes the author wonder how and why the same natural environment got totally contradict meanings in various historical phases. What triggered this dramatic transformation? From the superimposition of the meanings embedded in the landscape, we consider the minds of common people and see how they perceive and imagine the landscape or transform to another mindset in response to the change of collective spiritual needs.