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MARJORIE TOPLEY
The following short description of how some sects related to territorial units comes mainly from my own investigations and examination of sectarian documents in Singapore and Hong Kong. The groups I studied are off-shoots of a widely ramifying system sometimes called Hsien-t'ien Ta Tao, "The Great Way of Former Heaven". It contains many sects going under different names. The sects of this religion were found in many parts of China and copied the State system of territorial administration in dividing up areas for administration with lodges descending to the level of the district. Below the district, however, the groups had other centres for members and based, as in Buddhism and Taoism, on pseudo-kinship organization. Provision was thus made for China-wide organization, although it is doubtful whether any sect extended over the entire country at any time.
The system appears to have worked as follows: administrative lodges existed usually, and where feasible in the face of campaigns of suppression which were waged from time to time against them, in the chief towns of provinces, counties and districts. The "capital”, however, was not necessarily the same as the imperial capital but might be the town where the sect developed originally or to which it had been forced to remove its head office because of State activity against it. Until the late '50s of the nineteenth century, sects were headed by a patriarch who ideally resided in the main lodge but sometimes lived in another remoter place to escape attention by the State. In the records of some of the sects, the patriarch is compared to an emperor. It is often claimed he was an incarnate Buddha. Under the patriarch, there were various officers administering the branch lodges. All administrators had to hold degrees known as “lotus degrees" to be eligible for such posts, although not all "degree" holders were administrators. Examinations for these degrees were in religious knowledge and techniques, which included knowledge of their own sutras (sometimes written in code) and Taoist type "hygiene" and Ch’an Buddhhist type meditation. Degrees have elaborate titles in many of the sects and are likened in their literature to degrees for State examinations. Administrative posts are sometimes compared to those occupied in the State administration by governors, judges and magistrates.
Many sects are "vegetarian", that is to say they require degree-holders to practise permanent vegetarianism and also sexual