Telling the fortune of Wong Tai Sin temple
THE RISE OF A REFUGEE GOD: Hongkong's Wong Tai Sin By Graeme Lang and Lars Ragvald (Oxford University Press, $95) THIS is the story of a phenomenon, the amazing and often improbable success of the Wong Tai Sin temple, visited by tens of thousands of worshippers seeking favours from the god and having his often cryptic answers interpreted by Asia's biggest concentration of fortune-tellers.
Above all, it explores who, on earth and out of it, was - and is - Wong Tai Sin.
The authors also examine, with limited success, why so many Hongkong people put their trust in a relatively minor figure in the pantheon of Chinese immortals who even at the best of times was scantily worshipped in China itself.
It is obvious from the authors' research that the majority of Hongkong worshippers neither know nor perhaps care very much about the background of their god, despite the fact that there is a tablet giving an outline of the story at the temple itself.
According to the Taoist legend, in his earthly existence the god was a shepherd named Wong Cho Ping who tended his flock on Jinhua Mountain. Under Taoist influence, he disappeared for 40 years. He was eventually traced on the mountain by his brother who asked what had happened to the sheep. He was shown a hillside scattered with white stones but when Wong Cho Ping shouted to them to arise, the stones turned into tens of thousands of sheep.
He is also reported to have developed cinnabar (mercuric sulphide) into a drug which could produce immortality. ''This experimentation with cinnabar preoccupied many Taoists,'' note the authors. ''Cinnabar is actually a poison, and some of the hermits were no doubt 'translated into the heavens' by cinnabar more speedily that they had hoped.'' When Wong Cho Ping died he became Wong Tai Sin (the Great Immortal Sage Wong).
The centuries rolled by with Wong Tai Sin receiving scant attention. But about a century ago, a Guangzhou man, Leung Yan-ngam, casting around for something to do after a long career in the customs service, began communicating with Wong Tai Sin. The method he used was fugi, spirit writing, in which the god controls the hand of the writer.