Ghost Troubles And Exorcism Methods

Ghost is one of the most elusive yet ubiquitous elements in Chinese popular religion, even in Chinese whole culture. In modern society, we can still see the effects that ghosts played on people’s daily lives. The recognition of ghost culture, therefore, is of vital importance for our understanding of Chinese people’s religious mentality, as well as the development of Chinese religion. The fact that ghosts are often central to rituals and popular stories makes the ghost belief an perfect angel to reflect the inter-relationships between popular religion, Taoism and Buddhism in Chinese religious tradition.Taiping Guangji, a 500-fascicle work published during the Song dynasty, is an anthology of stories from the Han dynasty to the early Song dynasty. The book is classified into 92 categories by property, including immortals, ghosts, demons, etc. Among the 500 volumes, the category of ghost accounts for 40 volumes, which take a great part of this book. As Taiping Guangji collects the unofficial historical biographies as well as miscellaneous works written mainly by novelists, it contains much material useful for the study of the commoners’life, culture, religion, customs, and even mentality, and thus provided us an ideal medium to study the ghost culture in Medieval China.In this essay I will present a more meticulous observation on the ghost stories of Taiping Guangji and address two inter-related questions:(1) What kind of troubles ghosts bring to people’s lives? (2) What kind of methods did people take when they encountered with the troubles brought by ghosts? This essay is an attempt to solve these problems. There are four chapters:Chapter one, the development of ghost opinions from pre-Qin dynasty to Tang dynasty. In this part, we mainly comb the development of ghost opinions reflected in Classical books and unearthed documents from pre-Qin dynasty to Tang dynasty, and we know that dangerous is one of the basic characters of ghost.Chapter two, the outlook of ghost stories of Taiping Guangji. In this part, we want to know the component and the characters of these ghost stories, that is, as Taiping Guangji is an anthology of stories, and there are many book sources the stories come from, we want to make it clear and know which book these ghost stories comes from and then we can know which dynasty they belong to.Chapter three, ghost troubles reflect from ghost stories of Taiping Guangji. In this part, we comb these ghost stories carefully to find out what kind of troubles that ghosts can bring to people, as a result, there are mainly seven kinds of troubles including death, plague, diseases, seducing, revenge, stealing, mischief and others. Through studying these troubles we can know how people think about ghosts and how they think about these ghost troubles they encountered.Chapter four, exorcism methods reflect from ghost stories of Taiping Guangji. In this part, we can see many exorcists were active in people’s daily lives to help them solve their troubles brought by harmful ghosts. According to the contents of ghost stories, there are mainly three kinds of exorcists:Wu shaman, Taoist and Buddhist that played great roles in solving people’s problems. Through analyzing the differences between attitudes and exorcism rituals toward ghosts among these three different kinds of exorcists, we can know the development and the interaction of these three religions.Conclusion part, by reviewing ghost troubles and exorcism methods reflected from Taiping Guangji, we discover the view of life-death and the view of diseases of people in medieval China; And discover the similarities as well as differences between the attitudes and methods among Wu shamans, Taoists and Buddhists toward ghost troubles.