[
    {
        "id": 204327,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1961",
        "page_number": 95,
        "title": "RAS-1961",
        "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch\n\nRASHKB and author\n\nVol. 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\n91\n\nyou will be one of his vanguards. Well, I think I can do something for you in this matter. He ordered Chin-hsia to bring two stalks of lotus and three lotus leaves to him, and with them he made a human shape on the ground, using the stems to represent the joints and articulation of the bones, and set the seed of a golden pill in the middle. He employed his divine power and spoke the magic spells while he pushed No-cha's souls toward the lotuses, and suddenly there sprang up a young No-cha who was handsome and full of vitality, with a rosy complexion, red lips, intelligent eyes and was sixteen feet tall. Thus was No-cha reincarnated from lotuses. (Ch.14)\n\nAs I have said, in chuan 3, Lun-1 P'in (Discourses) of the Ta-fang-pien-fu Pao-ên Ching there is a Buddhist legend which can be summarized as follows:\n\nThe king of Varanasi (*) married Lady Doe-mother who conceived and gave birth to a lotus which was cast into a pond. The lotus then grew five hundred leaves and under each leaf a boy was born. When these five hundred boys grew up they became giants, each of whom was strong and brave enough to fight against a thousand men single-handed. These brothers, from the first one to the four hundred and ninety-ninth all forsook their noble life and became Buddhist priests. The youngest brother attained the fruition of a Pratyeka-Buddha ninety days later and, manifesting his miraculous powers, he preached the dharma for the benefit of his parents.\n\nThis can be cited as an illustration that the story about reincarnation from a lotus had a religious background. In the paragraph in chuan 2 of the Wu-têng Hui-yüan I have quoted, the last sentence of the text is “現本身,運大神通,為父母說法” (manifesting his original body and by his miraculous powers preached the dharma for the benefit of his parents), and now in this sutra the corresponding sentence is “...” which would make no difference in translation. We may consult Ch.27, \"King Resplendent and Buddha Thunder-voice\" (¥2) of the Lotus Sutra, in which the two sons of the king, Pure Treasury (*) and Pure Eyes (), worrying about their father's attachment to the heretical teaching which deviated from the right course, revealed to him some of their supernatural powers (...) and brought him to faith and discernment.3 So we may believe the original story that No-cha “rending himself asunder, gave his flesh back to his mother and his bones to his father”.\n\n3 \"The Lotus of the Wonderful Law\" (Saddharma Pundarika Sutra), translation by Prof. Soothill, Oxford, p. 256.",
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    {
        "id": 206805,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1973",
        "page_number": 82,
        "title": "RAS-1973",
        "content_text": "76\n\nHELGA WERLE\n\nThe hands are made of wire (Plate VII) which facilitates the fastening of the sticks or arms, but their appearance is ugly.\n\nThe sticks have the length of chopsticks. Made of iron, they form a small ring at one end and have a wooden handle on the other, to prevent the sticks from slipping out of the hands. The third stick is thicker and is hooked into a hole at the puppet's back from below. The puppeteers tell that in Ch'aochow some puppets were considered so precious that they were handled with sticks made of pure gold.\n\nNeither the waist nor the stick is movable.\n\nThe Historical Background in Ch'aochow\n\nAlthough well proportioned and even beautiful, this puppet has many technical disadvantages compared to the Cantonese rod-puppet or the Fukienese string or glove-puppet. The reason for this incongruousness can be found in the dominance of Ch'aochow's ancient leather shadow-puppet tradition, which was definitely well established in the Ming dynasty in that area. One can assume that it existed earlier but any proof is lacking so far.\n\nIn Ch'aochow these shadow-puppets were cut out of cowhide (which is very rough when compared to the donkey-hide used in North China or Szechuan) which was coloured. They have two-jointed arms and legs and are handled with three sticks attached to the hands and the back of the two-dimensional puppet. The author has seen such Min-nan shadow-puppets in Taiwan, and some old Ch'aochowese confirmed that the Ch'aochow ones had exactly these features. By the end of the last century, supposedly under the strong influence of the extraordinary perfection of the string and glove puppets of Ch'uan-chou, Fukien, a new type of puppet evolved, a hybrid with the beauty of a Ch'uan-chou puppet, but handicapped in movement by the technique of a two-dimensional puppet. The name paper-shadow-theatre chih-ying-hsi was also applied to the new puppet. These two kinds of puppets existed side by side for one generation, and according to witnesses the leather shadow-puppets disappeared in the 1920s.\n\nIt is yet possible to receive first-hand accounts of the time when puppets were much used. An educated elderly Ch'aochow gentleman, Mr. Su related that in his childhood, at the beginning of the Republic, there were still 3 different kinds of puppets: shadow, horizontal stick-puppets and a third kind which he describes as...",
