A Case Study on the Evolution of Chinese Religious Symbols from Talismanic Paraphernalia to Taoist Liturgy

Grégoire Espesset (1)

1 CRCAO - Centre de recherche sur les civilisations de l'Asie Orientale

The mid-fifteenth-century Taoist Canon (Zhengtong daozang 正統道藏) contains five specimens of a religious artefact called “Great Peace Symbol” (“Taiping fu” 太平符), dispersed between five texts spanning about a millennium. The introduction to this paper discusses the meaning of the Chinese word fu 符 and its most widely used English rendition, “talisman”. The article briefly presents the source of each specimen, attempts a deconstruction of its morphology, and analyses its modus operandi, thus providing a basic methodological model to outline the historical evolution of the category of “fu” artefacts from early medieval portable devices endowed with specific apotropaic functions – like charms and amulets – to multipurpose ritual implements designed for use within the framework of early modern Taoist liturgy. The epilogue introduces a sixth specimen, differently named but morphologically and functionally related to the latest three “Great Peace Symbols”.

Mots clés: Taoism; Visual material; Symbol; Talisman; Great Peace (Taiping); Liturgy

Mots clés: Chine – histoire – sources; religion; taoïsme; talisman; liturgie; cosmologie; sources visuelles

Domaines: Histoire; Histoire; Religions; Religions; Littératures; Littératures

Grégoire Espesset. A Case Study on the Evolution of Chinese Religious Symbols from Talismanic Paraphernalia to Taoist Liturgy. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2015, 78 (3), pp.493-514. ⟨10.1017/S0041977X15000439⟩. ⟨halshs-01385139⟩