Precious scrolls of village ritual associations near Houshan, Hebei:
left, “Demon-queller scroll”, Lijiafen;
right, “Ten Kings scroll”, Jijiagou.

My sideline in “precious scrolls” (baojuan 寶卷) [1] goes back to our 1990s’ field project on the central Hebei plain, when we were impressed to find a substantial treasure-trove of early editions in villages of Yixian and Laishui counties—and particularly to witness them still being performed by the liturgists of amateur ritual associations there (see under The Houshan Daoists and The Houtu precious scroll).

While the central Hebei plain, and the living performance of its early sectarian scriptures, remain my main focus in baojuan studies, after this recent note on the traditions of Gansu my wider interest has been further piqued by the latest in a succession of anthologies:

• Pu Wenqi 濮文起 ed., Zhonghua baojuan cuibian 中华宝卷萃编 (2024),

whose 50 volumes contain 150 precious scrolls, each with an introductory synopsis. They belong mainly to sectarian groups such as Wuwei 無為, Huangtian dao 黄天道, Xi Dacheng jiao 西大乘教, and Hongyang jiao 弘阳教 / Hunyuan jiao 混元教, many of which feature in our fieldnotes on Local ritual in Hebei (see e.g. Ritual groups of Jinghai).

As instances of texts that we found in rural Hebei, vols. 24 and 25 comprise six editions of the “Demon-queller scroll”  Huguo youmin Fumo baojuan 護國佑民伏魔寶卷, performed until recently for mortuary rituals in villages around Houshan. Of early printed scrolls that we found in Gaoluo village, the “White Clothes scroll” Xiaoshi Baiyi Guanyin pusa song ying’er xiasheng baojuan 銷釋白衣觀音菩薩送嬰兒下生寶卷 is in vol.29, and the Fuguo zhenzhai lingying Zaowang baojuan 富國鎮宅靈應竈王寶卷 in vol.38 (cf. the Gaoluo editions, from 1745 and 1720 respectively). The compendium also includes the “Dizang scroll” 地藏王菩薩執掌幽冥寶卷 (vol.29) and “Ten Kings scroll” 泰山東嶽十王寶卷 (vol.30), preserved by nearby village ritual associations in early editions. In this region at least, the most commonly performed scrolls address the major preoccupations of Chinese villagers: birth (to Guanyin and Houtu), and death (to Demon-queller, Dizang, and the Ten Kings). 

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I can’t keep up with the “baojuan fever” that has grown since the 1990s. These notes serve as much for my benefit than yours—rather, perhaps, we constantly seek to refine and clarify our earlier studies.

Baojuan is an umbrella term for a range of texts. Many scholars have considered baojuan more as “folk literature”, or as a textual window onto early sectarian religion, than as a living performance tradition. Pu Wenqi’s own long-term research set forth from studying sectarian (if not always “secret”) folk religion in north China—under the aegis of the great Li Shiyu 李世瑜 (1922–2010); and it was Li Shiyu who blazed a trail in unpacking structural elements of baojuan in ritual performance, which are among the many themes discussed by later specialists.

The research paths of scholars have depended largely on which among the diverse types of baojuan were prevalent in their own region and to which they had access (cf. “blind people groping at the elephant“). As a broad outline, the early “religious” style has mainly been found near Beijing, while later “folk” texts are common in east-central China and the northwest.

Actually, in my earlier posts (based on Plucking the winds, and Appendix 3 of In search of the folk Daoists of north China) I appear to have had a basic grasp of the place of the Hebei scrolls in baojuan studies. As I noted, “while scholarship on the precious scrolls has tended to be more historical and sinological than contemporary and ethnographic”, “the whole point of these precious scrolls is that they are performed for rituals—they’re not musty tomes to be read silently in libraries.” What struck me about the Hebei scrolls was that they belonged very much to the early “religious” type of baojuan, but were still part of a living tradition—most performers we met were liturgists within ascriptive village-wide ritual associations, which had sectarian connections within living memory. And we found the classic structure of early religious baojuan to which Li Shiyu drew attention in 1957: 24 chapters (pin 品 or fen 分), each incorporating ten-word form, qupai labeled melodies, and so on (see under The Houtu precious scroll).

Of course, just as baojuan only constitute only one small sub-head among the vast mass of Daoist and Buddhist scriptures, they were just one component of the manuals performed by the liturgists whom we visited (see A tribute to two vocal liturgists, Gaoluo: vocal liturgists, Funerals in Hebei). (And zooming out still further, as Adam Yuet Chau reminds us, we need to overcome the hegemony of discursive/scriptural texts, when so much of the meaning of religious activity in society is relational and non-literate!)