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    {
        "id": 208964,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1980",
        "page_number": 126,
        "title": "RAS-1980",
        "content_text": "94\n\nJULIAN F. PAS\n\nthe new fire and the Easter Candle performed in the Roman Catholic Church on the eve of Easter Sunday. After discussing these two rituals separately, I shall conclude with some comments of a comparative nature.\n\n1. The Fen-Teng Ritual in Taoism\n\nThis ritual called fen-teng in Chinese, can be literally translated as “division of lamp(s)” or the “distribution of lamps\". \"Teng\" by itself means \"lamp\", or \"lantern\", and designates not so much the light produced by the lamp or lantern, but the object which contains the light. The expression fen-teng is not often translated by Western authors: usually the term is just transliterated. But sometimes there are attempts to render the term in translation. E.g. M. Saso: \"Lighting lamps to the Three Pure Ones\", which is not strictly a translation but a meaningful although partial description of the significance of the rite. Another rendering, not of the literal sense but again of the meaning, is \"Lighting of the New Fire\"2: this translation is not based on the Chinese expression fen-teng but indicates one of the fundamental meanings of the ritual. It comes actually closer to another Chinese expression sometimes used for the same rite: chu-teng3, which literally means: 'blessing' or 'consecration of the lamp(s)'.\n\nThe fen-teng ceremony does not appear to be an independent ritual but seems always to be performed in the context of a larger celebration, called chiao or ta-chiao, which is variously translated as \"ritual of cosmic renewal\", \"the great community festivals”, “great propitiatory rites\", or \"Taoist Mass\"7. So far there is only one monograph on the fen-teng ritual in a Western language: K. M. Schipper's Le Fen-teng. Ritual Taoiste. Apart from this well presented critical text edition, there are only minor treatments of the fen-teng ceremony included in monographs on the chiao festival as a whole: M. Saso's Taoism and the Rite of Cosmic Renewal is so far the only monograph in English on the chiao, and he just briefly discusses the fen-teng ceremony. Chinese scholars have also started to pay attention to this great Taoist event: two monographs are now available in Chinese by Liu Chih-wan9. It is remarkable that for the two different occasions Mr. Liu describes the chiao festival, he does not use the terminology used by Schipper and Saso, but calls the rite chu-teng or 'blessing of the lamp(s)'. One wonders where and when this variant designation",
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    },
    {
        "id": 208966,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1980",
        "page_number": 128,
        "title": "RAS-1980",
        "content_text": "96\n\nJULIAN F. PAS\n\ngo outside where new fire is \"taken\" (the method how fire is “taken\" is not further explained by Schipper); a torch is lit and carried inside the temple; with it the high-priest lights three new candles in front of him (ca. 6′ 45′′);\n\n(iii) the new light is offered to the Three Pure Ones in turn: each time one lit candle is carried and placed in front of the three shrines at the north side of the temple. (ca. 7'),\n\n(iv) the ritual of fen-teng proper: five torches are lit and carried by the five priests: in procession through the temple they light all the candles previously extinguished. (ca. 4′).\n\n(v) conclusion: chanting (ca. 1'30'),\n\nThe whole ritual lasts about 24 minutes. It is immediately, almost without any transition, followed by the two other mentioned rituals.\n\nThe highlights of this fen-teng ritual are obviously the striking of new light, the offering of the newly lit candles to the Three Pure Ones and the lighting of all the other candles in the temple. The term chu-teng, used by Liu Chih-wan refers to the first act, whereas the usual term fen-teng points to the last and third act.\n\nTwo major problems remain, however, unsolved: the meaning of this ritual and its origin. The two can hardly be separated and are here discussed together.\n\nSince the term fen-teng does not adequately express the deeper meaning of such a ritual, we have to analyze the phenomenological structure of the whole ritual and see if the ritual act in itself contains its own significance. Schipper's report gives us the necessary data, but does not go beyond an external description. Saso, although only just briefly, points out some essential aspects of meaning:\n\n\"The first ritual act is the famous Fen Teng, or lighting of all the lamps of the temple with a new fire kindled with the \"flames of the sun,\" or pure Yang. The ritual is, in effect, a reading of the forty-second chapter of the Lao-tzu describing the protogenesis of the myriad creatures.\n\nA new fire is lit outside the T'an area by striking a match. Two torches dipped in lamp oil are lighted with the new fire, and brought into the sacred T'an area. The action symbolizes taking fire from the \"Great Yang\", the sun, and relighting the lamps of the temple. Thus the light of new Yang is seen to renew",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt",
