Introduction
Ames, “On Body as Ritual Practice,” 149.
Badiou, “Jullien the Apostate,” 345–46 (French version, Allouch et al., Oser construire, 149–50). Emphases added.
Patton, Religion of the Gods, 179–80.
The term “signs of contradiction” is adapted here from Kierkegaard, Indøvelse i Christendom, where it refers exclusively to the paradoxical “God-Man” as a sign in himself and a challenge to faith—not to ritual symbols, which in Kierkegaard’s view belong within the (non-Christian) sphere of “objective religion.”
Daode jing, 14.
Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, 191. Cf. translation by Alastair Hannay in Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (2009), 175–76.
Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, 314. Cf. translation by Alastair Hannay in Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (2009), 288.
Kierkegaard, Notesbøgerne 1–15, 390.
See Badiou, “Thinking the Event,” 12–16. The background for this break is, of course, social existence, and it thus confirms the preexistence of social relations. In that sense, it would be correct to say that the self is inevitably social (i.e., it has a social dimension, even when this is essentially abolished), but this surely does not entail that it is “irreducibly” so, as claimed in Hall and Ames, Thinking from the Han, 41–43.
See Badiou, “Thinking the Event,” 14: “Philosophy is not worth an hour’s effort if it is not based on the idea that the true life is present. With regard to circumstances, the true life is present in the choice, in distance [to power] and in the event.”
See Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 113–25.
Compare Badiou “Thinking the Event,” 25–48, in which he presents his “theory of universality” as a necessary complement to the philosopher’s commitment. The figure
Badiou, “Jullien the Apostate,” 343–44.
Badiou, Being and Event, 294. In Badiou’s philosophy, an evental site is defined as an abnormal multiple, i.e., “a multiple such that none of its elements are presented in the situation.” It constitutes a singularity “on the edge of the void,” in which an event may occur. See Badiou, Being and Event, 173–77, and chapter 4 of this book.
Badiou, Court traité d’ontologie transitoire, 164. Badiou’s two magna opera, entitled L’être et l’événement (Being and Event), volumes 1 and 2, were published in 1988 and 2006, and they can be viewed as his main statements on ontology and phenomenology, respectively. Throughout this book, they are quoted from their English translations, Being and Event (2005), and Logics of Worlds (2009). The development of his thought between these two landmark events is expressed in a large number of smaller publications, including the Court traité d’ontologie transitoire (1998) quoted here, which Badiou himself saw as a transition from his earlier ontology toward the phenomenology still in the works.
Badiou, Being and Event, 524–25.
The clear distinction between the Way and the One relies primarily on chapter 42 of the Daode jing, which states that “the Way gave birth to the One.” Some counterexamples to this understanding among the early commentators on the Daode jing, who refer to other parts of the classic, will be discussed in chapter 5.
1. Truth and Subjectivation
See Graham, Chuang-tzu: Seven Inner Chapters.
The Philosopher-Sinologists in question are represented most forcefully in Hall and Ames, Thinking from the Han, but also, to some extent, in the works of Frango is Jullien—at least as read by some of his critics and defenders. See Allouch et al., Oser construire.
For a brief outline of the history of truth in the West, see Foucault, L’hermeneutique du sujet, 27–32.
See “Le facteur de la vérité,” in Derrida, Post Card, 468.
Badiou, Being and Event, 3.
Badiou, 3.
Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift.
Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, 456.
Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, 73; Badiou, Being and Event, 391–92; Heidegger, Basic Writings, 111–38.
Badiou, Being and Event, 327.
Ricoeur, Sur la traduction, 64; cf. the translation in Ricoeur, On Translation, 36, which is, however, marred with misreadings of the French original. Ricoeur’s statement refers to Frango is Jullien’s thesis, to be discussed further below.
Hall and Ames, Thinking from the Han, 111
For the term “reflexive pronoun,” see Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 1–3.
The most significant exception to this rule is found in the descriptive use of the term “subject” as a simple extension of the dynamics of the first-person pronoun.
See Ruti, Between Levinas and Lacan.
Hall and Ames, Thinking from the Han, 104.
Hall and Ames, 21 (my emphasis).
See especially, Harbsmeier, “Marginalia Sino-logica” and Language and Logic.
