Visions religieuses pendant le haut Moyen Âge chinois

Introduction Les textes et les pratiques religieux sont d’habitude étudiés en tant que produits de « traditions » religieuses particulières, comme nous disons couramment. Les questions que nous posons à cet égard reviennent le plus souvent à demander où ils se situent dans le développement général de la tradition qui les a produits, et si nous les comparons aux textes et aux pratiques d’autres traditions, c’est généralement dans le but d’expliquer les ressemblances observées entre ces traditi..

To live as long as heaven and earth: a translation and study of Ge Hong's traditions of divine transcendents

In late classical and early medieval China, ascetics strove to become transcendents--deathless beings with supernormal powers. Practitioners developed dietetic, alchemical, meditative, gymnastic, sexual, and medicinal disciplines (some of which are still practiced today) to perfect themselves and thus transcend death. Narratives of their achievements circulated widely. Ge Hong (283-343 c.e.) collected and preserved many of their stories in his Traditions of Divine Transcendents, affording us a window onto this extraordinary response to human mortality. Robert Ford Campany's groundbreaking and carefully researched text offers the first complete, critical translation and commentary for this important Chinese religious work, at the same time establishing a method for reconstructing lost texts from medieval China. Clear, exacting, and annotated, the translation comprises over a hundred lively, engaging narratives of individuals deemed to have fought death and won. Additionally, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth systematically introduces the Chinese quest for transcendence, illuminating a poorly understood tradition that was an important source of Daoist religion and a major social, cultural, and religious phenomenon in its own right