By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

Some say ‘tis the season to be jolly, but we all know the truth: Christmas is in fact a mandatory thirty-one-day program of hegemonic theological indoctrination, with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer as an allegory of the humiliation and redemption of the Messiah and Frosty the Snowman symbolising the miracle of the Eucharist.

That’s why I’ve decided to go with the flow of our unsecular December, sharing books about religion, ranging from a subversive Judaeo-Buddhist novella about kung-fu-fighting Jesus to handy non-fiction tomes about Taoism, Shaivite Hinduism and Đạo Mẫu, i.e. indigenous Vietnamese goddess worship. (Truth is, I was reading some of this anyway to contextualise my ongoing research into Singapore’s own folk goddesses.) [1]

I’d wanted to read some Muslim spiritual poetry too, but discovered to my chagrin that my collection of the poems of Hafiz is in fact original compositions by an American cultural appropriator. [2] In lieu of this, please accept a reflection on a study of the datuk keramat tradition—a Southeast Asian form of shrine worship that Wikipedia once classified as a religion, but now seems to regard as an offshoot of Sufism.

So don we now our omnisexual apparel—it’s time to troll some ancient pantheistic carols! Falalalala, lala beehoon.

Jesus and the Eightfold Path, by Lavie Tidhar
Jabberwocky Literary Agency, 2014

Every Christmas, the author promotes this e-novella, so this year I bought it. And gosh darn, it's ripping fun! It starts out with the premise, what if the Three Wise Men were Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy / Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie and Sha Wujing from Wu Cheng’en’s The Journey to the West, in service to just one of many incarnations of Sanzang / Tripitaka? Predictable hijinks and subversions ensue, with Jesus learning Shaolin kung fu from his masters and teaching it to his disciples (the expulsion of merchants from the temple is a whole wuxia movie sequence) and preaching Buddhist tenets at the Sermon of the Mount; even being tempted not by the Devil but by a Cthulhu-esque Yanluo Wang below the Eighteen Levels of Hell.

What's great, however, is that there are also unexpected subversions—Jesus meets and hooks up with a young Cleopatra in Egypt; Pigsy has a run-in with mummies while raiding a pyramid; Judas turns out to be the Judaeo-Roman historian Josephus spying for his masters in the capital—and under everything there's a deeply Jewish emotional core to the story, reflecting on the precariousness of the Jews in an age of Roman imperialism. We never get proof of Jesus' divine birth or resurrection, so he's principally just an outlaw leader of a colonised land—authentic jianghu stuff—rallying his people together, even prophetically arranging his own martyrdom with Josephus/Judas, with the knowledge that his life represents but one episode in the dharmic cycle of oppression/resurgence of the Jewish people—in this case, one that leads directly to the Jewish-Roman Wars and the destruction of the Second Temple.

It's a strange marriage of Jewish fatalism and Buddhist transcendence, all cleverly wrapped up in a novelty Christianist package. What's not to love? Apparently this was only released for a limited print run, which I don't understand: having the book lying around would be a helluva conversation starter.

Taoism: An Essential Guide, by Eva Wong
Shambala, 2011

Call me dumb, but this is the first text I've read that actually explains how everything we call "Taoism" is interconnected: from its beginnings as a philosophical tradition in the Zhou Dynasty with Laozi and Zhuangzi, to the alchemical experiments for immortality in the Tang and Song Dynasties (which probably led to the development of gunpowder), to today's ritual ceremonial and shamanistic practices, which some have told me aren't real Taoism, but just 拜神 / praying to gods.

Turns out there were scholars and priests actively theorising and practising mysticism and syncretism with Buddhism and Confucianism through the ages; actual historical revolutionaries like Zhang Daoling (who first advocated for Taoism as a religion), Wei Huacun (founder of Shangqing, one of the few women to successfully start a religious movement) and Lü Dongbin (not just one of the Eight Immortals but an actual advocate for Taoism as a practice of physical and mental clarification).

And of course it's all connected with fengshui, qigong, Chinese medicine... plus practices I didn't know about, like Taoist meditation and "sexual yoga" (OK fine; I've seen jokes on meme groups [3] about jing retention, but I didn't know entire movements used to hold ritual orgies).

Wong herself is an actual Taoist mystical practitioner from Hong Kong, which means she's grounded, non-fetishising and deeply serious about her subject (if you wanna be a Taoist magician, find a mentor, she says; you can't learn this from books). Plus, she's great at giving resources for further reading—gotta seek out Michael Saso's translation of The Gold Pavilion and Thomas Cleary's translation of the Wenzi.

