Realms of another world
PALLAVI AIYAR
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The Dong Yue temple in Beijing, with shrines assigned to every possible responsibility, has an uncanny resemblance to modern bureaucracy.
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The structures of power in China's present and that in the Taoist hereafter are identical: both worlds are run by middle-level bureaucrats with a penchant for paperwork in triplicate.
PHOTO: PALLAVI AIYAR
A FEAST OF POLYTHEISM: The Dong Yue Temple in Beijing.
THE commonalities between the Taoist netherworld and that of the mortal world of contemporary China may not be immediately apparent to most. However, a visit to Dong Yue temple, an unobtrusive building set off a traffic-choked thoroughfare in central Beijing, not only offers insights into this improbable connection but further suggests that the help of a few Taoist Gods may be just what the doctor ordered to help China's current communist leadership confront its most pressing challenges.
The temple is a feast of polytheism, featuring a smorgasbord of Gods, Goddesses, Demons, Immortals and Saints inhabiting multiple realms of heaven and hell. What a quick walk around the shrines that line Dong Yue's main courtyard reveals is that the structures of power in China's mortal present and that in the Taoist hereafter are identical: both worlds are run by middle-level bureaucrats with a penchant for paperwork in triplicate.
Distributed duties
The temple's shrines, of which there are no less than 76, are thus labelled "departments" and each department is displayed with a head-mandarin Under Secretary seated comfortably atop a pedestal with rows of supplicants bearing paperwork and offerings queuing up along the sides.
Demon headed gate-keepers whose main job is to keep petitioners at bay from the badly-lit rooms are only one more feature that the here and hereafter share, or so Dong Yue would lead us to believe.
Pride of place amongst the temple's shrines goes to the Department of Signing Documents, which an accompanying explanatory plaque divulges to be the department in charge of "all writing, authenticating, signing and sealing of documents". But the red tape is only beginning. Next door is the Signature Department which your correspondent learnt is the "headquarter of all signature departments in the nether world. Its function is to sign and approve documents or verdicts passed by different departments prior to their execution".
A stroll down the corridor reveals the Department of Petty Officials (who are ordered by the department chief to be "selfless, kind and benevolent") which itself stands next door to the Evidence Department for Issuing a Warrant, in charge of "investigating and collecting evidence to avoid harming innocent people".
Back in the world of men, as of January of this year, China returned the sole right to hear death penalty appeals to its Supreme People's Court after a gap of more than two decades. The reason: a slew of high-profile cases in which it was revealed that the authorities had executed innocent persons for crimes they never committed. One could almost hear the Evidence Department for Issuing a Warrant's chief clucking his disapproval from above.
But this particular Department Head isn't the only one whose help the Chinese leadership could use today.
For example, two of the more formidable challenges Beijing is grappling with at the moment are corruption and illegal land seizures. For Taoist Gods, on the other hand, these very same problems are easily enough dealt with.
Guilty parties are swiftly dispatched to the Department of Confiscating Unwarranted Property, whose purple-headed guardian monster bears a particularly nasty spiked mace, or in the case of venal bureaucrats to the Department for Official Morality in charge of "the morality of officials" and of ensuring they are "honest, resist corruption and enforce the law strictly."
As your correspondent continued her inspection of the temple she came across the Measurement Department, which she learned is in charge of ensuring that "traders abide by rules of fair treatment and refrain from cheating by undercutting the weight and size of the merchandise". The Taoist netherworld certainly has better anti-dumping measures in place than even post WTO-accession China. It could have market economy status anytime it wanted.
Environment-friendly
And as China's environment continues its rapid deterioration — 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities are in China according to the World Bank — the State Administration for Environmental Protection could learn much from the Taoist Department for Flying Birds, Department for Preserving Wilderness and the three separate Departments for Mountains, Rivers and Wind, all to be found within Dong Yue's tree-shaded environs.
The Plague Performing Department (in charge of performing plague on miscreants), Department for Implementing 15 Kinds of Violent Death (including clubbing, battle, fierce animals and revengeful murder), Department of Insect Birth (in charge of men who are reborn as cicadas, mosquitoes or flies as punishment for bad karma) and Department of Wandering Ghosts (responsible for ghosts that may have lost their way) are a little harder for Beijing to find practical uses for, but with some imagination (and of course a proposal signed and verified in quintuplicate) one never knows.
Down the ages
DONG YUE is a Taoist temple originally built in the 13th century. It fell into disrepair after China's last emperor was overthrown in 1911 and was ransacked during the Cultural Revolution. But in 1999, after a five-year-long restoration process, it was once again opened to the public, although as a museum of "folk religion" rather than as a functioning place of worship.
Taoism along with Buddhism and Confucianism is one of China's three main traditional religions. It is deeply mystical and the esoteric theology is difficult to grasp for the layperson but over the centuries its practice took on a hybrid form including Buddhist elements, Confucian ethics and animistic rituals.
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