Charismatic sainthood was a tool used by redemptive societies in the twentieth century to construct magnetic leadership for emerging salvationist organisations.
‘Redemptive societies’ is a western term for the wave of religious activity that emerged particularly in Republican China seeking to save China and the wider world from social decline and apocalypse. China had undergone a destabilising series of transformations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that challenged its conceptions of the world order and traditional cosmology. The nation-state became the normative model of authority and legitimacy, restructuring Chinese value systems away from the domination of the religious to include those of secular modernity, such as science and human rights.1 For redemptive societies, sainthood provided a middle ground where modern science and technology could be used to legitimate a religious leader’s practices and authority in a new system, while simultaneously referencing an established familiar cultural heritage of sainthood practices, such as establishing a lineage, constructing a hagiography or the practice of spirit writing. In this way, redemptive societies reframed traditional conceptions of religious leadership to survive in the modern context.
David Ownby isolates the systematic construction of charisma in religious leadership, defined as ‘the embodiment of the qualities of leadership, the attraction of followers, the representation of their interests and dreams in real or utopian projects’.2 The two charismatic leaders discussed in this blog post, Zhang Tianran and Li Yujie, used their charismatic power and practices to influence the actions of the divine and the humans around them. Under Zhang Tianran’s leadership, the redemptive society Yiguandao became the largest religious organisation in China, while Li Yujie successfully guided and established Tiandijiao as a redemptive society organised around spiritual healing and science. Nonetheless, both leaders offer very different forms of charismatic authority, providing a fascinating comparison in terms of their relationship with the divine, their interactions with the political system and their long-term legacy.
Both Li and Zhang were highly skilled at establishing relationships with the secular power structures around them, utilising their charisma to foster support and legitimation from the state, academia and business. However, while Zhang Tianran consciously assimilated into the traditional religious hierarchy, Li Yujie maintained a more mediatory role as an interlocutor between the divine and the earthly realm. Zhang claimed to be the reincarnation of the Living Buddha Jigong, a twelfth century Buddhist monk associated in popular religion with eccentricity and spirit possession cults. Jigong’s image has been used extensively as symbolic representation of Zhang, who has thus become deified as a transcendent omnipresent, omniscient figure. This was strengthened after his death when Zhang maintained his charismatic authority through appearing in spirit writing sessions, directly interacting with his disciples and impacting the present organisation of the movement. Billioud describes anthropological accounts of followers describing greater connection to his physical presence compared to the more abstract entity of the Eternal Mother, Yiguandao’s conception of the power of the universe.3 While there is an abundance of documentary evidence of Li, Zhang remains ‘elusive’4, with sources about his life restricted to hagiographical accounts or propaganda pieces against him. This, combined with mystery around the location of his burial site, results in a further intangibleness attributed to his self that elevates him beyond the earthly realm.
On the other hand, Li Yujie’s time as leader of the Tiandejiao movement was grounded in his political principles and institutional ties. While Li would also appeal to traditional perceptions of holy men by preaching about the intimate relationship between god and man, retreating for a few days every year to ascend to heaven and wearing dark glasses so as to protect others from his blinding healing gaze, he was also engaged in earthly matters to a very high degree, as listed in President Li Denhui’s eulogy in 1994.5 He served as a member of the Finance Ministry under the GMD, owned and edited a newspaper that extensively advocated for freedom of the press, and used scientific language to frame his religious treatises. As Ownby argues, this did not appear to be a contradiction for Li, and in fact, his secular contacts served to strengthen his religious goals as in the case of gaining approval from the Taiwanese government to operate as a public religious institution despite their martial law.6
This differing use of charisma, the relationship between the leader and their followers, from these two saints, demonstrates the abundance of approaches to sainthood amongst redemptive societies at the time, all seeking to aid China and rescue the world from apocalyptic decline.
- David Ownby, ‘Introduction’, in Making Saints in Modern China, eds. David Ownby, Vincent Goossaert, and Ji Zhe (New York, 2017), p.7 [↩]
- ibid. p.17 [↩]
- Sébastien Billioud, ‘Yiguandao’s Patriarch Zhang Tianran: Hagiography, Deification, and Production of Charisma in a Modern Religious Organization’, in David Ownby, Vincent Goossaert, and Ji Zhe (eds), Making Saints in Modern China (New York, 2017) p.235 [↩]
- ibid. p.229 [↩]
- David Ownby, ‘Sainthood, Science, and Politics: The Life of Li Yujie, Founder of the Tiandijiao’, in David Ownby, Vincent Goossaert, and Ji Zhe (eds), Making Saints in Modern China (New York, 2017) p.252 [↩]
- ibid. p.249 [↩]