Fengshui In China: Geomantic Divination Between State Orthodoxy And Popular Religion

333 Pages·2004·5.64 MB·English

by  Ole Bruun

B Fengshui
‘Required reading for scholars of Chinese religion’
R
Unlike popular manuals, this book approaches fengshui from an
u
academic angle, focusing on its significance in China, but also
depicting the recent history of its reinterpretation in the West. It u
in China
includes a historical account of fengshui over the last 150 years
n
with anthropological fieldwork on contemporary practices in two

Chinese rural areas. The author argues that fengshui serves as an
F
alternative tradition of cosmological knowledge to explain a range
e geomantic Divination between state
of everyday occurrences in rural areas such as disease, mental
n Orthodoxy and Popular Religion
disorders, accidents and common mischief. Although Chinese
authorities have opposed the tradition for centuries, it has been g
used by almost everyone as an aspect of popular cosmology. s
This paperback edition of the 2003 hardback introduces new h
material, responding to the evolving scholarly debate and reflecting
u
changes in Chinese society, culture and beliefs.
i

i
‘This valuable study will be required reading for scholars of Chinese religion, and makes
n
a valuable contribution to the anthropology of religion.’ – Joseph Bosco, ‘East Asia’

C
‘[This book] offers significant insights into the working of diverse coexisting traditions
... [and will] undoubtedly remain an important work in the studies of contemporary h
China’s transformation as well as postcolonial cultural development.’ – Yinong Xu,
i
‘China Review International’ n
‘Ole Bruun’s direct observations of fengshui … are the most detailed and extensive a
that have been made in these new conditions. He is well placed to say what fengshui
has become in the dramatically changed circumstances of its homeland.’ – Stephan
Feuchtwang
Ole Bruun
Foreword by stephan Feuchtwang
www.niaspress.dk
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Fengshui in China
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nias – nordic institute of asian studies
Man & Nature in Asia series
Series Editor: Arne Kalland, University of Oslo
Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives
Pamela J. asquith and arne Kalland (eds)
Environmental Challenges in South-East Asia
Victor T. King (ed.)
State, Society and the Environment in South Asia
stig Toft Madsen (ed.)
Environmental Movements in Asia
arne Kalland and Gerard Persoon (eds)
Wildlife in Asia
John Knight (ed)
The Social Dynamics of Deforestation in the Philippines
Gehard van den Top
Co-management of Natural Resources in Asia
Gerard Persoon, Diny van Est and Percy sajise (eds)
Fengshui in China
Ole Bruun
Nature and Nation: Forests and Development in Peninsular Malaysia
Jeya Kathirithamby-Wells
NIAS Press is the autonomous publishing arm of NIAS – Nordic Institute of Asian Studies,
a research institute located at the University of Copenhagen. NIAS is partially funded
by the governments of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden via the Nordic
Council of Ministers, and works to encourage and support Asian studies in the Nordic
countries. In so doing, NIAS has been publishing books since 1969, with more than two
hundred titles produced in the past few years.
UNIverSIty oF CoPeNhAgeN Nordic Council of Ministers
Fengshui-title-TOC Page iii 29 August 2011 1:47 PM
Fengshui
in China
geomantic Divination between state
Orthodoxy and Popular Religion
Ole Bruun
Second revised edition
with a foreword by Stephan Feuchtwang
Fengshui-title-TOC Page iv 29 August 2011 1:47 PM
nias – nordic institute of asian studies
Man & nature in asia series, no. 8
First published in hardback in 2003 by nias Press
simultaneously published in the United states
by the University of Hawai‘i Press
This revised paperback edition published in 2011
nias – nordic institute of asian studies
Leifsgade 33, DK–2300 Copenhagen s, Denmark
tel: [phone] • fax: [phone]
E–mail: [email protected] • Website: www.niaspress.dk
© Ole Bruun 2011 (2003)
Publication of this book was assisted by the
Danish state Research Council of the Humanities
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bruun, Ole
Fengshui in China : geomantic divination between state
orthodoxy and popular religion. - (Man and nature in asia ;
no. 8)
1.Feng shui - China 2. Religion and state - China
i.Title ii.nordic institute of asian studies
133.3’337’0951
isBn 978-87-91114-79-3 (hbk)
isBn 978-87-91114-57-1 (pbk)
Typesetting by nias Press
Printed in the United Kingdom
by Marston Digital
Fengshui-title-TOC Page v 29 August 2011 1:47 PM
Contents
Foreword by Stephan Feuchtwang vii
Acknowledgements xii
Some Notes on Transliteration xiii
A Retrospective View of the Book xv
1. Fengshui: a Challenge to anthropology 1
2. Fengshui Practices and Policies, 1850 to 1949 34
3. Fengshui Practices and Policies after 1949 81
4. The Fengshui Revival – Fieldwork in sichuan 112
5. another school of Fengshui – Fieldwork in Jiangsu 163
6. Fengshui applications and Possible interpretations 198
7. The Construction of a Discourse: Fengshui as Environmental
Ethics 231
8. Conclusion 255
appendix: On the Origin of Fengshui and the History of its
Literature 263
List of Chinese Terms 285
List of Chinese names 287
Bibliography 288
index 301
00/Prelims+Foreword Page vi Thursday, October 31, 2002 9:57 AM
FIGURES
3.1: Illegal booklet of divination circulated in Sichuan 109
4.1: One of the few pre-liberation books on fengshui that survived the Red
Guards’ book-burning 116
4.2: Mr. Luo in front of his house 123
4.3: Spreading ‘road money’ ahead of the funeral procession 140
4.4: Funeral procession, carrying a modern-style paper house for the
deceased 141
4.5: Funeral procession – the urn 141
4.6: Mr Luo showing the landlord’s grave on his property 147
4.7: Road sign announcing the good fengshui of a public graveyard in a
development zone 159
5.1: Traditional entrance adorned with powerful images 181

