Unseen offerings
At four o'clock in the afternoon, yang turns into yin. At this moment, the head Daoist priest led the participants in the jiao ceremony in the cleansing ritual along the offering tables for the pudu. Six huge pigs weighing over 1000 Taiwanese catties (about 600 kg) each were laid beside the other offerings, eliciting the same response over and over again from city kids who have had little opportunity to witness temple fairs: "Is that a real pig?" Killing a big boar to offer to the Lord of Heaven is a way to present the best and most beautiful of earth's bounty to the highest and most revered god above. Employing this ancient rite with its offerings of whole pigs, whole goats and whole chickens just shows how important the jiao ceremony was to the residents of Talungtung.
The kansheng on the offering tables also attracted people to stop and look. Kansheng are painted animals models (including lions, giraffes, eels, conches, or sea turtles) made of poultry, fish or flour dough; they are only for display and not for consumption.
"The model of King Wenwang in 'Wenwang Dragging a Cart' is made of a chicken's body! These two rabbits' torsos are made of pig's stomach, their long ears of dry squids and their eyes of longans," said one onlooker. "Aren't they cute!" People perused these intriguing kansheng and tried to figure out how they were made. Chefs specialized in fruit carvings made use of Taiwan's abundant and colorful fruits to make designs that contained stories or themes, which also gave people pleasant surprises. A work of kansheng named the "Naughty Family" used a coconut to make a Totoro, a red apple to make a Hello Kitty and avocados to make the Penguin Family. These got kids to point their fingers gleefully.
Weng Sung-yuan played on the characteristics of southern Taiwan in designing kansheng from the Ta Kuanyin Temple and Hsingchi Temple of Tainan city. He used smoked milkfish as scales to create a 30-foot-long silver dragon, and mushrooms to create a Godzilla. Both were extremely unusual.
These kansheng, which caused people to salivate and murmur in admiration, are certain to have pleased those of the spirit world too. However, there are good ghosts and there are bad ghosts, and lest the bad ghosts bully the good ghosts and snatch all the offerings for themselves, a statue of the King of Ghosts, Tashihyeh, was erected behind the offerings to supervise. This six-foot-tall deity is quite vicious looking, and he sticks out a very long tongue. Originally, the King of Ghosts was evil, and he only turned good after being tamed by Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy. Therefore, there always sits a small Kuan Yin statue on the head of Tashihyeh. It provides for a very vivid contrast.
The dead were treated as if they were living. Apart from the delicious offerings, on either side of the Tashihyeh were two houses made of paper called the Hanlinsuo (the National Academy) and the Tonggueisuo (the gathering house), which respectively provided places for scholar ghosts and common ghosts to rest. What's more, there was a "Sutra Clothes Mountain" upon which clothes, combs, washing basins and other items that the ghosts would need were laid out daily. And sparkling gold, silver and money mountains were provided to let the good brethren leave the festivities with something extra in their ghostly pockets. It was a very thoughtful gesture. "A jiao ceremony presents the best chance to enjoy traditional paper handicrafts," says Hsien Tsung-jung, a part time lecturer in traditional handicrafts at National Taiwan University of Arts. "Particularly for the statues of guardian deities on horseback, such as the four field marshals Wen, Kang, Ma, and Chao, the artisans have to use their imaginations to create these very delicate and detailed statues."
Once in a century
The Chung Kuei Dance ritual was held on the last night of the ceremony. After 9:00 the atmosphere shifted suddenly from festive to solemn, and the Daoist priests started to chant out spells while holding charms and sprinkling salted rice and holy water to cleanse the ceremonial site. On the stage, a group of men performed a half-hour-long exorcism ritual, in which the character Chung Kuei was not allowed to talk. Instead he employed his body gestures and eyes to vividly convey the progress of driving away and defeating the evil spirits, as well as clearing out a road upon which to send the ghosts back to the underworld.
The Paoan Temple has always enjoyed the reputation as a temple of culture among all the temples in Taiwan. It pays special attention to the integration of the arts and culture with religion. During this jiao ceremony, the largest held in Taiwan for the last 85 years, the theatrical groups, performance troupes and priests chosen all represented the very best of the era. With temples in Taiwan becoming increasingly gaudy and the activities held within them increasingly vainglorious and empty, Lee Fong-mao, a researcher of the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy at the Academia Sinica, praised the chingcheng jiao of the Paoan Temple as truly a refined temple fair. From the golden-scaled rice dragon, to the paper statues, to the designs of the altars, all showed the vitality and creativity of folk arts.
People who missed the grand gathering of Paoan Temple's chingcheng jiao ceremony now must content themselves with experiencing it through media reports. It might be another century before there is a similar chingcheng jiao ceremony.