On Mount Tai Temple Festival Study

Mount Tai Temple Festival is the oldest and most influential Temple Festival in China and it’s the most typical study case as well. From Folklore perspective, this dissertation researched on the history and present situation of the Mount Tai Temple Festival.Mount Tai Temple Festival has two different definitions:in the broad sense,it includes all the temples Festival which sacrifice to Gods of Mount Tai;in the narrow sense, it means only the ones whose main Gods sacrificed are Mount Tai divines. Here, I chose the strict meaning of Mount Tai temple Festival and referred to some researches of broad sense one.The following four factors of Mount Tai Temple Festival will be discussed in the main:To begin with, we studied the history of Mount Tai Temple Festival, including its formative conditions and years-----the development period of Song and Yuan dynasties, the prosperity in Ming and Qing dynasties and the continuation from the Republic of China to now days.What’s more, the management and the temple recreational activities were presented. The Mount Tai Temple Festival activities are the activities in which the public took part actively and religion believes, merchandise trades and various recreations and competitions were melted. The management of Mount Tai Temple Festival has its own rules. In the development of Mount Tai Temple Festival, the public, temple and the government each played an important role on its own.Furthermore, the temple festivals rituals are studied. The religious rituals and everyday rituals of the pubic were different. The study of the temple festival religious rituals is very important for deeply understanding of Chinese public religion.Last but not the least, several theoretical questions were discussed, such as the definition of "Mount Tai Temple Festival Group","pilgrimage theories"," Chinese pilgrimage" and the heritage of the Mount Tai temple Festival in the back grounding of non-material cultural heritages etc.Mount Tai Temple Festival belief is very influential and it has rich research materials. As the Temple Festival activities are vivid and various, this dissertation tried to describe the Mount Tai temple Festival culture from the Folklore perspective to offer a good case for the Chinese Temple Festival culture.