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    },
    {
        "id": 208977,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1980",
        "page_number": 139,
        "title": "RAS-1980",
        "content_text": "SYMBOLISM OF THE NEW LIGHT\n\nmeaning of he three Taoist rituals.\n\n107\n\nIn the Christian Easter liturgy, after the deacon has finished chanting the Exsultet, there is next a sequence of readings from the Old Testament, followed, at least since recent changes, by a renovation of the baptismal vows by all those present. Towards midnight, the solemn Easter Mass takes place with the joyful intonation of the Alleluia to mark the resurrection of Christ which happened in the early hours of Easter Sunday. Just before Mass, however, the celebrant and assistants change their ritual garments from purple (mourning) to white (expressing joy). At the same time, the sanctuary undergoes a quick metamorphosis: all signs of sorrow are removed: the purple curtains behind the altar are taken off, the purple veils covering the holy images since Passion Sunday (two weeks before Easter) are taken away and flowers are put on the altar. In just a short time there is a dramatical transformation from sorrow to exultation, symbolizing the sudden triumph of the live Jesus rising from the dead.\n\nThen Holy Mass starts in a shortened form until the intonation of the hymn Gloria in Excelsis by the celebrating priest. A new eruption of joy follows: while the chorus starts singing the ancient hymn, the organ for the first time since Holy Thursday starts playing; and at the same time altar bells and the big church bells join in with their respective sounds of jubilance. They all manifest a cosmic rejoicing at the resurrection of Jesus.\n\nThe very sequence of the three rituals in the Christian liturgy37 provides an excellent hypothesis to interpret the sequence of the Taoist rituals. Although each of the three Taoist rites contains its own logic and significance, yet the sequence appears to be obscure and somehow unrelated. It makes one wonder whether the original version (both meaning and sequence) has been gradually forgotten and therefore invested with a new symbolism in later times.\n\nFirst of all, the 'Rolling up of the Screen' is to be interpreted as a preparatory act before the Taoist priests enter into an audience with the Three Pure Ones.38 Therefore it seems to be out of place here and explains why some Taoists perform it during the Noon Audience on the second day of the chiao.39 If that is the original meaning of the ritual, there is no apparent similarity with the Christian act of decorating the sanctuary. One can only wonder why it was performed in the context of the fen-teng and just before the “sounding” ritual.",
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    {
        "id": 209055,
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        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1980",
        "page_number": 217,
        "title": "RAS-1980",
        "content_text": "BIBLIOGRAPHY OF TAOISM\n\n185\n\n(A), object of worship by the Taoist priesthood. The common people consider Yü-huang Ta-ti, or the Jade Emperor as the supreme head of the divine hierarchy, whereas the Taoist priests worship as their highest creative powers the Three Pure Ones, the Celestial Worthy of the Original Beginning, the Celestial Worthy Ling-Pao and the Celestial Worthy Tao-Te.\n\nAs a religious organization, Taoism is divided into several sects, each of which has its own emphasis or specialty, roughly corresponding with five major areas of Taoist concern: good conduct, study of classic literature, alchemy (in modern times rather \"inner\" alchemy, or the search for longevity by \"nourishing one's vital energy\"), magical and religious rites, and finally divinatory practices.\n\nThe philosophical ideas of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu slowly permeated Chinese society. \"In office a Confucian, in retirement a Taoist\" became the tag of the scholar-official and even his Confucianism, after the thirteenth century, was to a large extent philosophical Taoism in disguise (H. Welch, The Parting of the Way. Boston, Beacon Press, 1957, p. 158). The Neo-Confucians borrowed the Taoist concept of an underlying unity, which \"does\" nothing (i.e., does not make any purposive effort) but accomplishes everything. They took the old Confucian concept of the Rites, li, and extended it to include the laws of nature as well as of man. They also adopted the Taoist goals of minimizing desires, returning to the purity of one's original nature, and identification of the individual with the universe.\n\nThrough the centuries, the Taoist influence on Chan Buddhism, which appealed particularly to intellectuals, flourished in China from the T'ang through the Sung dynasties and in Japan from the time of the Sung until today. The Japanese call it Zen, which \"rejects verbal teaching, disregards logic, discards morality, and regards Heaven and Earth as unkind. It sees no value in good deeds. The only way to be saved is to do nothing about it. Zen believes that salvation, in fact, is a return to our original nature, that no one else can do it for us, and that doing it makes us into the most ordinary and wonderful people\" (H. Welch, The Parting of the Way, p. 159).\n\nBecause the Chinese and Japanese cultures were considered in Japan to be essentially the same, due to the pan-Asian concept dobun doshu (same script, same race), Taoism spread from China...",
