ABSTRACT
If one can learn much about a religious tradition from observing its interaction with its rivals, and particularly from the encounter of a great, well-established tradition like Buddhism with new forms of religiosity, then China is perhaps the best place of all to observe this process. This is not simply because of the outstanding Chinese historiographic traditions which allow us to put so much of its religious history into context-in fact for the type of religion examined here historiographic problems are far from absent, as we shall see. Rather, the simultaneous existence in mediaeval times of another great and established tradition, Taoism, allows us to treat the question of reactions to novelty from a comparative perspective by tracing through the same period of time the evolving reactions of both ‘old’ religions to the newcomer. In this study the role of newcomer is played by the so-called ch'eng-huang cults.