5.2: Seeing fengshui, although the circumference of the house is already
indicated 183
5.3: Rural geomancer with compass and book 185
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Foreword
Fengshui has been globalised, but its centre of activities is still China.
It is fashionable abroad because it is ‘complementary’, like acu-
puncture: another Chinese body of knowledge and practice. As
fashion, trickery or trustworthy truth, its practise in urban interior
and garden design in the rich cities of Euro-America as well as China
has been added to its traditional use for the siting of graves, homes,
and public buildings. But it is important to treat it as a kind of
knowledge, rather than as a phenomenon. Fengshui certainly stands
the test of being so treated. It is substantial, has a long history, and
can be shown to have affected the way Chinese people see and treat
the world. One of the ways fengshui is known is through stories of
the perfidy of its practitioners. But to ask what kind of knowledge it
is and to what uses it has been put gets behind the immediate and
practical questions of trust that anyone attracted to it as a client, in
China as anywhere else, understandably asks.
Others may go to China to learn the art and cosmology of fengshui
in order to become practitioners. Ole Bruun did not. He is interested
in fengshui as a kind of knowledge. So am I, and so probably are you,
the reader. But there are many available ways of treating and
understanding fengshui as knowledge. Fengshui has been studied by
historians of science, by historians of religious cosmology, and by
landscape architects. But for a closer emphasis on practice and social
context, it is best done by anthropologists. My own study, which began
nearly forty years ago, combined the exposition of Chinese texts with
reports of fengshui in practice. But Ole Bruun concentrates on
practice and has interviewed a great many fengshui specialists and
their clients, something I did not do. Ole starts with the records of
other Western observers as I did for the second half of my book but
only after I had given an exposition of Chinese fengshui manuals1.
He then adds his own much more systematic observations a century
and a half later.
The outsider is never neutral. It may be of some interest to
compare the difference between the nineteenth-century observers
vii
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FENGSHUI IN CHINA
and Ole Bruun as a late twentieth-century observer of fengshui in
China because it is also an indication of changes that fengshui itself
has undergone. The outside observers of the nineteenth century
were missionaries and other representatives of great imperial powers.
Ole Bruun is a different kind of outsider, in another time and kind of
global economics and politics. He has less direct interest in China as
a market or as a field for salvation or for any other mission than they
had. He is a European who has used his knowledge of Chinese, years
of experience in China and decades of studying it, to make of himself
a well respected academic researcher. He is a professional exponent
of different kinds of knowledge, how they are embedded in political
and economic contexts and extended in social practices. True to this
calling as an anthropologist, he describes how the politics of the
immediate past, the years of Cultural Revolution, affected his field-
work, and he has a very interesting take on the effect that his nine-
teenth-century predecessors' quite different preoccupations in China
had on the politics of fengshui.
Fengshui was always proscribed, amongst other reasons because of
the unfilial delay in the burial of ancestors that geomancers or geo-
mantic dispute could cause. Yet it was also supported by the imperial
state, as an art for the siting of imperial tombs and the design of the
imperial capital. To this was added the privilege and duty of the
emperor to produce the annual calendar. On the other hand this
