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HONG KONG’s Wong Tai Sin Temple locates itself imaginally at China’s Taoist roots where benevolence, mysticism and pragmatics apply in equal measure.
The Embodiment of Myth in Modern Worship
To witness a dynamic marriage between the alchemical legend of a deified Taoist saint who lived in fourth-century China and a flourishing community in the twenty-first, one needs look no further than the temple compound located in the bustling residential neighbourhood in Hong Kong named after Wong Tai Sin 黄大仙 (huang daxian). Known locally as the presiding deity who grants benevolent blessings to worshippers and patients at the free Chinese medical clinic on the temple grounds, his name means the Great Immortal Sage Wong.
One purpose of this paper is to provide the reader an introduction to the remarkable and fairly recent history of this cult of worship in Hong Kong. Another is to lay the thematic groundwork for a psychological pilot study to be conducted among a sampling of patients at the free Chinese medical clinic mentioned above. The pilot study asks what kind of connection, if any, the worshipper/patient consciously makes between the quality of the medical assessment, diagnosis and prescription of remedies available at the temple and his or her prevailing mental imagery of Wong Tai Sin, especially where the legendary healing powers and miracles attributed to the god are concerned.
For the definitive work on the study of the origins of the Wong Tai Sin cult, the present Hong Kong temple, and the three temples that preceded it in Guangzhou and Guangdong Province, please consult the fascinating The Rise of a Refugee God: Hong Kong’s Wong Tai Sin by Graeme Lang and Lars Ragvald.(1) Although these authors pay some attention to devotees’ attributions of the god’s healing powers and miracles and mention that “some of the remedies seem to extend into semi-magical realms…”,(2) Lang and Ragvald provide a primarily sociological framework for analyzing the phenomena observed. This paper takes a psychological approach by seeking to amplify the particular imagery associated with the legend of Wong Tai Sin and determine if there exists a correlate in the minds of devotees with regard to the god’s attributed healing powers. To date, no studies have been located indicating that psychological research has been conducted on the worship of Wong Tai Sin. This paper hopes to invite more discussion in the apparent lacuna of literature on this topic.
The Legend of Wong Tai Sin
Here follows the autobiographical statement of Wong Tai Sin as it appears in temple pamphlets, books and on the Internet, all published by the managing institution, Sik Sik Yuen 啬色园.(3) The autobiography was said to have been recorded by the temple’s founder through the process of spirit-writing fuji 扶乩 (fugei) in the late 1890s.
Autobiography of Master Wong Tai Sin:
As a young shepherd-boy, I spent my early childhood at Jinhua Mountain located at the north of Jinhua City in Zhejiang Province. The mountain was said to have derived its name from Venus and Mou Nui constellation both of which were directly overhead. Oriented at the north of Jinhua Mountain was the Hill of Red Pines where I took abode. The hill, densely forested and often hidden in clouds and fog, was seldom frequented by outsiders. Among thick natural vegetation and interlocking peaks, there was a deep ravine named Jinhua, one of the thirty-six caves of similar geological structures in the neighbouring district.
My childhood was marred by poverty and hunger, compelling me to start earning my daily bread as a shepherd-boy at the age of eight. At fifteen I was fortunate enough to have been blessed by a fairy who led me to a stone cave where I learned the art of refining cinnabar nine times into an immortal drug. For forty years in succession, I lived in seclusion for the cultivation of Taoism until my brother broke this isolation. His early efforts were at first futile. However, through the guidance of a Taoist fortune teller, he located me. My brother queried me of the whereabouts of the sheep under my custody. To this, I replied that they could be traced in the East of Jinhua Mountain. He was surprised, on arrival, to find nothing but heaps of white boulders that quickly transformed into sheep at my call. Seeing this, my brother decided to follow my footsteps. He too reached enlightenment and became an immortal.
Originally, I was named Wong Cho-ping, a subject of the Tsun Dynasty and a native of a place named Dan Qi. The derivation of my name as Red Pine Fairy was due to my meditation in Red Pine Hill. To differentiate myself from the Red Pine Fairy who was in close company of Chang Liang, I wrote this autobiography.
Fuji: A Tool for Divination
The god’s autobiographical statement is quite significant in that it relates a good number of details and some powerful images of a transformative nature. That this information was received by means of the traditional divination method called 扶乩 fuji (fugei) also intrigues from a psychological point of view:
Fuji divination produces messages from a god or spirit through a stick, held by one or two persons, which write Chinese characters on a table or a tray. As soon as a character has been written on the tray and identified, it is copied into a notebook by one of the participants so that the complete message can be studied later… The god was evidently thought to control the stick, but the wielder of the stick had to be worthy to serve as the god’s spirit-writer to inscribe the god’s messages. Spirit-writers do not show dramatic manifestations of spirit-possession, but a mild kind of “trance” behaviour is frequently observed. (4)
Through this method, the temple’s founder and associates were said to have contacted the spirit of Wong Tai Sin who “taught them the principle of ‘benevolence and beneficence’ and thus became his followers” at the turn of the nineteenth century in Guangdong Province,(5)
China. These early messages from Wong Tai Sin indicated that his original intention was to save humanity. Around the same time, common poor people who could not afford to see a doctor when ill availed themselves of the free prescriptions and medicine available at the first temple. It is said that the spirit of Wong Tai Sin prescribed combinations of herbs that would invariably cure those who sought his help and thus a large following began to form in his name.(6) From several reported healings, Wong Tai Sin’s reputation grew...
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1. Graeme Lang & Lars Ragvald, The Rise of a Refugee God: Hong Kong’s Wong Tai Sin, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993.
2. Ibid., p. 27.
3. Sik Sik Yuen, Homepage http://www.siksikyuen.org.hk, accessed on March 21st 2008.
4. Graeme Lang & Lars Ragvald, “Spirit writing and the development of Chinese cults”, Sociology of Religion, Vol. 59, No. 4, 1998, pp. 309-328.
5. Sik Sik Yuen, Homepage http://www.siksikyuen.org.hk, accessed on March 21st 2008.
6. H. T. Leung ed., The Origin of the Belief of Wong Tai Sin in Hong Kong,
http://hk.geocities.com/goldrabbit388/WongTaiSin.html, accessed on March 21st 2008.
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