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    {
        "id": 211629,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1989",
        "page_number": 44,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "19\n\n2\n\nGoullart in his description of the monastery in Kiangsi in which he spent several holidays, describes in one hall 'Shang Ti smiling benevolently and enigmatically from his canopied throne'. He then refers, in his description of another temple, to the Jade Emperor and speaks of him as Shang Ti. There are various explanations offered as to why this deity is called the Jade Emperor. One suggests that the reference in the Book of Changes to '. . . heaven being the ruler, and is... jade' is its origin; Goullart however gives, in translation, an invocation from the abbot to Shang Ti in which he refers to him by title as 'the Mightiest Emperor over all Heavenly Kings, who lives in the Jade Hall of the Western Heaven'. This, surely, is a clue. The supreme deity, Shang Ti, lives in the Jade Hall, hence his title the Jade Emperor. This title is a relatively recent development in Chinese chronology having only become prominent during the 11th century AD. However, popular recognition of and interest in the cult became apparent during the Manchu (Ch'ing) dynasty.\n\nThe title of the sovereign divinity of the Chinese State religion until 1911 was Huang T'ien Shang Ti, the First Rank Supreme Deity in the 17th century regulations of the Ch'ing dynasty. Shang Ti, as the All-highest, was never portrayed in image form, and in a number of temples in South-East Asia the title of Huang T'ien Shang Ti is still given for the supreme deity, usually carved on plaques, and in one temple in Singapore an image of the Jade Emperor even bore a vertical slip of paper inscribed with this title.\n\nMany Chinese myths and legends involve the Jade Emperor; those surrounding his origins are shrouded in mystery and probably his genesis will never be known. China has a rich popular tradition incorporating local tales from every corner of the vast empire, and it is no wonder that numerous and varied explanations have been given by devotees of how and when the Jade Emperor became the senior deity. The earliest known reference to him is from the T'ang but he could have existed long before that. Since then it has commonly been believed that he was either an incarnation of, or given the task of Supreme Deity by Yuan Shih T'ien Chun, the senior deity of the Taoist trinity, the Three Pure Ones (San Ch'ing). His popularity declined somewhat during the Ming. Although a Taoist deity, his image is to be found on altars in several Buddhist temples and some Buddhists even claim that he is really just an adaptation of Indra. To the man in the street all Buddhist, Taoist and folk religion deities are his subordinates, and well timed worship will",
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    {
        "id": 211901,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1989",
        "page_number": 316,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "291\n\nout at church, and would be back before long, as the service began at nine o'clock. They only have one service, and get it over by eleven in time for breakfast. I was much disappointed, but of course it could not be helped.\n\nI took a long walk one afternoon with Mr Phillips, and posted my two letters. He took me through some parts I had never seen before. He had to call on business, so I came home alone. I passed the barracks, where I heard some native music, which to my ears was rather discordant.\n\nIn addition to their horses, the Malays use bullocks for drawing water casks etc. These bullocks are great thick clumsy brutes, with monstrous horns, and a great hump on their back. They have scarcely any hair, and go along at about two miles an hour. There is a strange breed of dogs and cats. There are plenty of snakes; one was shown me about three yards long, but with a very thin body, and covered with beautiful green and yellow marks. The frugivorous bats are very large, and as one walks about under the trees in the dark they almost flap their wings in one's face.\n\nAt last on Wednesday night we came off to the ship and once more took up our abode within its dreary sides. Everything seemed so dull and dreary, but I consoled myself with the thought that a fortnight ought to bring us to our journey's end. I brought with me a stock of pomeloes. They are a species of orange which grow larger than one's head, and are so healthy a fruit that one cannot eat too much of them. I got fourteen for two rupees. I have felt the benefit of eating them freely. In fact, they are such a cure for the bile that I have not been in the least troubled with it since eating them.