Fuji

What it is

Fuji is a Chinese way of receiving written words from gods, immortals and the dead. A sieve or tray hangs over sand or ash from incense; one or two people steady it, and characters take shape as its point, of wood or metal, moves. At a spirit altar, the jitan, helpers voice each sign while a copyist records it. Replies run from a few words to entire scriptures. Communities consult the practice about personal troubles, health, moral questions and public life, and some use it for deeper spiritual aims. It crosses Daoist, Buddhist and folk boundaries, and its revealed texts have shaped several Chinese religious movements.

Where it comes from

Written petitions to the gods appear among Celestial Master Daoist priests of the late Eastern Han, though their techniques varied. The planchette method itself first enters the record under the Liu Song dynasty, between 420 and 479 CE. Song writers such as Shen Kuo and Su Shi traced its beginnings to Zigu, the Purple Maiden, a spirit of the privy whom women consulted about silk raising. Scholars and officials later claimed it, and Daoist priests wove it into ritual, treating the gods as an administration that answers in writing. Altars flourished in the Ming, when the Jiajing Emperor had one built inside the Forbidden City. Under the Qing it spread even though the dynasty's legal code forbade it, and it gathered pace again in the Republican era.

How it is done

A session gathers a small crew around the altar. Two holders, occasionally just one, grip the tray or stylus; one of them is said to be entered by the visiting deity, who dictates through the moving hand. When the surface is sand, one attendant keeps it smooth, another speaks the characters as they appear, and a third copies them onto paper. On rare occasions the implement is said to move with no human hand on it at all. What is written, from short replies to long texts, goes to whoever asked, and communities print favoured scriptures to circulate them further.

Tools and materials

The classic outfit is plain: a sieve or winnowing tray hung so it can swing, a table of levelled sand, sometimes ash from incense, and a pen or stylus of wood or metal. Ming sources describe a pen with two handles, gripped by a pair of users, and note that the preferred phrase shifted from supporting a sieve to supporting a planchette. The apparatus lives at a dedicated altar, the jitan. The vocabulary borrows from the luan, a mythical bird like a phoenix: to support, send flying or bring down the luan all mean to hold a session, and a text produced this way is called jiwen.

What it is for

People bring questions about illness, family quarrels, business choices and other troubles, and the god present is believed to answer. Communities also seek moral direction for individual conduct and for public life. Some seekers use the sessions for spiritual cultivation, aiming past everyday advice. Printing and giving away the texts that arrive is itself held to be meritorious, and it builds a group's standing and its bond with the deity who speaks there.

Who does it

The hands on the implement, the jishou, are usually two people, more rarely one; tradition holds that a god or immortal works through one of them. Around them stand named helpers: one keeps the sand level, one voices the strokes, one transcribes. Daoist priests ran sessions inside their rituals, while village temples relied on local mediums for ordinary visitors. The earliest recorded gatherings were bands of women consulting Zigu. Later, the educated claimed the practice: the eighteenth-century literatus Peng Shaosheng took part, and Republican-era lay Buddhists such as Wang Yiting and Ding Fubao joined these groups in worship and charity.

Peoples and places

The practice is Chinese at root but tied to no single school. Daoist lineages treat it as a channel to the celestial order and have canonised its output, including collections such as the Daozang jiyao and the Lüzu quanshu. Buddhist lay devotees, especially from the mid-nineteenth century, saw Guanyin, Maitreya and Ji Gong preside at their altars; monks often kept their distance yet seldom rejected the moral teaching outright. Many halls now blend Buddhist and Daoist elements under the ideal of three teachings in one body, sanjiao heyi. Village temples keep it looser, answering everyday needs, and movements such as Yiguandao built revealed texts into their teaching. It lives on in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Guangdong and Malaysia, at mainland folk shrines, among overseas Chinese, and in Vietnamese religions including Caodaism.

What people believe

The working picture is that Heaven runs like an administration: gods hold ranks, receive petitions and issue edicts, so an answer in writing is natural. Those who descend may be a shen, a god, or a xian, an immortal, and ancestors may speak too. The deity is said to enter one holder's body and dictate, or at times to steer the implement alone. Who speaks depends on the altar: a Daoist lineage may call immortals, a Buddhist hall Guanyin, a village temple Guandi and Mazu, deities of war and of the sea. Many groups accept the teachings received as revealed scripture.

How scholars and sceptics see it

The study of fuji has an early landmark in Xu Dishan, whose 1941 book treating spirit writing as a superstition to be investigated remains foundational. The historian Matthias Schumann observes that condemnation changed character in the Republican years: writers around the journal New Youth, Chen Duxiu and Chen Daqi among them, attacked the practice for the first time as a systematic superstition rather than an occasional complaint. Educated defenders, notably the Shanghai Spiritualist Society, answered by trying to give the sessions a rational, respectable footing.

Compare and confuse

The art belongs to the wider family of automatic writing; English speakers call it planchette writing, after the swinging tray. Within China its nearest ancestor is the older habit of sending written petitions to the gods. Vietnamese religions such as Caodaism adopted the method, so the same practice answers to their names too.

Law and persecution

Imperial law and practice clashed in the Qing era: the dynasty's code forbade spirit writing, yet altars multiplied anyway. In the Beiyang period the larger organisations drafted constitutions and precepts, styled themselves on civic associations, and won registration as recognised religious bodies from some governments, even as established religious groups attacked them as rivals. The Republic of China moved against the two biggest redemptive societies, Daoyuan and Wushanshe, banning them in 1928.

Today

Fuji remains part of religious life across the Chinese world: dedicated altars in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Guangdong and Malaysia, folk shrines on the mainland, and congregations among overseas Chinese and in Southeast Asia. A hall rarely limits itself to writing; the same community may meditate, chant scriptures, hear morality sermons, run charity, offer healing and practise other kinds of divination. Groups organise around one deity, whether as purely spirit-writing centres or as Daoist, Confucian, charitable or vegetarian halls, and Vietnamese religions such as Caodaism and Minh Đạo carry the custom on.

Questions people ask about Fuji

Good reading and sources

• Spirit writing in China on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data