There’s a Daoist temple in my neighborhood that I’ve known about for several years but have never paid much attention to, beyond occasionally gawking at it. One day recently, I finally took the trouble to write down the characters at the entrance.
I showed the characters to a Chinese person, who explained to me that the temple is called the Fantastic Cloud Temple (妙雲宮, although the first typewritten character looks somewhat different from the one that is painted on the sign, and although on babelfish, the name comes out as “Wonderful Cloud Palace”) and is dedicated to 鬼谷子 (Gui3 Gu3 Zi3), who, according to this Chinese person, was the teacher or mentor of 孫子 (Sun1 Zi3).
Bearing in mind that I don’t mean to be in any way disrespectful toward anyone’s religious beliefs or practices, does anyone have an idea of what revering or worshiping Guiguzi might involve?
Also, is Guiguzi actually considered a god in Daoist beliefs, and if not, what is his status?
I wrote the above post (I used that username from about February of 2004 to around October of 2005). Some time after the writing of that post, the temple was torn down. Somebody told me that the temple had moved to another location, and that the sponsors of the temple were going to build a new one at the old location.
The land sat idle for a good while–well, except for serving as a sort of parking lot, and a hangout for a cat (whom I named “Kung Fu Cat” because of the excellent showing he made up on his hinders fending off a tugou, and because of the advanced wisdom and fine athletic abilities he displayed hightailing it out of the area upon the arrival of a second tugou) and some birds. The birds looked like maybe mourning doves? Anyway, they were such savvy birds that I never saw Kung Fu Cat catch even one of them, during quite a few attempts.
Then a temporary temple was constructed, and was used for so long that I began to think that it was perhaps a permanent structure. Finally a large temple was built there. Here it is on Google Maps (I hope):