My main complaint is that all the transliteration's in Wade-Giles, not hanyu pinyin—natural enough for a 1997 publication, but I wish she'd provided the hanzi originals so I could actually figure out how to pronounce the terms she's talking about!

7 Secrets of Shiva, by Devdutt Pattanaik
Westland, 2011

This is by the same guy who wrote The Man Who Was a Woman and Other Queer Tales from Hindu Lore, the pioneer resource on tracing LGBTQ+ precursors in Hindu spirituality!

And honestly, it's a strange work—part picture book (every alternate page is a black and white illustration of Shaivite art, with helpful labels), part academic study (the author's trying to provide an informed riposte to both Western exoticism and Hindu nationalist conservatism) and part devotional (though he cites multiple variations of the legends, suggesting that he sees the gods as metaphors for greater truths rather than literalist entities, there is an air of rejoicing in the transcendence that they offer).

Still, this is seriously informative reading—it's got chapters on the lingam, on Parvati/Sati/Shakti, on Ganesha, on Murugan, on the glorious Nataraja whose dance is the cosmos—and this is stuff that's hard to come by online, cos the info on Hinduism out there is overwhelmingly Vaishnavite, i.e. it won't educate you enough to understand most of the temple art in Singapore or Malaysia, where Shaivites are dominant.

And it is easy to fall in love with the Shiva the author describes, who is all purusha (soul) to be balanced with his consort's prakrit (nature); who is so innocent of sex, despite his eternally erect phallus, that Parvati must mount him from above to sire her six-headed warrior son; who understands nothing of social norms, so that when he walks naked and brilliant before yogis in a forest, inspiring their wrath, he fills them with envy and anger and vengefulness, but simply takes up each of their conjurations as an accoutrement: their tiger becomes his tigerskin, their snake becomes his garland, their demon becomes his pedestal.

The author notes how puzzled Westerners were when they realised, of the Hindu Trinity, that Brahma the Creator was not generally worshipped, but Shiva the Destroyer was. But destruction is a misleading term, he argues: when Shiva destroys maya (illusion), he deconstructs. He exposes the meaninglessness of norms, which is why he has the power to decapitate Brahma; to merge with Vishnu as Harihara or to make love to him in the guise of Mohini. Yet to square the ironies, he's the only one of the Trimurti who's consistently depicted as a family man, flanked by wife and sons. He's both ascetic and householder, both the untameable and the tamed. Get you one who can do both!

And honestly, is there any greater god out there (in terms of follower count, as well as status in the pantheon) who embodies the creativity of chaos? It's a role we usually leave to minor trickster figures (Maui, Anansi, Sun Wukong) and villains (Loki, Tiamat, Eris). Krishna embodies some of this jouissance too, of course—testament to the expansiveness of the Hindu tradition, not just this one face of the divine alone.

Cult, Culture and Authority: Princess Lĩêu Hạnh in Vietnamese History, by Olga Dror
University of Hawai'i Press, 2007

I've been curious about Đạo Mẫu ever since I watched Nguyễn Trinh Thi's documentary Love Man Love Woman (2007), about the queer shamans of the religion. But info's hard to come by online, and you sure don't see any Dorling Kindersley guides to the Vietnamese pantheon on sale!

Alas, this isn't an easy intro to the faith. I'm still lost when Dror casually rattles off dynasties, emperors and folk heroes, expecting that anyone who's curious about this has a basic grounding in Vietnamese history already. Fundamentally, this is a close-up study of just one specific goddess and her changing legends, from 16th and 17th C tales of her as the restless spirit of a singing girl or sex worker, prominent 18th C authoress Đoàn Thị Điểm's literary hagiography (which Dror sees as proto-feminist, positioning the goddess as a liberated intellectual equal of the scholars she marries), to 19th C Buddhist co-option of her as a malevolent spirit who must bow down before Amitabha. Also the changing fortunes of folk gods under different administrations, from imperial and colonial tolerance (there was never the same kind of respect for them as for Confucian/Buddhist deities of state religion), mild Communist suppression (more because of wastefulness than anti-religious ideology) and post-Đổi Mới celebration of local gods as national icons...

But some of the most instructive stuff in the book turns out to be the offhand comments, which run against a lot of my assumptions about folk religion. E.g. the fact that most people don't know the legends associated behind the gods and only care about how efficacious their prayers to their temples are (early catalogues of gods seem to reflect this); the revelation that people first set up a shrine to the Trung Sisters not because of awe or love for their rebellion but because of pity at how they had fallen in battle; the author's personal realisation that she and other foreign scholars were being positioned not just to witness the ceremonies but to be part of them, in full view, legitimising an obscure faith for the sake of national propaganda.