Background
Early advocates for the study of baojuan were Gu Jiegang from 1924, and Zheng Zhenduo 郑振铎, inspiring a succession of articles in the 1930s and 40s. In the first catalogue, published in 1951, Fu Xihua 傅惜华 listed 246 scrolls in Baojuan zonglu 宝卷总录—the same title that Li Shiyu used for his 1960 catalogue, listing 618 scrolls in 1,487 editions.

Since the 1980s, as baojuan came out into the open both in performance and research, scholars have reflected further on origins and classification. Two authoritative figures in baojuan studies are Pu Wenqi 濮文起 and Che Xilun 车锡伦. Following Che Xilun’s useful 2001 retrospective, his major book Zhongguo baojuan yanjiu 中国宝卷研究 (2009) contains both an overview and case studies. Similarly, alongside chapters on specific themes, Pu Wenqi and Li Yongping 李永平 eds., Baojuan yanjiu 宝卷研究 (2019), includes surveys by Pu Wenqi himself and by Wang Mingbo 王明博 and Li Guisheng 李贵生. In English, the detailed studies of Rostislav Berezkin on traditions of baojuan performance in south Jiangsu include useful introductions to the wider topic (cf. my Appendix under Ningxia).

Che Xilun has distinguished “religious baojuan” before the Kangxi reign (1662–1722) from later “folk baojuan”—with subdivisions: [2]

• A) Before the Kangxi reign: “religious baojuan”
  明正德 (1505–21) 以前“佛教世俗化宝卷”:
       “演释佛经”
       “讲唱因缘”
  正德后“民间宗教宝卷”:
       “宣讲教义”
       “讲唱故事”

• B) After the Kangxi reign: “folk baojuan”
  “劝世文”
  “祝祷仪式”
  “讲唱故事”:
       “神道故事”
       “妇女修行故事”
       “民间传说故事<”
       “俗文学传统故事”
       “时事故事”
  “小卷”

Catalogues and anthologies
By the 1990s, catalogues were expanding significantly, such as

• Che Xilun, Zhongguo baojuan zongmu 中国宝卷总目 (2000, after a 1998 Taiwan edition), listing 1,585 scrolls in over 5,000 editions.

Wide-ranging anthologies of the texts themselves were also published, such as

• Wang Jianchuan 王见川 and Lin Wanchuan 林万传 (eds), Ming-Qing minjian zongjiao jingjuan wenxian 明清民间宗教经卷文献 (1991) (12 vols, 207 texts) and the 2006 sequel edited by Wang Jianchuan, Che Xilun, et al. (12 vols, 204 texts), mostly consisting of baojuan.
• Zhang Xishun 张希舜 et al. (eds), Baojuan chuji 宝卷初集 (1994) (40 vols, 153 texts).
• Zhongguo zongjiao lishi wenxian jicheng weiyuanhui 中国宗教历史文献集成编委会 (Pu Wenqi!) (ed.), Minjian baojuan 民间宝卷 (2005) (20 vols, 357 texts).

Ma Xisha 马西沙, another long-term scholar of folk sectarian religion, has also addressed baojuan, including the major anthology

• Zhonghua zhenben baojuan 中华珍本宝卷 (2013) contains 30 vols, with 138 texts,

before Pu Wenqi’s recent collection with which I opened this survey.

Regional fieldwork and research
Much of the collection work has long consisted in editing baojuan held in libraries and private collections, but fieldwork became an increasingly important source of texts—often bringing further insights from observing living performance (in another useful overview, see §3 and §5 here).

There had been a few such projects under Maoism, in a period when both performance and research were becoming increasingly risky (cf. the work of Yang Yinliu and his colleagues at the Music Research Institute in Beijing). [3] But fieldwork could only begin in earnest with the liberal reform era since the 1980s. Around Tianjin and further afield, Li Shiyu resumed his work with alacrity—now with a keen disciple in Pu Wenqi.

From Rostislav Berezkin, “Scripture-telling (jiangjing) in the Zhangjiagang area
and the history of Chinese storytelling” (2011).

South Jiangsu and Zhejiang became popular sites for fieldwork, with a particular focus on ritual groups around the Suzhou region, notably Jingjiang (see here, and n.1 here). Again, many texts were published, [4] and fieldwork encouraged scholars to observe actual performance practice—often in the context of zuohui 做会 religious gatherings. In English, after a 2001 article by Mark Bender on the Jingjiang tradition, Rostislav Berezkin has expanded the field in a series of detailed articles.

