Sonja and I had an explosive time at the Lantern Festival celebration that the big temple in our neighborhood put on last night. The Lantern Festival or yuanxiaojie 元宵節 is the day that marks the official end of the lunar new year holiday. “After today,” a Taiwanese friend cautioned me, “it would sound weird to keep saying ‘Happy New Year.’” It takes place on the fifteenth day of the new year, the evening of the first full moon. Many organizations—businesses, temples, municipalities—put up lanterns of various shapes and sizes (the traditional one is a red round lantern), and one of the main activities is to stroll around with your friends and family enjoying the moon and the lanterns.
It is also a time for enjoying tangyuan 湯圓, small glutinous-rice balls stuffed with a sweet filling (often sesame or peanut paste) and served in a warm sugary broth. Sonja and I opted for a slightly different kind of dessert, shaved ice with glutinous rice balls and other garnishings. But the symbolism still holds: this is a time to eat things that are round (symbolizing completeness, togetherness) and sweet (symbolizing hopes for sweet things to come in the new year).
I had seen that the local temple would be having some activities on the evening of the Lantern Festival, so S and I decided to check them out. They were advertised as:
6 pm, puppet show
6:30 pm, local god mounts the sedan chair
8 pm local god returns to the temple and is peacefully seated
That summary of activities leaves out a whole lot of action. It makes the whole thing sound pretty sedate, like maybe you’re going to see some chanting and bowing accompanied by some gongs and incense. And yes, those elements were present, but the atmosphere was positively carnivalesque. Initially there was a small crowd watching the puppet show, while a larger crowd gathered in front of the tent a few paces away. There, the small statue of the local god was sitting along with statues of some other deities, all attended by members of the temple’s staff. The crowd bowed to various deities represented. All of this was happening on the sidewalk at the base of the big hill where the actual temple is located.
This neighborhood temple, like many Chinese temples, hosts all sorts of deities. Standard Buddhist figures like Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, are there, and standard Daoist deities like Laozi, alongside ones that aren’t associated with any formal religion but are part of the popular pantheon. For example, at this particular temple, which was originally established by people from Zhangzhou (a city on China’s southeast coast), an important god is “Sacred King, Founder of Zhangzhou” (Kai zhang sheng wang), a seventh-century general named Chen Yuanguang who was later deified. The local god, star of last night’s events, is another popular deity. In Chinese he’s called tudigong 土地公, literally meaning “Lord of the Land.” He’s depicted as a long-bearded gentleman, and his domain is very geographically bounded—just the local area around the temple—unlike Guanyin or Laozi, whose influence is more universal. Most places have their own tudigong.
Most of the time the tudigong sits tranquilly on an altar inside the temple alongside his fellow deities, surrounded by flowers and food and incense and sumptuous, richly colored drapery. But every now and then, on special occasions, he comes out of the temple and gets strapped to a sedan chair like this:
Why must he be so rudely trussed up? Well, because he’s got a pretty rowdy journey ahead. He’s going to circumnavigate the neighborhood on the shoulders of two bearers, greeting the residents and dancing through exploding fireworks.
A small truck carrying a band of musicians pulled up and they began loudly drumming and playing bells and cymbals.
The local god’s companions, three large cartoonish figures, then emerged from the tent. A woman next to us exclaimed, “They look like Mao Zedong!” Which they kind of did:
At this point in the preparations, the crowd in front of the tent backed way up and created a big space. Sonja and I, who had been in maybe the sixth or seventh layer of people watching, suddenly found ourselves much closer to the front. What did they know that we didn’t?
The temple staff then began rolling out long strips of firecrackers. The local god in his chair came out on the shoulders of the bearers, the staff lit the first strip of firecrackers, and the heavens and earth shook. Bright flashes, a huge cloud of smoke, and a noise compared to which everything else I’ve heard in Taipei is silence. Little bits of firecrackers were shooting everywhere, bonking me on the forehead, landing (and smouldering) on the tent, raining down on the sidewalk. Through it all, the bearers were bouncing the local god right through the middle of the bedlam.
Finally the god was ready for his peregrinations. The truck with the band led the way, followed by the cartoon companions, the god in his sedan chair, and several hundred of us (a little boy exclaimed, “Even foreigners are doing this?” upon seeing Sonja and me), strolling very noisily through the neighborhood.
Every once in a while the procession would stop and the organizers would lay out more strips of firecrackers and set them off, and the bearers would again dance the local god through the middle of the battlefield.
