The famous cultural hero, King Sejo (1455–1468), at first he put in place, on the advice of his officials, very punitive and strict regulations around Buddhism. But as time went on, he got sick of the [Confucian State Council] he was dealing with. He started to think that his officials were nuts, I mean actually crazy. You can see in his documents, he himself was being driven crazy having to deal with these people. And the whole issue was Buddhism. They want the recurring thing: to convince a King to go the whole way and kill off Buddhism once and for all.

[By the 16th century], they kind of succeed in [stripping Buddhism of legal recognition] but there’s an unhappy conclusion: it didn’t atrophy and die. In fact, something worse happened: because they removed the government oversight of Buddhism, it started to flourish!

The paintings are considered neither neutral nor representational media but rather places of uncanny presence and sources of inspiration for the mansin, which may be experienced with greater or lesser intensity and clarity depending on the current state of favor an individual mansin enjoys with her personal deities.

The transformation of god pictures into collectable, marketable folk art has required both overcoming a fear of objects believed to hold souls, or “ghosts,” and a renegotiation of the ways that god pictures were traditionally disposed of.

No explanation has ever been offered or demanded for the admiration the Chinese have had for hermits. Hermits were simply there: beyond city walls, in the mountains, lone columns of smoke after a snowfall. As far back as records go, there were always hermits in China.

A beautifully written introduction to the (living!) tradition of Chinese eremitism: from its pre-Daoist roots to contemporary Chungnan Shan.