imperial duty and privilege had from the seventeenth century been
transformed by highly respected scholars’ criticism of the correlative
thinking behind fengshui in which any thing can be linked to every-
thing else. To widespread agreement among the ruling elite learned
critics pointed out awkward facts that did not fit and had their own
conditions of existence that the correlative systems could not elucidate.
They and their successors to the present day could nevertheless not
explain why such thinking persisted (which is what the anthropologist
tries to do). Now, in the last half of the nineteenth century, a further
twist was added to this ambivalence. Fengshui became a useful tool
for the mobilisation among the subjects of the state to place obstacles
in the ways of the projects (mines, roads, railways, buildings) of
1. My main interest was in fengshui as a way of putting into practice a
cosmology but first of all I wanted to be able to say what that
cosmology is. I have just revised the publication of that study. The new
edition of An anthropological Analysis of Chinese Geomancy is
published by White Lotus Co Ltd, Bangkok, 2002.
viii
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FOREWORD
Western imperial incursion into China. In the same way, beliefs in
demons and the means for fighting against them could be turned
against foreigners to whom the imperial court had been forced to
concede privileges. This happened in the Boxer Rebellion in the last
years of the nineteenth century.
Imperial ambivalence blew apart in the course of the republican
revolution, with republican states turning to science, progress and
atheism in their urban bases. Continued use of fengshui seen from
the cities was considered to be a backward ‘peasant’ superstition. The
state of the People's Republic of China led by a professedly atheist
Party continues this condemnation. But in the last quarter century,
official ambivalence has returned. Mao had promoted a policy of
walking on two legs, advancing Chinese traditional knowledge in
several spheres, including medicine, and at the same time learning
and developing scientific knowledge that had started in the West.
Traditional Chinese medicine was taught in universities, including
reconfigurations of traditional cosmological concepts that are also
basic to fengshui. But walking on two legs definitely did not include
fengshui or traditional religious practices. Then in the last two
decades of the twentieth century, Chinese physics and other research
disciplines investigated the scientific value of exercises for cultivating
qi, the basic energies of bodies and all other physical forms in the
universe. Official promotion of such exercises for preventative health
fed a craze. Many methods of cultivating spiritual and physical health
were born and flourished. They threatened to go out of state control
a number of times, particularly in the mid-eighties and the late nine-
ties, when those not registered with state authorities were severely
suppressed. At the same time there was a resurgence of religious
practices. In many instances they are cultivated officially as local
custom and as tourist attraction, in many others they are condemned
as superstition, fraud and disorder, and in most instances they persist
on an uneasy middle ground.
Popular religion includes Daoist rites, which share with fengshui a
conception of the emergence of things from a great unity, through
the fertile balances of Yin and Yang. It is elaborated in a cosmology of
flows of qi energies and substances, of destructive as well as
constructive interactions of the Five Elements, and of the astrological
influences of stars, likewise harmful or benign. But it is also true to say
that geomancy is a completely distinct practice and tradition. The same
is true of Chinese medical traditions. I do not think either fengshui or
Chinese medicine is a religious system. Fengshui practitioners are
ix