Lecture | China Seminar
The Ontology of Writing: The Workings of Talismans in Daoist Practice
- Date
- Wednesday 7 May 2025
- Time
- Serie
- LIAS China Seminar
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.01
Abstract
Talismans—messages to deities or demons inscribed, often in esoteric script, on paper, cloth, wood, metal, or in the air—have been ubiquitous in the history of religions, nowhere more so than in Daoist liturgical practice. This talk asks what makes talismanic writing efficacious by looking closely at Daoist practice these days in south China. What makes the strange script of talismanic writing do what it purports to do—compel deities and demons to obey the will of a Daoist master to heed summons and carry out liturgical tasks such as apotropaic protection or healing exorcism? This talk invites the audience into the liturgical world of talisman-making in living Daoist practice in south China while exploring foundational ideas about talismans and their efficacy in the major Daoist liturgical movements of the tenth through fourteenth centuries, ideas which are still informing Daoist practice in south China today. And the talk puts those Chinese ideas in conversation with current debates about material culture in the study of religion.
Biography
David J. Mozina (Ph.D. Harvard) is an Affiliated Researcher in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge. He studies living Daoist and Buddhist ritual traditions in rural south China, and their roots in the liturgical vibrancy of the eleventh through early fifteenth centuries. Informed by the comparative study of religion, he is interested in phenomenological and semiotic approaches to ritual; in the relationship between ritual and material culture (i.e., talismans, liturgical implements, religious art); and in different ways of combining ethnographic and historical research.
David is the author of Knotting the Banner: Ritual and Relationship in Daoist Practice (University of Hawai‘i Press, Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2021), which was named a finalist for the 2022 Best First Book in the History of Religions by the American Academy of Religion. David has published articles in leading journals on Daoist exorcistic ritual today in Hunan province, on Daoist ritual theory in the Song dynasty (960–1279), and on the intertextual nature of secret ritual manuscripts used by Daoist priests. He is currently working on two monograph-length projects. The first is a historical study of the Song- and Yuan-dynasty (960–1368) Daoist lineages dedicated to rites regulating deceased spirits in the Fengdu underworld. The second is an ethnographic and historical study of the intertwining Daoist and Buddhist ritual traditions in the lineages of rural Hunan province. Together with Dr. Ling Zhang of the University of Cambridge, he is also working on a collaborative project entitled “Ecology, Religion, and Multispecies Healing.”
David has received research grants from the American Philosophical Society, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Association for Asian Studies. And he has been active in various professional organizations, including several units in the American Academy of Religion, the Society for the Study of Chinese Religions, the Global Daoist Studies Forum, and the Center for the Study of Religions at Southwest Jiaotong University in the PRC.