Preface Ⅰ

Huang Jianxing is quite simply one of the best doctoral students I have ever had in over twenty-five years of directing doctoral theses. He had come already well prepared by his teacher Ye Mingsheng, with whom he had done a great deal of fieldwork. But since working with me, he has made enormous strides, in his mastery of English for one, but above all in his understanding of the history and sociology of Chinese religion. He has also continued to do fieldwork and shows great promise for the future in this area.

For some 15 years, I have been looking for someone who would be able to synthesize the vast numbers of field reports produced since 1990 on the subject of shigong师公.That is exactly what Huang Jianxing has done: he has read all that material, by Japanese, Chinese, and Western scholars, ranging across the ten provinces of Taiwan, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, Jiangxi, Hunan, Sichuan，Guangdong, Guizhou, and Guangxi and involving both Han and non-Han（She and Yao）. He has brought all that material together and made a coherent comparative analysis of these far-flung traditions, showing how much they share as regards vestments, ritual implements（法器）, rituals of transmission（传度仪式）, and performance of rituals for the living（专门吉事）as opposed to rituals for the dead. He demonstrates that what he calls the “teaching of the masters”（师教）is so distinctive that it deserves to be considered a kind of fifth religion, together with the Three Religions（三教）and shamanism（巫教）. At the same time, in a carefully nuanced and balanced way, he shows that it has a particularly close relationship to Daoism, of which it can also be considered—and traditionally has been considered—a unique part that arose in the Song and led to a major rapprochement between Daoism and the forms of medium-and temple-based religion that are often called “popular religion”（民间宗教）or “popular belief”（民间信仰）and that the elite forms of Daoism from the Tang and pre-Tang eras rejected because they involved blood sacrifice（血祭）. Thus Daoism, which had hitherto rejected the blood sacrifices of popular religion, came by means of the “teaching of the masters” to at once incorporate and transcend them. This represents a major revolution in the history of Chinese religions, and it is the signal merit of Huang Jianxing, having read and digested all relevant fieldwork and historical studies, to have drawn a coherent portrait of this radically new form of Daoism that combined features from popular religion，Tantric Buddhism, and elite Daoism.

This represents a major breakthrough in Daoist studies. I am proud to have been Huang Jianxing's teacher.

Hong Kong, 15 January 2017

John Lagerwey

Research Professor of Chinese Studies

Centre for China Studies

Chinese University of Hong Kong