Sonja and I peeled off at the metro station, wanting to see Taipei’s official Lantern Festival display in another part of town. It turned out to be a bit of a dud by comparison. Meanwhile, the god and his entourage were going to make a lengthy promenade through the neighborhood and end up about an hour later back at the temple, where, as the itinerary noted, the god would be peacefully re-ensconced. Here are the grounds of the local god’s temple, quite a bit more tranquil than the scene down the hill on the street:
I had never seen anything like this before in my experience in mainland China. I’m not sure it happens there; this may be one of the expressions of religion that the PRC government has effectively eliminated or diminished.
So what does all this mean? As with many expressions of popular religion, it depends on whom you ask. Penny, one of my conversation partners on italki, said she thought it was like when you have a revered elder living in your home but he’s not really able to get out and see things on his own. “Every once in a while it’s nice if you can take him out and show him, Look, here are the things in your neighborhood.” Or possibly it’s to give the local god a chance to check in person, on the ground, how things are going in his jurisdiction. After all, one word for this kind of activity is xunjian 巡檢, which implies a kind of patrolling or inspection. It brings to mind the inspection tours that the emperors used to periodically conduct in the far-flung provinces, to get a feel for what was happening in the parts of their domain farther away from the palace. And I’ve read online that it is also a way of dispelling evil spirits and bringing blessing or good luck to the businesses and people along the route.
That may be why they periodically stopped outside of a business to light more firecrackers—the loud sound and bright flashes of a string of firecrackers is supposed to scare demons away. The past two weeks we have heard a lot of firecrackers, usually at a distance, as shops have re-opened after closing over the lunar new year break. It’s an important part of trying to ensure that the new year will be smooth and bring good fortune.
In any event, it was a boisterous good time. It also exemplified something I have come to appreciate about what I’ve experienced about mainstream religious life here, and in mainland China as well: how accommodating it often is. I mean that in a couple of ways. First, it’s accommodating in the sense that, as I mentioned earlier, the temples welcome deities from all sorts of different traditions. In this world of global strife and personal struggles, why exclude any divine being who might be able to help? A friend of ours here says she’s even seen Jesus on some temple altars. To be sure, there are “pure” Buddhist temples, Catholic churches, and other places of worship here that don’t welcome deities from other traditions, but the typical temple is quite syncretic.
It’s also accommodating in the sense that it doesn’t require ordinary life to stop or be left outside the temple grounds. Even on ordinary days, temples are pretty active places. On a regular Saturday morning in the courtyard outside the temple that hosted this event, I saw children playing, a lady practicing some kind of martial art with a sword, people walking their dogs and a guy taking pictures. A few steps away, other people were bowing in front of the altars with incense sticks in their hands and some priests were chanting. Similarly, last night while the local god was receiving veneration and dancing around in fire and wandering through the neighborhood, a regular Saturday night unfolded all around us. Food-delivery mopeds sped by, the garbage truck made a couple of passes through (and it was a measure of how loud the local-god activities were that the garbage truck’s distinctive song, usually audible from several blocks away, could barely be heard). Even the puppet show didn’t stop for the local god’s coming out; as the crowd hit the road in the local god’s wake, Sonja looked back and said, “The puppets are now having a rave,” and sure enough, multicolored disco lights were flashing in the puppet box as the emperor and official and lady-in-waiting puppets danced around.
All of this makes these places of worship and these events inviting and inclusive to people who may not understand everything that’s happening (foreigners like us, certainly, but also lots of Taiwanese people). The blessings of the local god are available to anyone who lives in his area, as one of my conversation partners told me, regardless of where they come from or who they are. You don’t have to have proven yourself through catechism or confirmation; it’s pretty much a “come as you are” kind of deal. This is a bit of a romanticization and I don’t want to oversell it—I have heard a female scholar who has worked closely with Taiwanese temples say that there’s a pretty strict gender hierarchy in many of them, and women aren’t really able to fully participate in the governance or leadership of some of these temples. But at least for an outsider like me, I appreciate being able to show up and feel fully included in a public event like this one.
Finally, the experience highlights a quality of public life that people in Taiwan and China value highly: they appreciate places and events that are renao 熱鬧 (literally, “hot and noisy”). Lots of people, lots of bustle, lots of different things happening. As an introvert from a region with lots of wide-open spaces and solitude, it took me a while to really understand this value. I thought it was very funny when a Chinese friend in graduate school said of Philadelphia that it was all right but there weren’t enough people there. But I have come to appreciate the liveliness of the night market and the temple festival. A night market on an “off” evening, where you’re not surrounded by people on all sides, feels a bit sad. I had to cultivate a certain kind of mental detachment, a kind of “stillness in the midst of motion” (this is how tai chi is sometimes described, or “moving meditation”) to really enjoy it, but once I got better at doing this I could see why people gravitated to these sorts of places.