Devotional Creatures: Bugs and Other Little Critters in Chinese Religions

Devotional Creatures investigates how the many and various small critters known as chong helped develop Chinese religious teachings, practices, and material cultures. Today chong are generally understood as “insects,” but this narrow meaning became imaginable in East Asia only in the nineteenth century and only in limited scientific modernizing circles. In Chinese religious contexts, chong encompass a host of vibrant beings along a spectrum of tangible to intangible, from amphibians, arachnids, and reptiles to body worms and demons. Chong are liminal and anomalous creatures, astral and cosmic as much as chitinous and chthonic. They are ontologically contiguous with humanity and divinity.

Contributors to the volume explore how these little world makers, materially and symbolically, have worked together with human beings to co-create all manner of things that constitute Chinese religions, including imperial agricultural rituals, medieval Buddhist monastic regulations, and Daoist exorcistic rites as well as late imperial morality books, anomaly accounts, and materia medica. In contemporary times, common and pervasive chong such as ants and cockroaches instigate merit-generating advances in Buddhist monastery spaces, regulations, and ritual and hygienic practices, while fierce chong like wasps and centipedes imbue statues of deities with martial prowess for divine and human ends. Chong continue to play important roles in shaping more-than-human ethical codes, ritual procedures, monastic precincts, and ideals of mor(t)ality and spiritual perfection.

Devotional Creatures illustrates how multispecies relations that permeate daily lives and transgress bodily boundaries have driven religious imaginaries in diverse and unexpected ways across regions now associated with China. It will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese religions, Buddhist and Daoist studies, and animal studies.

• Daniel Burton-Rose, Editor

  Daniel Burton-Rose is Department Director of Humanities and Social Sciences and assistant professor of history at Wenzhou-Kean University.

• Stuart H. Young, Editor

  Stuart H. Young is associate professor of East Asian religions in the Department of Religious Studies at Bucknell University.

Contributors

• Olivia Milburn
• Laura Boyer-Meng
• Jennifer Eichman
• Aaron K. Reich
• Ann Heirman
• Tzu-Lung Melody Chiu
• Lina Verchery
• Daniel Burton-Rose
• Stuart H. Young