\n\nI managed to catch two butterflies and a moth, all of them very large, compared with any to be seen in England. There are some very fine ones which seem to be very common there. The birds have the most brilliant plumage, of all colours; one kind of dove, which is wild, naturally keeps up a most curious noise which can be heard a long way off. Its note is rather long, and has a peculiar sound when heard in the stillness of the night. Indeed, Java abounds with everything that is lovely and enchanting. There is a perpetual summer. Everything is always in season, and the excessive fertility is the means of making the natives indolent and careless. They never work unless compelled to do so. Then having got a few cents, they live on it till it is gone, and only work again when they can go no further in debt. They creep about so slowly that one cannot help feeling tempted to help them to a kick. Even a small establishment",
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    {
        "id": 211955,
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        "page_number": 370,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "345\n\nlevel. The rest of the group (on the middle level) included a scene from the story of the Baishe Zhuan, the legend of the love between a snake-turned beauty and a virtuous scholar. The episode represented was that of the monk exercising his supernatural power to kill the lady, so as to free the scholar from the seduction of the demon. The other group bore the sign Wudan Shan, at once one of the famous mountains of China and a well-known place for Taoism. The top level of the group included the Jade Emperor. On the lower levels of these two groups were a temple, runners escorting a sedan chair, and the scene of the Eight Immortals Turning the Sea Upside Down.\n\n51\n\nDecorated with embroidery hangings, the Taoist altar had at its centre portraits of the Three Pure Ones and on either side the Heavenly Master and Taai-Yut Jan-Yan. Further from the centre were portraits of four minor “generals\", named “dragon\", \"tiger\", \"fire\" and \"water\". On the inner walls of the partitions hung pictures of the ten Kings of the Underworld. There was also a backroom to the altar, where the priests stayed between rites. Hanging in this room was an umbrella-shaped object with many charms trailing from it. There were, a priest told me, 28 in all, one for each of the 28 sau constellations. It was called the luo-tian, which meant, he said, the same as xian-tian, the Taoist primordial heaven.\" In the room was a temporary altar set up for the Three Pure Ones, plus a place with two red slips of paper saying \"May Tao be popular with people\" and “Good Luck in the rites\".\n\n52\n\nOn the day before the seven-day period of rites, the villagers decorated the room for their own gu in the main paang. Before each of the rooms stood a Luk Gwok flag, which was the same as the flag used in the Cantonese opera of the same name to announce the identity of a player; and a lo-gu ga; i.e. “drum and gong holder\". Hanging from the top of the opening were mechanical \"hanging puppets\". Inside near the front was a heung-on incense burner set of the siu-cheng type. The tables inside were decorated by toi-wai embroidery that hung from the edges. Hanging from the \"ceiling\" were similar pieces of embroidery known as waang-mei.\n\nSome of the villages put on displays in these rooms of relics of their illustrious ancestors. In the room for Shui Mei was the screen presented to Dang Git-Sau by relatives and friends to congratulate him on the occasion of his 61st birthday, which I mentioned previously. In the room for Wing Lung Wai was a series of scrolls presented in 1919 to celebrate",
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    {
        "id": 211959,
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        "document_key": "RAS-1989",
        "page_number": 374,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "349\n\ncommon to them. Most of them took place at one small space which I shall refer to as the ritual site. In most of the rituals, the ritual site was the Taoist altar in the main hall. Wherever a rite took place, the focus was one or more tables decorated with red embroidery, and covered with offerings of candle-sticks, incense, tea, wine, and sweets and food. In many cases the images of the gods to whom the rite was addressed were placed on the table. In most of the rites that took place at the Taoist altar, a distinction could be made between an \"inner table\" for the three Pure Ones and an \"outer table\" for the general gods of heaven. The priests put on their different Taoist robes and hats, which, in the main rites, distinguish the high priest from the others, and performed a series of actions to the accompaniment of music, which was played on cymbal, gong, dong-jiu and sona, and in the cases of scripture chanting and a few other rites which consist mainly of chanting, the \"wooden fish\" and \"chime\".