Hall and Ames, Thinking from the Han, 220 (emphasis added). See Schwartz, The World of Thought (48), where the author states about the ancient concept of the Mandate of Heaven (Tianming 天命): “What strikes one is the clear elevation of Heaven or the high god to a central and transcendent position in the cosmos, and in the ethical life of society …. The attribution to the high god of the ultimate powers of judgment for the ethical and ritual performance of those who rule the human order seems to introduce a truly new dimension of transcendence.”
Ricoeur, Sur la traduction, 64; quoted in Allouch et al., Oser construire, 144. Cf. English translation in Ricoeur, On Translation, 36.
See Deleuze, Foucault, 94–123, where Deleuze discusses this concept of an initial fold with reference to Foucault’s works.
Ricoeur, Sur la traduction, 65; On Translation, 36.
Ricoeur, Sur la traduction, 65; On Translation, 36. Compare my discussion of the renewal of Daoist ritual over time through the “creative misunderstandings” of the performing priests, in Andersen, “The Transformation of the Body,” 191.
Ricoeur, Sur la traduction, 66; On Translation, 37.
Cf. the notion of the construction of “a single world” mentioned in Badiou, “Jul-lien the Apostate,” 345–46, likewise with reference to Jullien’s work. See the introduction to this book.
Neville, Ritual and Deference, 65.
Neville, 66.
Cf. the contrasting approach of Michael J. Puett, presented as his “method of analysis” in Puett, To Become a God, 21–26.
Hall and Ames, Thinking from the Han, 41–43.
Hall and Ames, 4. My emphasis.
Fink, Lacanian Subject, 36–37; Fink, Lacan to the Letter, 108–9.
Lacan, Ëcrits, 96
Fink, Lacanian Subject, 37.
Fink, 37.
See Lacan, Ëcrits, 493–94.
Fink, Lacanian Subject, 25.
See also Badiou’s “theory of points,” set forth in Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 399–435 (with specific reference to Kierkegaard).
Fink, Lacanian Subject, 25.
Stedman, Victorian Anthology, 596–98.
Deleuze, Foucault, 100, 106.
Deleuze, 114.
Foucault, Hermeneutique du sujet, 46. In his emphasis on philosophy as a form of practice, Foucault was very much inspired by Pierre Hadot’s work on the “spiritual exercises” of ancient Greek philosophers since the Sophists and Socrates. See Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy, 172–233. However, it should be noticed that, contrary to Foucault, Hadot insists on making a clear distinction between the practices of archaic “shamans,” whose trance behavior and ecstatic journeys to heaven were framed by ritual and social contexts, and the Greek philosophers whose ascetic life-disciplines aimed at the construction of a transcendent “I.” As we shall see, there is little need for upholding this distinction between the concrete and the spiritual in Daoist ritual.
On the early Daoist temporary absence from the body (appearing as “dead ashes”), see the translation from Zhuangzi 2, below.
Foucault, Hermeneutique du sujet, 184.
For a more comprehensive comparison of ancient Chinese and Greek thought and practice, see Lloyd and Sivin, Way and Word. The two authors focus on the development of science in the period from 400 BCE to 200 CE, as part of what they call “cultural manifolds,” i.e., totalities of social and intellectual history in which the concepts and practices of each culture are viewed as embedded in the social circumstances of their time. The result is a kind of social history, which, in the case of China, is heavily weighted toward the Confucian project of social order. The cutoff point at 200 CE saves the authors from considering Daoist philosophy throughout subsequent history and allows them to treat most of Daoism as heavily influenced by Indian metaphysics (via Buddhism) (Lloyd and Sivin, Way and Word, 203). Contrary to the present book, Lloyd and Sivin show no interest in contemporary philosophy, or even the philosophy of science. Their project is one of cultural relativism, and they do not condone “comparing concepts or factors one at a time” across cultures. Their focus is on contrasting the two cultures, while at the same time applying comparison broadly, and in this way, allowing them to throw light on each other (Lloyd and Sivin, xii–xiv). Thus, whereas the work of Lloyd and Sivin undoubtedly constitutes a major contribution to the social history of science, it still leaves the door open to the more universalistic and existentialist approach of this book.
