佛道度亡=Funeral ritual in Buddhism and Taoism; 佛道儀式架構=Ritual framework of Buddhism and Taoism; 贛西北度亡=Funeral ritual in northwest Jiangxi; 贛西北正一=Zhengyi in northwest Jiangxi; 贛西北普庵=Pu'an in northwest Jiangxi
The headquarters of the Orthodox Unity School of Taoism in northeast Jiangxi borders northwest Jiangxi. It is predictable that the ritual tradition in northwest Jiangxi would be under the influence of the Orthodox Unity School. In fact, we learn from fieldwork that the Taoist registers issued by the Orthodox Unity School in Mt. Longhu was delivered by trolleys to Jiujiang in northwest Jiangxi and then shipped to Shanghai and Suzhou. Ritual tradition in northwest Jiangxi was, again, influenced by another ritual tradition that traced to the renowned Chan monk Pu’an (1115-1169) of Cihua in northwest Jiangxi. In this essay, we compare two ritual traditions in northwest Jiangxi. One claims to be affiliated with the Orthodox Unity School of Taoism and the other to the Pu'an tradition of Buddhism. We will concentrate our discussion on the funeral ritual of the two ritual traditions. The aim of our study is to submit a hypothesis that funeral ritual of both the Buddhist and Taoist ritual specialists in Chinese local society share a ritual framework. This hypothesis builds upon the study by James Watson who claims that there is a common ritual framework for funeral ritual across China. Watson did not study in detail the funeral ritual performed by ritual specialists in China. Our hypothesis calls for more case studies to test its accuracy as we have mainly used two cases from Jiangxi to construct our hypothesis.
