Paper short abstract:

Much has been written on the writings of the famous Chinese Christian preacher Watchman Nee (Ni Tuosheng 1903-1972). However all of these assessments of Nee's oeuvre assume a referential approach to language. In contrast, his modern-day followers focus upon the "edibility" of his writings.

Paper long abstract:

Watchman Lee's most prominent disciple, Witness Lee (Li Changshou 1905-1997), called the movement that formed around Nee's, and then Lee's, teaching and writing "the recovery of eating". During my fieldwork I discovered that while there is a lot of food sharing involved in the life of this group, their main focus is "eating the Lord" (Lee 2000), or "eating Jesus everyday" as one of their popular songs puts it. The primary way of eating the Lord is "eating His word" together and "consuming" Nee's and Lee's ministry which are considered an extension of the Bible

Ritual feasts hold a very important place in Chinese and Taiwanese lives (Chang 1977; Stafford 2000). In this paper I show how the ways in which Nee's (and Lee's) language is used within the group affords similar opportunities for sharing, reciprocal gifting and mutual nourishment as does food in these feasts. Moreover, Jesus as linguistic content of group meetings is said to "taste so sweet", while the successful enactment of a meetings is thought of as producing a "sweet-smelling fragrance for the Lord".

The use and imagining of language as food in these contexts leads me to re-think the relation between language and food in Chinese religious thought more generally. From here I suggest that while anthropologists have analysed food as a kind of "language" (e.g. Douglas 1972; 1984), it may be productive also to look comparatively at language as a kind of "food".