Foucault, Hermeneutique du sujet, 5–6.
Deleuze, Foucault, 105–6. My emphasis.
See the full translation and the detailed account of this chapter of the Yushu jing in chapter 6.
Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, 44. Cf. translation by Hong and Hong in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1992), 138.
Taylor, Sources of the Self, x.
Taylor, 11.1
Taylor, 535.
See Said, Orientalism.
Allouch et al., Oser construire (2007).
Allouch et al., 62.
In his defense of Jullien, the prominent French Sinologist Léon Vandermeersch fully supports this particular choice, based on the premise that the special quality of
Lunyu 9.4.
The four matters to abstain from are all preceded by the character wu 毋, which normally means “do not” in the sense of an injunction. Some Confucian commentators believe that the character here substitutes for the ordinary wu 無, “have not, be without,” while others maintain that the four phrases are intended as precepts for Confucius’s students meant to guide their practice of learning. See, for instance, Frederic Wang, “Yang Jian,” 171–83. What complicates this reading is that the first part of the sentence seems to introduce a description of what Confucius did himself.
Er-Cheng ji, 16–17. Cf. Sources of Chinese Tradition, 694–95, and Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History, 176–77.
Du Sishu daquan shuo, 336–38.
Du Sishu daquan shuo, 336 and 338. Hu Anguo was famous for his commentary on Chunqiu 春秋 (the Spring and Autumn Annals), one of the five Confucian classics included in Shisan jing zhushu, 2: 1697–2188.
Gernet, La raison des choses, 290.
Gernet, 303–4. It should be noted that the assessment of Daoism as seeking the origin of everything in a source external to the self and apart from the world is peculiar to Wang Fuzhi and other Confucian critics of Daoism. This assessment of Daoism is not supported by the findings of this book.
Gernet, 310.
See, for instance, Hall and Ames, Thinking from the Han, 57.
See Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, 748–60; Badiou, Being and Event, 327–87. See also Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 173–76.
Cf. Jullien, who uses this line as the title of the book La grande image na pas de forme.
See for instance Wang Fuzhi, translated in Gernet, La raison des choses, 310. Compare Kierkegaard’s concept of “the sickness unto death,” by which he means despair. Despair has three forms: (1) the despair of not being conscious of having a self; (2) desperately wanting not to be oneself; (3) desperately wanting to be oneself. Someone suffering from one of these forms of despair does not have a true self, which Kierkegaard defines as the self “determined as spirit.” In this sense, such a person might be said not to be fully human. However, even as a person living in despair has no self in the spiritual sense, there is nothing in this that prevents such a person from being utterly “selfish.” In other words, like Wang Fuzhi, Kierkegaard views the unevolved self as being egotistical and contentious—and thus as having at least some form of existence. See Kierkegaard,
See also Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood, 106–10
Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 1–2.
See Sartre, “Conscience de soi,” 63, and Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood, 115
Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, 487.
Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, 44.
Kierkegaard, Indøvelse i Christendom, 129–30.
K. E. Løgstrup criticizes Kierkegaard for not being aware of this “linguistic” definition of the sign, but of course, nothing was further from Kierkegaard’s mind than talking about the central Christian Sign in such terms. See Løgstrup, Opgør med Kierkegaard, 14–19.
Badiou, “Thinking the Event,” 24.
Badiou, 14–15.
Heidegger, Basic Writings, 115–38.
2. Truth and Knowledge
See Quentin Meillassoux, as represented in Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 107–10.
See, for instance, Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 1–22.
See Badiou, “Thinking the Event,” 26, Thesis 1: “By ‘thought,’ I mean the subject insofar as it is constituted through a process that cuts through the totality of established knowledge. Or, as Lacan puts it, the subject insofar as it makes a hole in knowledge.”
Badiou, Being and Event, 333, 339.
Vattimo, Farewell to Truth, xxvi.
According to Vattimo, “[the] decline of the idea of objective truth in philosophy and epistemology doesn’t yet seem to have floated to the surface of public consciousness, which is still deeply attached, as the scandal clinging to the ‘liars’ Bush and Blair shows, to the idea of the true as the objective description of facts.” It may be suggested that, in the era of Trump, with its focus on “alternative facts” and on truth as being determined by the interests of authoritarian leaders, the project of reforming public consciousness in accordance with “the demise of the very idea of truth” proposed by Vat-timo has perhaps been more successful than any of these postmodern thinkers bargained for. “Be careful about what you wish for—it might come true,” as the saying goes. See Vattimo, Farewell to Truth, xxvi.
