Religion in the modern world: the case of the zhuyou ritual in China

Abstract

This article examines how, within contemporary Chinese discourse on traditional medicine, the Taoist healing ritual zhuyou 祝由 is reinterpreted so that it functions as a traditional yet fully legitimate therapeutic method in a modern society. Zhuyou – originally a healing ritual rooted in popular Taoism, combining protective and exorcistic functions with paramedical treatment of various ailments and characterized by incantatory formulas, ritual gestures, and talismans – is presented in this discourse as part of an indigenous medical heritage. Recent Chinese scholarship advances this view through various forms of psychologization, treating zhuyou as a traditional technique of suggestion, emotional regulation, or even “Chinese psychotherapy” and by embedding the ritual within a narrative of continuous native medical tradition. The article argues that this development has a historical precedent in the Song–Yuan period (960–1368), when zhuyou was formally recognized and incorporated into the official repertoire of therapeutic methods. Comparing these two periods – medieval and contemporary – suggests that, in this well-documented case, the relationship between “modernity and religion” in China is a process of cultural transformation. A practice of religious-magical origin is not eliminated but repeatedly reconceptualized within discourses regarded as modern (first within medical cosmology and today within psychology and heritage protection) and in this transformed guise reintegrated into the institutional framework of the state.