TWO PATHS OF THE GENERATION OF FAITH RELATIONSHIP: CASE STUDY ON NORTHERN SHAANXI AND CHAOSHAN

This paper will use the Hei Long Temple in Northern Shaanxi and the Xuan Tian Ancient Temple in Eastern Guangdong as comparative cases. By analyzing the administrative legalization path of Hei Long Temple from a folk temple to an artifact repository, and its transformation from a Taoist temple into a tourist attraction, as well as interpreting the phenomenon of Xuan Tian Ancient Temple and the Buddhist Jingxin Hermitage actively integrating into the Huang clan to gain social legitimacy, it aims to explore the issue of faith relationship construction in folk beliefs. It seeks to supplement the binary discussion on institutional and diffusion, state and locality in religious social studies, revealing two pathways for the generation of faith relationships in local belief practices: upward legalization and downward legitimacy.