The Sacred Expression Of Wangmuchi In Mountain Tai

This paper, taking Wangmuchi temple in Mountain Tai as center, tries to explain what Wangmuchi is and then further explore the idiosyncrasy of Wangmuchi as a temple, which is sacredness.Wangmuchi lies in the south of Mountain Tai among the cluster of temples. Mountain Tai is a mountain of nature, of civilization and of sacredness. Through analyzing the sacredness of Mountain Tai, this article explains the background of the origin of Wangmuchi's sacredness. Wangmuchi and the fable of Wangmu and Kunlun were entangled with each other. Although geographic position in fable does not equal to that in nature, it endows Wangmuchi with a color of welkin where celestial being live. To distinguish the mystery of Wangmuchi in myth from that in reality, I analyze the general sight of Wangmu temple.Using Iliad's study of the sacred for inference, this article claims that sacred world is opposite to mundane world. Temple is a belief-centralized place. Temple fair is the focused time of belief conducts. The inner formulation of temple lies in its sacredness. This article, starting from Wangmuchi temple, analyzes how temples in spatial concept manifest the sacredness; taking Wangmuchi as an example, analyzes how temple fairs as belief-centralized time manifest the sacredness; in sacred space and time pilgrims deepen and intensify such sacredness. Sacredness is the core of belief. And in the process of taking part into pilgrimage, pilgrims are sanctified and receive a totally different experience from that in mundane world.The study on Wangmuchi is basically an adventure in knowledge. This article tries to look into wangmuchi sacred temple, unscramble wumuchi situated in the cluster of temples in Mountain Tai, and through its locality and particularity study its common sacredness as religious site. It explores the inner essence of sacred belief in temples and unscrambles the relationship between human and deity. Instead of the purpose of universality, it is aimed at benefiting the study field of folk beliefs. It is the feature of this article to look into the relationship between the concept sacred and temples through the fieldwork on temples and temple fairs, which is also maybe an experiment from which some valuable views will be drawn.This article mainly takes three kinds of methods: documentary research, field research method and the general method of folklore.This article includes 5 chapters.The introduction illustrates the choice of this topic, the documentary, the theory and method of this article.Chapter 1 looks into the spatial background of Wangmuchi, Mountain Tai, and analyzes Mountain Tai as mountains of nature, of culture, of sight-seeing and of sacredness.Chapter 2, focusing on Wangmuchi in natural geography and fable geography, figures that Wangmuchi is the production of fable and reality interweaved together.Chapter 3 and chapter 4 analyze how sacredness, the inner formulation of temple, manifests itself in the system of space and time, how temples as sacred places and temples fairs as sacred time manifest their sacredness.Chapter 5 analyzes pilgrims' pilgrimage activities and the imagination on efficaciousness. From the angle of knowing and doing, it continues to look into how the pilgrims, the main body of observance, cognize the sacredness and practice before the sacredness.