Calling on the Perfect Warrior: An Emotional Plea for Help

Abstract: This paper is about the story of one Chinese man's petition to deal with the impending dangers he perceived, by using the spiritual power of the mighty Daoist deity Perfect Warrior. The petition was written with a brush on hand-made paper of a size usually used for official documents. The hand-writing of the petitioner and the lack of punctuation, combined with deterioration of the document, made it hard to clearly read in some places. It was written at the time of the Dragon Boat Festival in 1967, when the Cultural Revolution was sweeping across China and into the province where the petitioner lived. The petitioner felt fear and danger that destabilized his emotional state. He wrote a heart-felt plea to the deity to be transformed into a god himself capable of destroying the "snakes and tigers" bringing danger into his community.