As someone who's now involved in documenting Singapore's own goddesses, this makes me reconsider some of my stances—is it so disgraceful that their stories are forgotten and rewritten?—and makes me a little more aware of the role I'm playing in propagating their images. I'm not an objective academic: I'm just another idol-bearer in the procession.

A Complete Catalog of Keramat in Singapore, by William L. Gibson
Self-published, 2022

Sure, this isn't exactly a book—it's a 1,155 page free-to-download PDF, without even a cute cover image for bookstagram—but due to my own perverse interests I decided I had to plough through it from beginning to end, and I'm pretty glad I did. (Get it yourself from http://urbex.asia/dFMED4 !)

I already knew Gibson was ambitious: he’d announced he was using his Lee Kong Chian Research Fellowship to document every single keramat, extant and demolished (13 and 38 of them respectively), within the current political demarcations of Singapore. What I couldn't fathom was the extent of the research he'd put into every single entry, tracing every news article and half-remembered legend thereof over the past two centuries, even carefully documenting the history of the vicinity for clues and including pics of every ancient photo, architectural drawing, map, exhumation notice, Street Directory page and Google Map screenshot (comparing the 2000s with the 2020s) so future researchers can have all relevant resources in a single place.

Which means this document is truly a treasury of info about the historical shrines of the land—didja know the Keramat Iskandar Syah wasn't always associated with the 14th century Singaporean king Raja Iskandar, but with Alexander the Great himself? And that in the 1910s one of the hermits living there was Baron de Horn, a supposed illegitimate son of a Russian Tsar and reincarnation of Alexander who once owned racehorses and was supposedly robbed of his diamonds by his personal secretary?

There've been at least two kubur panjang, or lengthening tombs, a strange proliferation of keramat next to or inside police stations (including that of Syed Yasin, who was killed by William Farquhar's colonial law enforcers), and even a Keramat Ganjah which Gibson suggests was used as a place where mystics smoked ritual bhang. Also, clear evidence that Singapore has traditionally been a site of incredible interreligious syncretism—though usually grounded in Islam and Malay culture, the keramat often betray Hindu or animistic roots, venerate Arab and Indian Muslim personages (and in one case, a Sikh), and have long histories of Chinese/Taoist and Hindu patronage and even administration.

And yet... Gibson made it clear in a recent talk that he's not intent on mythbusting, but sometimes his accumulation of evidence does precisely that, revealing how unstable the names, stories, and even races and genders of the people buried beneath the tombs are; how some of the details of the legends are demonstrably false. The biggest bombshell for me was his revelation that the Keramat Radin Mas, and indeed the neighbourhood of Radin Mas, precede the tale of the martyred precolonial Javanese princess Radin Mas Ayu—the area, whose name literally means "golden prince", may have been associated with a golden rice grain and was discovered as the site of miraculous spring water by Chinese in 1932. Gibson claims that the story of Radin Mas Ayu as we know her came from a 1934 bangsawan opera by local composer Inche NM Ali Munshi, borrowing the name of a character from the epic Hikayat Hang Tuah, and ended up being associated with a grave in that vicinity that may have once had royal connections. His argument's pretty convincing, and reading it, I felt like I'd just learned Santa Claus didn't exist!

So there's this weird tension at play. How can we continue to value and venerate these sites when passionate study of them actually turns up info that weakens their mythic power? Feels like that tale from Zhuangzi about the friends of Hundun who worried that he had no orifices, so spent six days drilling seven orifices into him, until on the seventh day, he died. Knowledge and numinous wonder are uneasy partners, and what worries me is that they're both in my private polycule.

Endnotes

[1] Ng Yi-Sheng, “Maiden Lim and Her Sisters: Taoist Folk Goddesses of Singapore.” BiblioAsia Jan-Mar 2023. https://biblioasia.nlb.gov.sg/vol-18/issue-4/jan-mar-2023/taoist-folk-goddesses-singapore/

[2] Omid Safi. “Fake Hafez: How a supreme Persian poet of love was erased.” Al-Jazeera. 14 June 2020. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/6/14/fake-hafez-how-a-supreme-persian-poet-of-love-was-erased/

[3] Syncretic Religion Memes for Rebellious 修行人, Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/SyncreticMemes

Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, the spoken word collection Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and the performance lecture compilation Black Waters, Pink Sands. He recently edited A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. Check out his website at ngyisheng.com.

#YISHREADS December 2022

By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

Endnotes

About
Singapore Unbound

#YISHREADS December 2022

By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

Endnotes

About Singapore Unbound

About
Singapore Unbound