Badiou, Being and Event, 525.
Badiou, 294.
Badiou, 327 and passim.
See Hansen, “Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy,” 503–4.
See, for instance, Graham, who rejoices in the refreshing relief for “anyone bored with the ambiguities and complications of Truth,” offered by the focus on the term dang 當 (fitting the fact) found in Mohist philosophy of the late Warring States, which
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 52–53.
See Karl Popper’s influential The Logic of Scientific Discovery (first published in German in 1934), in which the notion of verifiability as a quality of a scientific theory is replaced by that of falsifiability. (See Popper, Logic of Scientific Discovery, 40–42 and 78–92.) A good theory is not one that can be verified, because, in the end, no theory can be conclusively validated in that way. A good theory is one that can be falsified, i.e., one that has withstood attempts to disprove it—until it crumbles and must give way to another theory.
Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, 184. Cf. translation by Hong and Hong in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1992), 1201.
See Badiou, Being and Event, 327–34.
Having sat through Schelling’s widely attended lecture series in Berlin 1841/1842—which to begin with struck Kierkegaard with the force of a revelation (exactly because of its focus on a “positive philosophy,” as opposed to Hegel’s “negative philosophy” of possibilities)—Kierkegaard concluded as follows in a letter to his older brother P. C. Kierkegaard: “Schelling drivels quite unbearably…. I am too old to listen to lectures, and Schelling is too old to give them. His whole teaching about potentials reveals the highest degree of impotence.” See Kierkegaard, Notesbøgerne 1–15, Commentary volume, 431–32.
Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, 187. Cf. translation by Hong and Hong in Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1:204–5.
Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, 298–99. Cf. the translation by Hong and Hong in Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1:328. I am taking the liberty here of translating Kierkegaard’s “Virkelighed” as “true reality,” thereby opposing it to “thought-reality,” which is reality established as knowledge. The current convention of translating Virkelighed as “actuality” is, in my view, unfortunate, since it seems to reduce the religious and existential dimensions of the term. The various uses of the term Virkelighed in Kierkegaard’s authorship are discussed by Michelle Kosch in the article “‘Actuality’ in Schelling and Kierkegaard” (Hennigfeld, Kierkegaard und Schelling, 235–51), in which she follows Hong and Hong’s translation of the term in Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
Foucault, Courage of Truth, 2–3. The term “alethurgy” is a conceptual neologism introduced by Foucault based on a single occurrence in ancient Greek literature, in a text by the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who lived around 500 BCE.
Olivier, “Foucault and the Courage of Truth,” 1.
See, for instance, Tu Wei-ming, Centrality and Commonality. See also An Yan-ming, “Idea of Cheng,” who suggests the rendering of cheng as “integrity,” and who emphasizes the interpersonal connotations of the term, as it qualifies not so much a psychological quality as a quality of a performance deemed to be adequate by the performer him- or herself as well as by those on whose behalf the performance is executed.
Ames and Hall, Focusing the Familiar, 12–13.
Zhuangzi, chapter 31.
See DZ 1176: Mozi; Graham, Disputers of the Tao, 137–70.
DZ 99: Jiutianyingyuan leishengpuhua tianzunyushu baojing 下.25b–26a.
Cf. Graham, Disputers of the Tao, 52.
Your “final answer” in the quiz show Want to Be a Millionaire? is a gamble, a throw of the dice. If someone had total knowledge, it would not be a game, and the person would not be allowed to be in the show. It would be cheating, because this person would be God.
See Strickmann, Mantras et mandarins.
In this regard, I disagree with Stoneman, Ancient Oracles, 1–25, who believes that, contrary to most oracles in other parts of the world, the Greek oracles took the form of “actual utterances” of the gods, and that they therefore constituted “the opinions of the gods.” Cf. Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen über Frazers “Golden Bough ,” 1e–3e, where he forcefully dismisses the notion that religious symbols and practices in general may “rest on any opinion.” (Emphasis in the original.) Contra Frazer, Wittgenstein therefore asserts that it is “wrong-headed” to maintain that religious notions might conceivably constitute mistakes.