\n\nThe other common objects used in the rites included manuals, charms, charm water, a bushel measure, knife, seal, and the faan flags for the Emperors of the Five Directions. To pay their respects to the gods, in many rites the priests held a chiu-gaan tablet before the breast as officials did when received in audience by the Emperor, or held a small incense burner with handles. At certain stages of the rites, typically when reporting their Taoist title and invoking the gods, the priest instructed the ritual representatives to kneel. The bushel measure was on the ritual table during most of the major rites. It contained, besides the faan flags, the sword and seal which represented the power of the Heavenly Master, Zhang Tianshi. With these two symbols of authority the head priest performed his magic steps to purify the ritual area, often using charm water as well. Besides the charms used with water for purification, there were charms for summoning different spirits in the Taoist cosmology.\n\n62\n\nOne of the ritual objects which appeared several times in the series of Taoist rites was the Memorial, which existed in three different forms for different purposes.\n\nIn all its versions the Memorial contained a general statement about the ritual, and a list of all the participants in the ritual, i.e. all the villagers. One version was bound in the form of a book and was usually carried by the no. 1 ritual representative in a paper \"pavilion\". This Memorial was read in summary during the first stage of most rites, and in full in a few major rites. Used in most of the major rites were Memorials in the form of scrolls, which were at the end of the rites sent off to the different sections of the supernatural",
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    },
    {
        "id": 211960,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1989",
        "page_number": 375,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "350\n\nworld by first fixing them in the arms of a mounted paper horse rider known as gung-chou, who served as a messenger, and then burning the three (horse, rider, and memorial) together. The other form, known as bong, was posted in a rite on the main day of the festival on a wall, and remained there until the conclusion of the ritual.\n\nThe scripture chanting/Repentance session took place before the Three Pure Ones three times a day. The manual used was the common Jade Emperor's Repentance Scripture. The sessions were very short. The one I timed lasted only fifteen minutes. The other daily rite was the procession of offerings, which started at the Taoist altar with worship of the Three Pure Ones, then visited all the five faan posts, all the temporary altars and the Jau and Wong Temple, the guardian gods of the paang, and the yau-saan. The procession included flags and banners, and was preceded by a man holding a \"spirit summoning flag\". At each spot it stopped at, the priests briefly chanted and made offerings.\n\nThe other (and longer) rites involved a lot of chanting and singing, which, in many cases, nobody could hear clearly. The amplified music of the puppet theatre drowned out any other sound. The only exception was a scholar of religion from the Chinese University of Hong Kong who had the high priest carry a wireless microphone for him and who could therefore listen to the priests' words from a headphone radio and compare them with the manual. My descriptions of the Taoist rites, therefore, are often interpretations of what I saw and heard on the basis of past experience and manuals. 63\n\nE. The Participants List in the Taoist Rites\n\nOf the elements of the rites, the villagers probably knew most about the Memorials in their different forms. The women villagers in general knew less about the festival (or they pretended to). When I asked some elderly ladies at the ritual site what da-jiu was all about, they explained that it was heui-lok promised to Jau and Wong, to commemorate them. They suggested that I should ask elderly men instead. It was men who knew more about these things. The knowledge was handed down from one generation to another. But I overheard, during the opening rite, the same group of elderly ladies asking themselves how many priests were reading the Memorial (the one to be burnt). They observed that there was too much noise for them to hear the reading. They explained to me that the names of all the villagers (yan-hau) were being read. The priests\n\nPage 375\n\nPage 376",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 211965,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1989",
        "page_number": 380,
        "title": "RAS-1989",
