ABSTRACT
Examining popular/folk religion in China necessitates looking at what laypeople do; and this is a significant endeavor because what laypersons do forms the backbone of Chinese popular religion. As Ruiping Fan argues, “Popular religious beliefs and practices carried out by ordinary people in their homes and villages have long formed the mainstream in the history of Chinese religions, constituting the basic support for traditional society, culture, and values”. The reality is that these traditions have influenced each other throughout history, and aspects of their teachings are deeply interrelated and ingrained in Chinese culture and identity. As foreign concepts from Christianity pervaded the new meanings of zongjiao, the Chinese had difficulty reconciling the new meanings of the term with their own understandings of religious traditions. Some of the approaches that regular people in China use to think about religion are different from those well-known in the West.
