Who Brought the Rain? : Non-Chinese Perceptions of Local Rainmaking Rituals in Yuan-Ming North China

• In Event: The Reception and Localization of Foreign Religions in Yuan and Ming China

Abstract

This paper aims to explore how “foreign” immigrants and their descendants in Yuan and Ming north China perceived and accepted an “indigenous” religious tradition. The “acceptance” of local religious practices by non-Chinese immigrants has conventionally been interpreted as a signal of their assimilation into the wider Chinese population. On the basis of bilingual stone inscriptions found in Shanxi, this paper sheds light on the fact that the immigrants were not cultural minorities who were passively absorbed by the dominant culture. Focusing on rainmaking rituals performed by Mongol and other Inner Asian communities and officials in the Yuan, it demonstrates that these participants in fact perceived the nature of the deity and its efficacy quite differently than the Chinese did. They “rectified” the rainmaking religious tradition to conform to what they saw as the “proper worship” of the deity, adding new elements to the ritual, creating new sites of worship, and reinterpreting the deity according to their own religious cultures (for example, Tibetan Buddhism). The paper then traces the development of these religious traditions in the Ming and reveals that Ming local administrators often accepted or even legitimized the transformation by the hands of their “foreign” predecessors, thus “localizing” the foreign rectification. Today, the religious traditions this paper examines are regarded as authentically Chinese. In fact, when we penetrate the layers of rectification over time, it turns out that the rituals are a mixture of originally distinct religious perceptions, distilled from Chinese and non-Chinese elements during the Yuan and Ming periods.

Author

• Tomoyasu IIyama, Waseda University