Karlgren, Grammatica Serica Recensa, 834g.
See Monier-Williams, Sanskrit-English Dictionary, 1052–54.
See Benveniste, Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, 1:104–8.
The archaic Chinese pronunciations of the two words zhen and xin, as reconstructed by Berhard Karlgren, are closely similar, and they therefore may well be derived from a shared root. See Karlgren, Grammatica Serica Recensa, 375a and 384a.
Shuowen jiezi 8 上.5b.
See, for instance, Hall and Ames, Thinking from the Han, 163.
Shuowen guangyi, 329.
Foucault, Courage of Truth. See especially his first lecture on February 1, 1984.
Foucault, 2–3.
Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy, 172–233. See my comparison of Greek and Chinese precepts in chapter 1. It should be noted that whereas Foucault appears to support the notion of a continuity between the ascetic life-discipline of Greek philosophers and archaic Greek ritual, Hadot insists on distinguishing between the two historically separate forms of practice. Greek philosophers aimed for rational self-control and mastery of their souls, and they do not appear to have retained any of the concrete elements of the rituals of earlier times. (See Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy, 181–89.) In contrast, and as mentioned already, the fusion of inner spiritual exercises and outer ritual action is a hallmark of Daoist ritual throughout history.
Foucault, Courage of Truth, 163.
Foucault, 170.
Foucault, 356.
See Badiou, Being and Event, 327 et passim.
The term “ex-sistence” was coined as a translation of the term Ekstase, which Heidegger adopted from the Greek ekstasis. As explained in Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 22, the root meaning of the term in Greek is “standing outside of” or “standing apart from” something. Lacan uses the term “ex-sistence” for the real that does not exist, but
The text in the Liezi may be found in DZ 732: Chongxu zhide zhenjing sijie 2.13b. The use of the word gui, “to return,” to explain the etymology of the near-homophone gui, “ghost,” may seem like little more than a pun, but in fact, the pronunciations of the two words were nearly identical already in the most ancient forms of Chinese, and the two words therefore might, indeed, share a common root. See Karlgren, Grammatica Serica Recensa, 569a and 570a.
Rizhi lu jishi, 823–24.
See Badiou, Being and Event, 524–25, where he writes that, contrary to knowledge, there is “no contrary to the true.”
See Mawangdui Hanmu boshu, 145–52, and Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature, 385–411.
See Mawangdui Hanmu boshu, 146–47.
Xunzi jijie, 1.11. The standard commentaries on the Xunzi gloss zhen in this phrase as meaning cheng, “truthful, sincere,” thus taking zhen to be used here as an adverb, and the following ji 積 to be an intransitive verb: “if you sincerely accumulate and make a lasting effort.” Knobloch, Xunzi, 1:139, accordingly renders the whole sentence as “If you genuinely accumulate and earnestly practice for a long time, then you will become an initiate.” In all of the book, however, leading up to this sentence, ji has been used as a transitive verb, and the context of the phrase zhenji lijiu —if following this traditional reading—would give no clue as to what is being accumulated. I have based my interpretation on the section on zhen by Gu Yanwu, discussed above, in which a commentary by Gu himself makes it clear that, in his view, zhen is used here in the same sense as in the Daode jing and the Zhuangzi. As a further example of this usage, he adduces a verse from the late fourth or early fifth-century Daoist scripture, Huangting neijing jing, chapter 28: “You must accumulate your essences and store your breath in order to become true and real” (積精累氣以爲眞). Cf. DZ 331: Taishang huangting neijingyujing 9b.
Han Feizi jiaoshu, 23.515.
Han Feizi jiaoshu, 8.140. That a tiger may return to its true being by being transformed into a man is explained by the fact that the figure of the tiger is here used allegorically to designate an unrestrained official usurping power.
Han Feizi jiaoshu, 20.407–9.
Laozi Daode jing, chapter 28.
Zhuangziyinde, chapter 31.
Compare Badiou, Being and Event, 524–25.
Zhuangzi yinde, chapter 20.
See also Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, 748–60.
Zhuangzi yinde, chapter 26.