Another lively site for baojuan studies was the Hexi corridor of Gansu (here I cited this recent survey by Cheng Guojun 程国君). Local cultural workers such as Duan Ping 段平 and Fang Buhe 方步和 were early collectors. [5] The numinous ancient site of Dunhuang tempted some researchers to embroider a connection with early bianwen religious narratives there—a tendency (akin to the persistent “living fossil” shtick, and further mired in romantic fantasies of the Tang and Silk Road) that Che Xilun disputed in his 1999 article “Ming-Qing minjian zongjiao yu Gansude nianjuan he baojuan” 明清民间宗教与甘肃的念卷和宝卷. Nearby, baojuan traditions were also discovered in the Mani assemblies 嘛呢会 of largely Tibetan areas of eastern Qinghai (see e.g. Liu Yonghong 刘永红, Qinghai baojuan yanjiu 青海宝卷研究, 2013); see also under Ningxia.

The baojuan of south Jiangsu and Gansu, while numerous (and again based in ritual performance), are mostly in the later “folk” style, not so early as the early 24-chapter sectarian scrolls that we found on the Hebei plain. For north China, besides Pu Wenqi, other scholars paying attention to the latter kind of baojuan include Cao Xinyu, Yin Hubin 尹虎彬, and Liang Jingzhi 梁景之.

In the great Anthology of folk music of the Chinese peoples, baojuan falls within the scope of the relevant provincial volumes for narrative-singing: Zhongguo quyi yinyue jicheng 中国曲艺音乐集成, and particularly the historical material of Zhongguo quyi zhi 中国曲艺志 (see e.g. under Famine and expressive culture). Foreign scholars of baojuan include Daniel Overmyer (for north China), Rostislav Berezkin (south Jiangsu), Victor Mair and Wilt Idema (Gansu).

As always, silent library study cries out (sic) to be enriched by documenting the soundscape and bustle of ritual in social life (cf. More films). To complement the vast corpus of published texts, and textual studies of their ritual context, even a modest collection of audio/video recordings of baojuan in folk performance is most desirable (my usual caveat: I refer to field recordings, rather than the reified, sanitised staged versions of the Intangible Cultural Heritage project!). The CD with my 2004 book Plucking the winds has a paltry two audio tracks from the Houtu scroll (one of which features on the playlist on this blog, with commentary here—and I look forward to making a new documentary on the 1995 New Year’s rituals in Gaoluo!!!). And click here for a video clip from a ritual performance by a group in Shaoxing.

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[1] Though I use the term “precious scrolls”, which has attained a certain niche currency, allow me to repeat Dan Overmyer’s observation (n.3 here) that baojuan is more properly rendered as “precious volumes”.

[2] I’m not sure how useful is Che Xilun’s further distinction between “literary” and “non-literary” baojuan (按照宝卷的内容和题材，又可将宝卷分为“文学宝卷”（包括各个时期讲唱故事的宝卷及民间宝卷中的“小卷”和部分“祝祷仪式”宝卷）、“非文学宝卷”（包括宗教宝卷中“演释佛经”“宣讲教义”的宝卷和民间宝卷中的“劝世文”及部分“祝祷仪式”宝卷）两大类。)

[3] In south Jiangsu, Jiangsu nanbu minjian xiqu shuochang yinyue ji 江苏南部民间戏曲说唱音乐集 (1955) was part of a project collecting material on opera and narrative-singing. And for Jiexiu in Shanxi, Zhang Han 张颔, Shanxi minjian liuchuande baojuan chaoben 山西民间流传的宝卷抄本 (1957) used material collected in 1946—see also Li Yu 李豫, Shanxi Jiexiu Zhanglan diqu baojuan wenxue diaocha baogao 山西介休张兰地区宝卷文学调查报告 (2010), and the chapter by Sun Hongliang 孙鸿亮 in Baojuan yanjiu.

[4] E.g. Zhongguo Heyang baojuan ji 中国河阳宝卷集 (2007); You Hong 尤红  et al. eds, Zhongguo Jingjiang baojuan 中国靖江宝卷 (2007); Lu Yongfeng 陆永峰 and Che Xilun 车锡伦 eds, Jingjiang baojuan yanjiu 靖江宝卷研究, 2008; Che Xilun ed., Zhongguo minjian baojuan wenxian jicheng, Jiangsu Wuxi juan 中国民间宝卷文献集成·江苏无锡卷 (2014, 15 vols).

[5] As in all walks of life, both performers and scholars bore the scars of Maoist campaigns. Following her tribulations around 1960 as one of the Spark protesters blowing the whistle on the famine, Tan Chanxue 谭禅雪 was based from 1982 to 1998 at the Dunhuang Research Institute, where as part of her studies of Dunhuang folklore she published articles on, and editions of, baojuan.