Any attempt to describe “popular religion” in early medieval China must first come to grips with what the term means. The category has long been contested. Broadly speaking, over the past fifty years popular religion (in China and elsewhere) has been seen in one of five ways. For some, it has comprised the religious practices and understandings of the lower social classes as opposed to those of the elite. For others, it has designated types of phenomena that are widely shared across most levels of society rather than those of narrower scope. (These scholars often prefer the term “common religion.”) For yet others, to study popular religion has meant focusing on religion as carried out in particular places, as opposed to studying translocal ideas or institutions in abstraction from local contexts. For still other writers, to study popular religion is to study religion as it was actually practiced, as opposed to religion as prescribed or religion as official doctrine.