Zhuangzi yinde, chapter 26; Hall and Ames, Thin king fro m the Han, 104.
Zhuangzi yinde, chapter 31.
Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit, 751
Compare Badiou, Being and Event, 524–25.
The Concept of “Zhen” 真
Møller, Filosofiske Essays og Strøtanker, 156. Poul Martin Møller (1794–1838) was Kierkegaard’s friend and mentor, and a professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen during the crucial years when Kierkegaard was a student there. Though a major figure in Danish literature, to my knowledge none of his philosophical essays and aphorisms have been translated into other languages—let alone his revered poems and short stories.
Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, 44. See chapter 1.
On Kierkegaard’s early epiphany concerning the relationship between “philosophy and reality” (inspired by Schelling’s second lecture in Berlin on November 22, 1841), see his Notesbog 8, p. 33, and Notesbog 11, pp. 2–3. In Kierkegaard, Notesbøgerne 1–15, pp. 235 and pp. 305–7.
Zhuangzi 2. See chapter 1.
Lidai minghua ji 2.5a–b (on the “painter-saint” Wu Daozi 吳道子, c. 689–c. 758).
DZ 1227: Taishang zhuguo jiumin zongzhen biyao 8.1a. On bugang, see also chapter 4.
Andersen, “Practice of Bugang ,” 47–48.
See also Wang Yucheng, Quanzhen zongzu tu, 260.
Andersen, “Practice of Bugang ,” 40.
On the status of walking the guideline in Daoist ritual, see chapter 4.
See, for instance, DZ 1451: Zihuang liandu xuanke.
DZ 6: Shangqing dadongzhenjing 上清大洞眞經 6.13b–15b.
See Despeux, Taoïsme et corps humain, 50. The version of which the upper part is reproduced in figure 1 is from an appendix to Xi Yukang, Neiwai gong tushuo jiyao. It is there labeled Chart of the Nine-fold Transmutation of the Elixir (Dancheng jiuzhuan tu).
See, for instance, Andersen, Holding the Three Ones, 39.
The text is Dengzhen yinjue (DZ 421) (Secret Instructions for Ascending as a Realized Being), which includes the description of the Lighting of the Incense Burner in chapter 3.
Xuanke miaojue huiji 39. See also Lagerwey, Taoist Ritual, 121–23.
See Andersen, Holding the Three Ones, 47.
Foucault, Courage of Truth, 159.
Møller, Filosofiske Essays og Strøtanker, 165–69.
Møller, 169; and Acts 17: 28.
See Jullien, Un sage est sans idée.
On classical Western ontology, see, for instance, the discussion of Parmenides and his basic tenet that “being is one” in Badiou, Being and Event, 23–30. On ritual in the “subjunctive mode,” see Seligman et al., Ritual and Its Consequences.
Cf. Billeter, Contre Francois Jullien, 52–59.
On the notion of “the real” as an impasse in the symbolic system, see Hallward, Badiou, 13–14.
Because of the ultimately temporal nature of the latter type of “immortals,” scholars today often follow the convention of translating the term xian as “transcendents.” See Bokenkamp, “Declarations of the Perfected,” 167. I generally avoid this choice, since it runs the risk of obfuscating the even more obvious quality of transcendence in the “true beings,” zhenren.
See Bokenkamp, “Declarations of the Perfected,” 168–69.
DZ 1205: Santian neijie jing 1.2b. An overriding notion of “the breath of the Way” (daoqi 道氣) is also used in this text, but primarily in the sense of “civilizing influence” or “teaching” of the Way, and only secondarily as a kind of subtle, life-giving breath.
DZ 421: Dengzhen yinjue 3.7a.
DZ 1205: Santian neijie jing 2.3a.
See also DZ 732: Chongxu zhide zhenjing sijie, compiled in 1189.
DZ 668: Chongxu zhide zhenjing 1.1b–2a.
DZ 1220: Daofa huiyuan 67.1a.
