The Cavern-Mystery Transmission: A Taoist Ordination Rite of A.D. 711

Humanities Open Book Program, a joint initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon FoundationVery little scholarly research has been done on the institutional structure of Taoism in medieval times. With this study of investiture, Benn attempts to fill that void. He describes the mechanism by which the Taoist priesthood ordered and perpetuated itself, as revealed in a rare account of an ordination rite for two T'ang princesses. He examines the lives of the participants, the hierarchy of the clergy, the liturgy, and the significance of the altar and its furnishings, and discusses other works of Chang Wan-fu, who authored this account

Origin Narratives: Reading and Reverence in Late Ming China

In this dissertation, I examine a genre of commercially-published, illustrated hagiographical books. Recounting the life stories of some of China’s most beloved cultural icons, from Confucius to Guanyin, I term these hagiographical books “origin narratives” (chushen zhuan 出身傳). Weaving a plethora of legends and ritual traditions into the new “vernacular” xiaoshuo format, origin narratives offered comprehensive portrayals of gods, sages, and immortals in narrative form, and were marketed to a general, lay readership. Their narratives were often accompanied by additional materials (or “paratexts”), such as worship manuals, advertisements for temples, and messages from the gods themselves, that reveal the intimate connection of these books to contemporaneous cultic reverence of their protagonists. The content and composition of origin narratives reflect the extensive range of possibilities of late-Ming xiaoshuo narrative writing, challenging our understanding of reading. I argue that origin narratives functioned as entertaining and informative encyclopedic sourcebooks that consolidated all knowledge about their protagonists, from their hagiographies to their ritual traditions. Origin narratives also alert us to the hagiographical substrate in late-imperial literature and religious practice, wherein widely-revered figures played multiple roles in the culture. The reverence of these cultural icons was constructed through the relationship between what I call the Three Ps: their personas (and life stories), the practices surrounding their lore, and the places associated with them (or “sacred geographies”). In this dissertation, I explore this dynamic through the prism of origin narratives by focusing on the immortal Xu Xun 許遜, the god Zhenwu 真武, and the immortal bard Lü Dongbin 呂洞賓. I conclude with a case study of a recurrent theme in origin narratives: the protagonist’s journey through hell. The main goal of this dissertation is to examine the pivotal yet overlooked genre of origin narratives and unveil its significance to Chinese literature and cultural practice. What was the reading experience of origin narratives? What spurred their rise and commercial success in late Ming? And what was their long-term impact on writing and worship in late-imperial China? To answer these questions, this dissertation attempts to transcend anachronistic disciplinary boundaries that obscure the realities of life in late Ming China, and instead explore origin narratives within the broader cultural framework that informed their production and consumption during this period. Therefore, I analyze origin narratives in conjunction with a wide range of materials that fall into the realms of literature, religion, and history. These include literary works, canonical texts, popular religious tracts (baojuan and shanshu), daily-life encyclopedias, local gazetteers, geographical compendia, pictorial hagiographies, and art works. Origin narratives reflect three concomitant trends in late-Ming book culture: a renewed interest in hagiographies, a penchant for anthologizing in commercial publishing, and the multiple roles xiaoshuo narratives played in the culture. In their hybrid composition and encyclopedic scope, origin narratives are a unique late-Ming phenomenon that opens a rare window onto the interplay between literature and religion during this transformative period in the history of Chinese culture

The Carroll Quarterly, Spring 1979

https://collected.jcu.edu/carrollquarterly/1093/thumbnail.jp

How To Live A Good Life And Afterlife: Conceptions Of Post-Mortem Existence And Practices Of Self-Cultivation In Early China

In the field of sinology, a widespread truism is that mind-body holism is a defining characteristic of early Chinese conception of human life. In this dissertation, we wish to demonstrate that contesting notions of life and death co-exist in early China, against the presumption that mind-body dualism never arises in early China. First, through examining elite burials from Western Zhou through the Han, we demonstrate how the diametrically opposed visions of the dead (that of an ancestral spirit who lacks eternal existence and that of an immortal with a transcended physical form) were seamlessly combined in the burial practices from Eastern Zhou to the Han. Second, through studying the visions of life and self-cultivation practices as portrayed in several early Chinese texts, we demonstrate that mind-body holism and mind-body dualism co-exist in early China, with the former prominent in “Neiye,” Mencius and parts of Huainanzi, and the latter prominent in Zhuangzi and the other parts of Huainanzi. Although “Neiye” and Mencius endorse different kinds of self-cultivation, their strands of self-cultivation both involve a transformation of the mental-spiritual as well as physical-physiological aspects of life. In contrast, Zhuangzi has a prominent body-mind dualism, holding that the body disintegrates upon death and joins in the cosmic transformation, but the spiritual entity, if properly attended to, can transcend the physical form and gain an eternal existence through merging with the cosmic ancestor. Self-cultivation in Zhuangzi, therefore, primarily involves the attendance to the spiritual aspect of life. Huainanzi portrays two diametrically opposed views of human life, each of which fits a special type of human exemplar. Parts of it follow the Zhuangzian dualism and hold that the spirit may remain eternally unchanged despite corporeal decay. Parts of it follow the “Neiye” tradition and hold that life is sustained by the union of the spirit and body, both of which are depletable or destructible. With the distinction between the two types of human exemplars predestined in the cosmogonic process, they diverge fundamentally in their impact on the cosmic order, and the boundaries between them can never be crossed through self-cultivation

Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion

This is an out of print book, the rights for which have reverted to the author. The version presented here was digitized from a paper copy provided by the author.tru