        "content_text": "355 \n\ntraditions were involved in the festival. The priests had some difficulty with the opening ritual. In this, according to their practice, they also send off the third Memorial. In this case the almanac specified that the third Memorial should be submitted at about 3 a.m., and the opening ritual take place at a later time. At first the priests thought that they would follow the almanac specialist's schedule. But later the ritual representatives decided that they had never had the two rituals separately performed in previous celebrations. So it was decided that they would have the third Memorial ritual together with the opening ritual, at the time specified for the latter.\n\nThe distribution of ritual knowledge was not even among the villagers. Two elders noticeably active in organizing the rites probably knew much more than the others. I was able to talk with one of them, who attributed his active involvement in the rites to the fact that he had become familiar with the ritual through serving as ritual representative in the last three celebrations, every time in the first five places. He had complaints about mistakes in the jiu ceremonies. He believed that paper clothing had not been burnt in the Small Offering to Ghosts, because, after the ceremony, there was still a box of them with hats and boots. A second mistake was remedied by his complaint. It was the villagers' practice to have 49 lanterns in the Dipper rite. The priests had set up only 28. The elder complained to the older priest, who explained to his colleagues how the number of 49 was arrived at. A third case was Ying-Sing, \"Escorting the Holy Ones\". The elder was aware of a mistake: this time there was no place for jung-sing (“All the Holy Ones\", represented by a san-teng tablet), ancestor Hung-Yi, or Jau and Wong. It had been the practice that four places were dedicated to them, and only one to the Three Pure Ones. The two mistakes were not corrected because he was not there. He had gone home to sleep.\"\n\nB. The Festival Committee\n\n66\n\nA Festival Committee was formed of the ritual representatives and the ordinary leaders of the community. Named as the president and vice-presidents were the head of the lineage, the member of the lineage who had been appointed by the Government as J.P., the chairman of the Rural Committee, a lawyer on the District Board, and elders from each village (who were not necessarily the Village Representatives). It was explained to me that this group of presidents was to represent the villagers in dealing with invited guests and other honourable outsiders. The chairman and",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1989.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8336pm92h",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 213787,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1996",
        "page_number": 139,
        "title": "RAS-1996",
        "content_text": "110\n\nand their brothers several generations earlier than the one with whom the last part of the genealogy starts counting generations from one.\n\nThe above shows that celebration of Fengchao is connected with ordination names. It is not meaningful to ask if all those who celebrate the rite had ordination names in their genealogies—in any case, as mentioned before, all Hakka genealogies I examined, except short excerpts, contain ordination names. There is a similar problem in asking if all lineages with ordination names in their genealogies celebrated Fengchao. One may ask, however, the following question: if two lineages trace to the same ancestors who are the only ones who had ordination names, and one of the lineages celebrates Fengchao, would the other celebrate Fengchao too? There are some cases in the New Territories of which we may ask this question: e.g., Ping Yeung and Ting Kok, So Lo Pun and Lai Chi Wo, Shuen Wan and Wu Kau Tang. At this stage of research, I cannot answer the question for any of those pairs.\n\nAccording to the memorial for the ritual of Fengchao, it is dedicated to ancestors. Chao is also written as Zuchao, zu meaning \"ancestor\". Elsewhere in the memorial, it is written as shangzu, “early ancestors”. Many of the sessions in the ritual are named in the memorial. They were for maintenance of an “immortal army” which seemed to be under the control of the ancestors. When a priest read the memorial to demonstrate his rendering, he added zugong (\"ancestors\") before bingma (\"army\") in the passage, indicating that he does think of the army as belonging to the ancestors. He compared the army to \"policemen\", and told me that they were to guard the village to prevent entry of outsiders. The rites were to remedy possible loss of soldiers and horses due to lack of provisions; loss of the wuhua qihao flags of the army; and the loss of yingsuo stations [garrisons?]. One major feature is petitioning the Jade Emperor and his subsidiaries for issuance of a Zhaobing Pai order for recruitment of soldiers.\n\nThe rite I witnessed was performed inside the ancestral hall, with the exception of a session to “pacify the kitchen god” at the kitchen stove of the bridegroom's house. At the ancestral altar of the hall, the priest hung a picture showing the Three Pure Ones and gods peculiar to the popular tradition, including the Three Ladies. Three temporary spirit",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214367,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1998",