See Ivanhoe, “Senses and Values of Oneness,” 233–34. Ivanhoe attributes this notion of an all-embracing, inchoate qi that gives substance to everything to “early texts such as the Yijing 易經. “He continues with an overview of various different notions of “oneness” in Chinese culture, with a special focus on neo-Confucian metaphysics and ethics, and includes a discussion of Daoist metaphysics with its starting point in the state of “nothingness.” Contrary to the findings of this book, however, Ivanhoe appears to view this primordial nothingness as simply a different form of oneness, not a distinct fundamental level of the real. He avoids all mention of the Way, Dao, and declares that, according to Daoism, “everything arose from primordial nothing and is unified by this common origin” (my emphasis).
The notion that the Great Indeterminateness is unnamable might seem to be contradicted by the assignment of this very term, “Taiyi.” However, as in the case of Dao, “Way,” the term “Taiyi” clearly is conceived as a proper name, and the quality of having no name (wuming 無名) refers to the lack of a common name (mingg).
DZ 1220: Daofa huiyuan 67.1a–b.
Guodian Chumu zhujian, 13–14 and 125.
Compare the lines in the above quotation from the Liezi, which state that the “beginning of the transformation of forms” is initiated by a sequence of the numbers 1, 7, and, 9, concluded by a return to the One.
On this liturgy, see chapter 4.
See Schipper, Le Fen-teng.
See Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 373–438.
DZ 1: Lingbao wuliang duren shangpin miaojing 1.6a.
Andersen, “Scriptural Traditions West and East,” 26–28.
The fundamental difference consists in either taking the term zhen to refer to an immortal who has perfected him- or herself to reach the rank of a “Perfected,” as does
We may see in this a parallel to the epistemology of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), according to which the thing in itself (das Ding an sich) remains forever unknown, whereas the experience of things depends on the unification of appearances in our understanding. The same applies to our experience of ourselves as subjects, the “true reality” of which is likewise unknown to ourselves. See Kant, Prolegomena, 72, 88, and 90–92. See also chapter 5 of this book, “Unity and Identity.”
Laozi Daode jing, 5.
See Wagner, Chinese Reading of the “Daode jing ,” 137.
For Lai Longfei, see chapter I on my main informants in southern Taiwan.
Cf. DZ 1156: Chongyang zhenren jinguan yusuo jue by Wang Zhe (1113–1170); and DZ 91: Taishang dongxuan lingbao wuliang duren shangpin miaojing zhujie (pref. 1336).
See also the expression lianjia chengzhen 辣假成眞 (to cultivate/refine the false and accomplish the real) used by Wang Zhe in DZ 1156: Chongyang zhenren jinguan yusuo jue 3.
The term “subtractive” points to a crucial aspect of Badiou’s discourse on ontology, but I have used it in this book also more broadly with reference to a quality of “the Daoist way of life” (see chapter 1). The term is explained as follows in Peter Hallward’s important introduction to Badiou’s philosophy: “This is what Badiou means when he calls his a ‘subtractive’ ontology: what can be said of being as be-ing can be said only insofar as being is held to be inaccessible to the categories of presence, perception, intuition, or experience. Being can be articulated only insofar as we can assume, very literally, that nothing is all we can say about the substance of being” (Hallward, Badiou, 65).
I have followed the translations in Graham, Chuang-tzu, 251–52; Graham, Disputers of the Tao, 57; and Roetz, “Validity in Chou Thought,” 90, except for in the translation of the term zhen. I render this term as “true and real” or “true reality,” whereas Graham and Roetz both translate it as “genuine.”
One might reasonably ask, therefore, why both Hansen (“Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy”) and Harbsmeier (“Marginalia Sino-logica”) maintain that this use of the term zhen does not refer to a “hypostatized” entity. In contrast, Roetz (“Validity in Chou Thought”) certainly seems to think that it does.
Ames and Hall, Daodejing, 115.
Ames and Hall, 210.
Ames and Hall, 211.
Ames and Hall, 15 and 57–58.
Badiou, Being and Event, 55 and 59.
The term xin is clearly the counterpart of the Indo-European root *drew, which meant something like “to stand firm.” It seems highly significant that, just like the Danish word tro, this Chinese word is likewise extended to mean “to believe”—not the least in religious contexts and with reference to, for instance, the “good believers,” shanxin 善信.
Graham, Chuang-tzu, 94.
DZ 745: Nanhua zhenjing zhushu 2.22b. See the translation of the full passage in which this sentence occurs in chapter 2.
