Someone asks this every few months. They have usually just been to a temple and come back confused: three figures in the main hall, the Jade Emperor in another, and every tablet longer than the last. So which one is in charge?
Ranking them is like asking whether water outranks the official who runs the water board.
Three names for something that takes no name
The Three Purities are Yuanshi Tianzun of Jade Purity, Lingbao Tianzun of Highest Purity, and Daode Tianzun of Great Purity. English usually renders them as the Celestial Worthy of Primordial Beginning, of Numinous Treasure, and of the Way and its Virtue. None of those renderings picks up the weight of ritual use the Chinese titles carry.
They are not three individuals. Inside the tradition the phrase is that one primal breath divides into the Three Purities: one source showing itself in three registers. Chapter twenty-five of the Daodejing has that passage about something formed out of chaos, born before heaven and earth, and of it Laozi says: I do not know its name, so I style it the Way, and if forced to name it I call it Great. The Three Purities carry the same manoeuvre further, naming what takes no name, and naming three because one register cannot hold the whole sequence by which things arise. Which is why no biography attaches to any of them, and why hunting for one is a mistake. I took that line apart at more length in the piece on the opening chapter.
Of the three, Daode Tianzun is most readily mistaken for a person, since Taishang Laojun stands behind the title and the historical Laozi behind him. Whether the two are one figure has been argued over for a very long time. In class I give the tradition’s account, then what the historians say, so students know there are two sets of books open.
The Four Sovereigns, and a list that won’t hold still
Below the Three Purities sit the Four Sovereigns. They are more concrete than the Purities above them, and they govern the workings of heaven and earth.
One common arrangement runs: the Jade Emperor, Haotian Jinque Zhizun Yuhuang Dadi; the Great Emperor of Purple Tenuity at the North Pole, Zhongtian Ziwei Beiji Dadi; the Great Emperor of the Curved Array, Gouchen Shanggong Tianhuang Dadi; and Houtu, sovereign of the earth, Chengtian Xiaofa Houtu Huang Diqi.
Other arrangements exist. Some sources set the Jade Emperor apart above the four and bring the Great Emperor of Long Life of the Southern Pole into the group in his place; some count six rather than four. Which is older and which better founded I have not settled to my own satisfaction. Temple halls were built and rebuilt across centuries, and what stands in them reflects local lineage and whoever was paying as much as doctrine. I use the titles current in my own line and say plainly that others do it differently. Where the lists disagree I won’t hand a student one right answer, because I haven’t got one to hand over.
On spelling, since we are on names. Houtu’s title ends in 祇, the character for an earth spirit. It gets printed as 祗, which means reverent and is a different character altogether. The error turns up in handsomely produced editions. I check that one character on its own every time I proofread a handout.
Star Lords
Below that come the Star Lords, the tier that touches ordinary life: natal destiny, lifespan and the fortune of a given year are handled here.
The Northern Dipper matters most. Each year during the Nine Emperor Festival, the first through ninth days of the ninth lunar month, I teach the Beidou Jing, in full the Taishang Xuanling Beidou Benming Yansheng Zhenjing, on the Northern Dipper and the extension of the life given at birth. That is what the scripture is about. I am not promising anyone anything. Why nine nights and not seven is usually explained by the nine of the Dipper, seven stars plus attendant stars, though accounts differ. The tradition has its own names for the seven, separate from the astronomical ones. How they are used at the altar passes from teacher to student and is not written down, part of the rule itself.
Doumu Yuanjun is the mother of the stars of the Northern Dipper. The name is written with either of two characters for mother, and the full titles vary between sources. I won’t fix a standard version here.
The Southern Dipper gets taught alongside it. Nearly everyone has heard that it governs birth and the Northern Dipper death, and most take the line for scripture. The best known source is a story in Gan Bao’s Soushen Ji, where a boy carries wine and dried meat to where the two sit absorbed in a board game and makes his request while they are not attending. It makes a good story, which is a different thing from what the scriptures say. I teach the Southern Dipper rarely and won’t pretend otherwise.
Teaching the Northern Dipper in Sydney has an awkwardness built in: you mostly cannot see it. At thirty-four south, three of the seven stars never clear the horizon at all. The other four rise every day, but mostly while the sun is up, so catching one at night is a matter of luck. In March or April, late and away from street lights, part of the pattern grazes the northern horizon. The Nine Emperor Festival falls in the ninth lunar month, October or November, and across those nine nights the four rise and set in daylight, nothing above the horizon after dark. New students ask what it is we are honouring, then. What we honour is that tier, not the seven points of light. Stars sit in the sky and do not change hemispheres when you do, the same dividing line I drew in the article on why facing south fails in Australia. Sydney and Beijing are in the same period of the same cycle; what flips is the layer on the ground. The sky here has other things in it though. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are naked-eye objects, two soft smudges hanging in the south like pieces torn off the Milky Way, invisible from almost all of the northern hemisphere. Not from the city; drive an hour or so west past the light and they come out. First-timers take them for thin cloud until half an hour of watching them turn with everything else settles it. Anyway.
The Nine Emperor Festival is not an ancestral observance, incidentally. Two separate things kept separate, as I set out in the piece on ancestral rites from overseas.
Where folk religion starts
The City God, Earth God, wealth gods and Kitchen God get asked about in one breath, and need their own answer.
The City God and the Earth God have a formal place in Daoist ritual. The wealth gods and the Kitchen God weigh more heavily in popular practice; they are in the temples and they are on every kitchen bench as well. Names and stories vary sharply by region. Some identify the wealth god as Zhao Gongming, some venerate Guandi in that role, some keep a civil wealth god as well; Fujian, Guangdong, the lower Yangzi and the north each have their own account. The Kitchen God answers to more than one appellation: Zaowangye in the north, Zaojun or Siming through Fujian and Guangdong, with tablets reading Dingfu Zaojun or Siming Zaojun. Sydney’s Chinese families lean Fujianese and Cantonese, and it is mostly the second sort of wording I see. I don’t legislate here.
Where a Kitchen God tablet goes I covered in the article on kitchens and stoves: the space over an Australian cooktop is a rangehood and a wall cabinet, so the position is awkward before you begin.
Wealth god figures also get sold as ornaments, in the same shops and off the same shelves. One is a placement you invite home and one is stock on a counter; don’t buy them as the same thing. I argued that out in the piece on charms and cures.
Getting the name right
One character wrong and it is somebody else, or nobody. Houtu’s 祇 is above; a few others come up as often. The 隍 in City God is a dry moat; it gets written as 皇, emperor, which is unrelated. 天尊 and 天君 are not interchangeable: the first sits at the level of the Three Purities, the second belongs to the thunder department’s guardian generals. And a tablet half in traditional characters and half in simplified just looks careless. Whichever edition you copy from, copy it all the way through.
Placement in an Australian house often comes with no good options. The kitchen above is one; a lounge room backing onto the stairs, or facing a bathroom, is another. If nowhere works, the step down is an incense burner without a tablet, and the step down from that is nothing at home and a visit to the temple at the festivals. Plenty of households here end up at the second one.