Visiting the spirit-world websites of folk deities – the sacred symbols of Taoist gods

By Prof. Si-Chen Lee

1. Do folk deities have websites in the spirit world?

Taiwan has temples everywhere: large Buddhist monasteries and Taoist temples, and small shrines at the roadside, housing local deities of every kind and receiving the devotion of hundreds or thousands of worshippers over long stretches of time. Do these deities really keep websites in the information field?

Can we identify a keyword by finger reading and connect to the home page? Do their websites have passwords or firewalls? Miss T's finger-reading experiments gave us some preliminary results. The sacred words that produced visions in her third eye are shown in Figure 1:

"Emperor" (皇帝): no vision — she simply saw the two characters. "Guan Gong" (關公): first a feeling of solemnity, then the characters appeared. "The Jade Emperor" (玉皇大帝): a faintly luminous screen. "Wenchang Dijun" (文昌帝君), who governs the register of worldly rank and fortune: patterning on the screen, partly dark and partly white. "Mazu" (媽祖): a faintly luminous figure. "Jigong" (濟公): a figure of light or a screen of light, only slightly less bright than the Buddha or a bodhisattva. "Bodhidharma" (達摩), first patriarch of the Chan school: a faintly luminous screen, unlike anything we had seen before.

2. Who built the websites?

Among these names, "Guan Gong" was a great general of the state of Shu in the Three Kingdoms period. There is no record of his having cultivated the Tao. He was captured by Lü Meng during the war with Wu and died unbowed. Later emperors canonized him as Guansheng Dijun, the Holy Emperor Guan; temples were built, and he has received the offerings and devotion of ordinary people for more than a thousand years. His website in the information field looks less like something built by his own attainment than something shaped by the collective consciousness of the Chinese people.

"Wenchang Dijun" was originally Zitong Dijun, surname Zhang, given name Yazi, who lived on Mount Qiqu. He served in the Jin dynasty and died in battle, and people built a temple to him; in the Tang and Song he was repeatedly enfeoffed as King Yingxian. Taoists held that Zitong presided over the Wenchang office and the register of worldly rank and fortune, and so in the Yuan he was further elevated to Dijun — all of which came out of Taoist embellishment. Historically, though, Wenchang Dijun has been much honored by scholars, and students still favor him today: whenever exam season arrives, plenty of candidates make their way to a Wenchang temple to make offerings and pray that the exam goes well. His website, too, looks like something shaped by the collective consciousness of a people.

Reasoning from this: where a deity such as a buddha or bodhisattva has vast powers and can build a website by their own capacity, and large-scale worship is added on top of that in the human world, the effect could snowball into a supersite.

We also noticed that Miss T could not connect to the websites of many Taoist immortals and perfected beings — the Eight Immortals, Zhang San-Feng, Sima Cheng-Leng and others — which puzzled us for a long time. When we asked a genuine present-day Taoist, we learned it may simply be that we did not know the passwords. Taoists are generally bound by the norms of their lineage and the precepts of their master; they keep a low profile and hold to a certain secrecy. For a thousand years and more the transmission has passed to a single heir or to a very few, deliberately unpublicized, so most people have no idea who is a Taoist. It had not occurred to us that a Taoist's website in the information field would be just as discreet and low-key: without the password, you are not getting in. Unlike the websites of buddhas, bodhisattvas or Jesus — who work in this world to bring all beings across and point their followers to the right road, and who likewise keep their gates wide open in the information field, so that all who have the affinity may enter.

We also found that a deity's name has to be written neatly and properly, never carelessly. On one occasion a researcher taking part in a finger-reading session wrote the word "Mazu" (媽祖) with a large 媽 and a small 祖 — the first character six times the size of the second (see the fourth row of Figure 1) — and the luminous figure Miss T saw did not look like the usual Mazu at all.

So the shape of a sacred word also plays an important part in connecting. A different letterform evidently reassembles the content of the page, or distorts the information in transmission. Fortunately Mazu is a sea goddess, a bodhisattva who answers suffering, and perhaps she does not much mind your distorting her page on purpose. Run into the website of a demon king, though, and the consequences might be less pleasant. In communicating with heaven, be sincere and upright, and write sacred words properly — for your own peace of mind.