        "page_number": 225,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "191\n\nindustry. It was common, so it claimed, for construction teams to hold Taoist rituals, including the sacrifice of oxen before work began.*\n\nOn the other side of the coin, according to the Bureau of Religious Affairs, about 200 Taoist temples have been re-opened to the public in China since the 1980s and seven Taoist provincial associations have been established. One of these temples is the former Taoist Cheng-i sect centre, the Heavenly Master Sect temple [T'ien-shih Miao] on Dragon and Tiger Mountain, Lung-hu Shan, in Kiangsi province. It was burned down in 1945 and work on rebuilding it did not begin until 1983. This consisted of the renovation of the main hall and the re-sculpturing of the images of the San Ch'ing, the Three Pure Ones, and fourteen other clay statues. Other sites nearby have also been renovated, including the Shang Ch'ing Palace, where the Immortals lived, and the Lien-tan Ch'ih, the Furnace [where pills of immortality were made]. It is interesting to read that both local and central authorities donated more than half a million yuan towards the project.\n\nAbout the same time as the iconoclastic campaign began, a ban was also imposed in Tsingtao, the port in southern Shantung, on the manufacture, sale and burning of funeral objects in a bid to curb a resurgence in superstition.\n\n...\n\nDespite all of these reports of the destruction of illegal temples and the crackdown on superstition, my daughter and I during the years 1995-1997 have visited a number of temples both urban and rural in remote areas of China as well as in cities and towns which, without doubt, fall under the category of superstitious religious establishments. We have not only been guided to several such temples by policemen but also in one instance we found the local party cadre actually lived with his mother inside a small popular religion temple. The only instance where a member of a temple staff had reason to explain that an activity was banned because it was superstition happened in the suburbs of Shanghai. When we asked why there were no oracular blocks on the altar with which to obtain the deity's answers to questions posed by devotees, we were told by the temple guardian that this particular practice was superstition and not permitted, whereas other routine rituals seen in temples in Hong Kong and Taiwan were. A Chinese scholar recently explained that in his view illegal temples are the structures built without permission because local State authorities have not had the quid pro quo erection of a village school, crèche or health centre paid for by the villagers with the same sum funded for the project as\n\nPage 225\n\nPage 226",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214977,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-2000",
        "page_number": 73,
        "title": "RAS-2000",
        "content_text": "29\n\nnot only by the white races but the coloured ones as well. Being by birth Eurasian, she made an only too easy and vulnerable target from both sides. In volume three of her epic autobiographical/historical cycle, Birdless Summer, explicit and abundant evidence is provided of almost unsurpassable difficulties in her first marriage to a Chinese aristocrat, chauvinist and Chiang Kai Shek general, due to her half-European roots. Let us quote just a short and very mild passage from Chapter Four, introducing us to this serious and later on gradually growing problem:\n\nIt was on this journey that Pao's [the Chinese husband's] friends began to tease him about me. When we stopped at night they would comment about my looks... \"There is foreign blood in her, one can see that...\"\n\n“Not at all, she is pure Chinese,\" retorted Pao. As if it was not written on my face that I was a Eurasian!\n\nThe greatest resonance of Han Suyin's artistic prose, echoed in the field of film-making also, was attained by a tragic love story, entitled A Many-Splendoured Thing (later made into the motion picture Love is a Many Splendored Thing by Twentieth Century Fox with Jennifer Jones and William Holden in the leading roles). It describes a great love affair between the author (then a medical doctor in Hong Kong) and Ian Morrison, a foreign correspondent of the London Times. This sublime love affair, perhaps the greatest in the whole of Han Suyin's life, lasted several months only and was tragically ended by Ian's front-line death in Korea, when reporting on the Korean war. The love affair was also a scandal in Hong Kong society of the early fifties, when interracial amorous ties were still considered improper and an attempt on the divine social order. Where they occurred, they were rationalised as the virtuous white man, assiduously corrupted by a sly coloured female of loose conduct.\n\nHan Suyin can indisputably be regarded as a reliable eye-witness and a true expert in the most subtle and often confounding issues arising from colonialism. Her painfully sober judgement is highly impressive. I myself very frequently return to fragments of Chapter Ten from The Crippled Tree, very eloquent about the colonial powers' cunning attempts to win ‘native' hearts and minds. Here is one fragment:",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2000.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/nk328168n",
        "rank": 0
    }
]