Jerome Yuchien's Ph.D Thesis
Chapter Three: the Land God in Chinese Popular Religion (part IV)
VI. The Earth Governor and the Land God:
Probably because Chinese believe that souls dwell in somewhere under the land, in Taiwan and generally in southeastern China, the grave site is guarded by the Earth Governor ("Hio- tho." or "Houtu") who is also regarded as a kind of Land God. When represented by a stone tablet by the side of the grave, the name is read as Houtu, and when represented by an image, it is depicted exactly the same as the Land God (cf. Hodous 1929:59; Diamond 1969:99; Schipper 1977:770; Paper 1990:31) and of course male.(note.27) When people visit the graves, they also worship the Earth Governor. One day, Ahern (1973:166) was told by a family that it could not find the site of one of its ancestors' grave. After looking in vain for hours, the family burned prodigious amounts of spirit money for the Land God, asking him to help in the search. This verified that the Land God is occasionally identified with the Earth Governor.
However, the myth of the Earth Governor is slightly different from the Land God that guards hamlet, street, or ward territory (Feuchtwang 1974b:121). For instance, a legend says that a man, only three days after marrying, was called to do military service and was killed on duty at the Great Wall of China. His soul visited his wife in a dream, begging her to come and find his bones to bury them properly. But when she came to the Great Wall, there were so many bones that she did not know how to identify her husband's. An old man with a white beard, the Land God, advised her that if she cut her finger and let blood drop from it the bones at which it would stop dripping would be those of her husband.(note.28) In this way she found and collected her husband's bones together in her skirts and carried them home weeping. She wept so profusely on to the bones that they began to come to life again. But the Land God considered it unjust that her husband should be singled out from the other soldiers to be brought back to life. When the wife had to go and find food to eat he offered to guard the reviving bones for her. On her return she found that they had lost their life again. She was very angry, and that is why there is a stone represented the Land God beside every grave; "to keep the dead dead" (Feuchtwang 1992:95).
A similar legend tells the story of a heroine Meng Jiangnyu, who, having lost her father, longed in vain for a husband. As the First Emperor of Qin Dynasty was then building the Great Wall, he called up all young men. Wan Xiliang did not want to go and hid away from his home. On the fifth day of the fifth month (Dragon Boat Festival) he was in the garden of Meng Jiangnyu's house. When she came out of the house, the lad hid in a tree above a pond. Meng Jiangnyu proceeded to bathe in the pond, whereupon she saw the image of the boy reflected in the water. She told him that, having seen her nude, he had to marry her. A wedding feast was held, but the old man who ran the general store was not invited. He reported Wan Xiliang to the authorities. The young man died while doing forced labour at the Great Wall, and his corpse was incorporated into the structure. Meng Jiangnyu went to look for her husband. Her tears made the wall collapse and many skeletons were uncovered. An old man told her that the bones that would absorb her blood were those of her husband. She thus found the skeleton and as her tears fell upon them flesh grew anew on the bones. The old man told her that if she put the body in a bag, it would be easier to carry. She did so and it became a skeleton once again. Out of spite, Meng Jiangnyu transformed the old man into the guardian of her husband's grave (Schipper 1977:661f), the Earth Governor to keep the body of Wan Xiliang.(note.29)
VII. Conclusion:
We have found that the belief of divine stones and trees recorded in textual data as the Land God, which has a very ancient basis as we saw in the last chapter, is also well preserved in modern Chinese society. The present chapter helps us understand the God better. We have identified several different traits and functions of the Land God. These traits communicate themselves in some degree to others (e.g. there is a common feature that he is depicted as a local elder devoted to his community) and are linked in a semantic chain: a local elder who is loyal to his locality transferred to a guardian of family, of community, of agriculture, of mountain, of grave, of business place, and thus wealth.(note.30) This fact clarifies why many Chinese elders devoted to their communities are thought as being deified as the Land God and that the term "the Land God" is a title of office and not the honourific title of a single specific person; why he is venerated at the family altar everyday; that he is worshipped only by those people belonging to the specific locality and not by outsiders; that he is territorially bound; that his temple is situated on the edge of the locality and should face the upper reach of the stream to guard the locality. (note.31)
However, no matter how the roles of the Land God are transferred and how these roles are semantically chained, he is, in Chinese popular religion, rather a "keeper" than a "challenger" of society. We see that being a locality god, he keeps hostile aborigines, wild swine, dangerous souls and others at distance from his locality. Being a community symbol, he transcends residents with diverse origins, making them homogeneous and keeping the heterogeneous people outside. In structuralist parlance, he is to "keep outsiders outside". Being a wealth god, he is the keeper of the shop's prosperity. Being a grave god, he is the boundary marker between mankind and the ghosts, namely, to "keep the dead dead".
In addition, I believe the fact that the common feature that the God is always depicted as an local elder who is loyal to the piece of land he governs is hardly accidental or insignificant. I attribute this to the result of the standardisation of the Land God and will examine my hypothesis in the following chapters.
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(note.1)
Yang (1961:98) holds that the cult was particularly well developed in south China.
(note.2)
I think the term "spirits of the Earth" refers to "Tudi Gong".
(note.3)
Chinese cosmology and the structure of imperial bureaucracy often correspond. Wolf (1974:131-82) argues that just as lower-level bureaucrats govern small administrative districts and higher-level officials control larger ones, so lesser gods reign over small local systems while more exalted gods rule the larger religion (see also Sangren 1983:5).
(note.4)
Not only the ground underneath the house, but the home itself, the walls and kitchen have their respective Land God. There are the protective Lanqian Tudi of the domestic stable; the Niu Tudi and Zhu Tudi protectors of the cows and pigs; the Gou Tudi of the drain-ditch; the Men Tudi and Buji Tudi of the cotton and the looms, respectively; as well as those very common Qiao Shen Tudi of the bridges and Shan Shen Tudi or mountain spirits beneath the graves. Moreover, for the convenience of the worshippers, entitled "Zhong Tu" or the "United Land Gods" a means by which all piece of land governed by the Land God may be appeased at the same time (Day 1974:67).
(note.5)
I follow Karlgren's interpretation (1930:11) and translate the Mandarin term "Houtu" as "the Earth Governor".
(note.6)
Schipper (1977:663) points out that the term "fute" or "good merit" appears to be of Buddhist origin, in connection with a kind of hostel operated by monks in Central Asia.
(note.7)
The term "Tudi Gong" is most frequently translated as "the Earth God". However, the shortcoming of the translation is that it might lead people to mistake "Tudi Gong" for the counterpart of "Dimu", "the Earth Mother" (see also Chapter Six).
(note.8)
Ahern (1973:67) reports that a couple who often hiked in the mountains near a small town in Taipei County claimed that an old man with a long, white beard had emerged out of a torrential rainstorm and had led them to safety in the temple of the Land God, thereafter immediately disappearing. They identified the mysterious man as the manifestation of the Land God.
(note.9)
Burkhardt (1958c:15), notes that in Hong Kong the Land God wears a red waistcoat and blue official robes.
