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Chapter 3 analyzes the many religious rites, including the worship of Heaven, nature, spirits, heroes, and religious figures in public cults as well as domestic rituals. It gives an introduction to the cultic life of the Vietnamese and a Christian evaluation of traditional worship. In particular, it describes prominent sacrifices—to Heaven and Earth; to the Divine Farmer and other spirits of nature; to imperial ancestors—as well as some of the important cults in Vietnamese society: the cults of Confucius and the military; of the three ranks of spirits (supreme, middle rank, and lower rank); and of religious figures: Mother Goddess, Lady Buddha of Compassion, and Jade Emperor. From a Christian perspective, these rites challenge the notion of monotheistic worship and display a reluctance on the part of the Christian to completely dismiss these rites.

This chapter turns to the current relationships that obtain between Buddhism and the spirit cults, examining the reasons why the veneration of phi continues with such vigor in the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic (Lao PDR). It discusses the process labeled “Buddhacization,” or how the spirit cults have been transformed within an increasingly predominant, emphatically Buddhist-dominated religious culture in the Lao regions of Isan. Although Buddhism and the spirit cults are expressions of two separate ontologies, a mutually or potentially transformative dialectic obtains between the two. In contrast to what seems to be happening in northeast Thailand, the chapter also studies the process in the Lao PDR called the “inspiriting” of Buddhism.

This chapter examines the public secrecy and popularity of spirit cults in Yan'an in the context of the urbanization of the rural area. It first provides an overview of folk popular religion and spirit possession in and out of China before discussing how deity worship figures as a form of unspoken yet widely circulated knowledge, communal bonds, and spiritual services in rural Yan'an. It then considers how spirit cults in Yan'an produce what it calls a “surrogate rural subjectivity” and proceeds by turning to the emergence of women spirit mediums in the 1990s. The chapter argues that, in the context of rapid urbanization, spirit cults provide occasions for the expression of disappearing rural communal relations, folk values, and ritual memories. It also suggests that folk religion now constitutes a new form of rural discourse through which the urbanizing rural subject of China is recognized. Finally, it describes spirit cults as a major site through which rural norms, values, dispositions, and desires are de facto produced and reconstructed in the urbanization of the rural area.

This chapter talks about how changes in the political order in Laos have impacted religious culture to the threshold of the contemporary scene. It examines how the Buddhist sangha and the spirit cults were affected by and adjusted to the establishment and policies of the Marxist revolutionary Lao Peoples Democratic Republic (Lao PDR). The Lao PDR, despite the continued allure of the phu nyai politics of patronage, recognizes the need to develop the economy by appealing for more international investment and assistance. Given such “instability” as Laos continues to ponder its national identity, it is difficult to know exactly how Buddhism will figure as a component in future national public discourse.

This chapter considers the conception of rationality that Tibetan scholasticism presupposes, particularly in its relation to some of the practices associated with folk religion. This brief heuristic exploration attempts to highlight some of the differences between traditional and modern conceptions of rationality. This important topic is one of the most misunderstood aspects of Buddhism, which is too often misrepresented as scientific. The chapter's general focus on dialectical practices underlines the importance of rationality in traditional Tibetan education. However, this emphasis must be put in perspective if we are to avoid the danger of misunderstanding the role of reason within Tibetan monastic education, as Tibetan scholars are made to look too much like modern intellectuals. The dialectical emphasis of Ge-luk education strongly resembles that of the medieval European universities. Similarly, the spirit cult described in this chapter has parallels in other traditional cultures, though its details may be specific to Tibet. The key distinction between mundane and supramundane deities affects a set of practices that are particularly important to Tibetan Buddhists, the propitiation of the dharma protectors.

This book explores the role of folk cultural discourse and practices in the cultural politics of post-Mao China by focusing on Yan'an, headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1937 to 1947. It examines the relation between the government and local communities for heritage preservation and cultural tourism in the age of runaway urbanization by focusing on the moments of mobilizing and representing folk traditions in both socialist and late socialist Yan'an. It articulates the cultural logic of the late socialist Chinese society that corresponds to a new form of political economy through an analysis of three rural cultural practices in Yan'an and their entanglement with political, capital, and local forces: folk storytelling, folk paper-cuts, and spirit cult practices. This introduction discusses historical events and narratives that contribute to the development and modern meanings of folk culture and Yan'an. It also provides an overview of the author's fieldwork and research methodology as well as the chapters that follow.