Graham, Chuang-tzu, 84.
Rao Zongyi, Laozi Xiang’er zhu jiaojian, 58–60.
See Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 29–37.
While here clearly referring to sexual practices, the term red and white, danbai 丹白, is used in medical literature with reference to a kind of fine grain that one may eat to “make the true and real breath complete” (quan zhenqi 全眞氣).
DZ 1016: Zhen’gao 6.14a–b. This passage (minus the last sentences about the true and real being false, zhenjia 眞假) is included in the Tang dynasty compilation of medical recipes and prescriptions for self-cultivation, Zhenzhong ji 枕中己, at the end of the section on avoidances. The topic of the passage is defined there by the alternative reading of the opening phrase: “As for practicing the true and real” (fu xizhen zhe 夫習眞者). See DZ 837: Zhenzhong ji 7b.
See The Enneads 5, Second tractate; Plotinus, The Enneads, 290–92.
Following Graham, Chuang-tzu, 48.
DZ 743: Nanhua zhenjing xinzhuan 2.1b. Note that Graham accepts this interpretation in his comments on the translation of the Zhuangzi anecdote.
DZ 1016: Zhen’gao, the passage preceding the one by Lord Pei translated above.
DZ 405: Shangqing zijin jun huangchu ziling daojun dongfang shangjing 3b.
Note that though Hall and Ames obviously concede that this factual sense of truth is relevant to the Chinese, at the same time they treat this sense of truth as banal and proceed to concern themselves instead with the question of the absence of a Chinese “theory of truth.” Hall and Ames, Thinking from the Han, 106 (italics added).
See Rao Zongyi, Laozi Xiang’er zhu jiaojian, 24.
Xian’er zhu. In ZHDZ 9.175–76.
DZ 1101: Taiping jing 108.2b.
DZ 1101: Taiping jing 41.4b. Following the translation in Hendrischke, The Scripture on Great Peace, 199–200.
DZ 1101: Taipingjing 554a.
See Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 373–80.
See Andersen, “Scriptural Traditions West and East,” 14–17.
DZ 1: Lingbao wuliang duren shangpin miaojing 1.6a. The Duren jing has been translated in full by Stephen Bokenkamp, who characterizes it as “without a doubt, the most influential and widely known of the original Lingbao corpus of scriptures” (Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 373). During the early Tang period, it “was taken as one of the three scriptures to be studied by Daoists for the official exam leading to Daoist investiture” (Bokenkamp, 373). It should be added that during the Song period, which saw the emergence of the Lingbao dafa, the Great Method of the Numinous Treasure (the ancestor of the present-day classical Daoist liturgy practiced in Taiwan and in many other parts of China), this tradition’s methods were to a large extent transmitted in the form of comprehensive ritual compendia in which the descriptions of the methods were attached as commentaries on the Duren jing (see John Lagerwey’s expert accounts of the main texts of the Lingbao dafa included in DZTK 1010–38). The importance of the
Note that primordial chaos (consisting of yuanqi) is often said to have the shape of a chicken’s egg. The use of a chicken’s blood might conceivably have its origin in this.
Robinet, Taoism, 125.
See Andersen, “The Practice of Bugang.”
DZ 1316: Dongzhen shangqing taiwei dijun bu tiangang fei diji jinjianyuzi shangjing 28b–29a.
Robinet, Taoism, 126.
See Schipper, “Gogaku shinkei.”
DZ 1185: Baopu zi neipian 17.3a.
Luther, Large Catechism, 432.
Chauvet, Sacraments, 100–101.
The term “Brahma-breath” (fanqi) is used primarily in the Lingbao scriptures, where it refers to the primordial creative breath that pervades everything and establishes the fundamental patterns of the universe. See, for instance, the commentaries on the Duren jing in DZ 87: Yuanshi wuliang duren shangpin miaojing sizhu 3.8a-9a, where the fanqi is identified with the “primordial breath” (yuanqi 元氣) that deploys the “primordial guideline” (yuangang 元網) through all the heavens. (On this guideline, see chapter 4.) The term “ancestral breath” (zuqi) designates the same primordial substance in the texts of inner alchemy, and in the forms of ritual that incorporate elements of inner alchemy. See, for instance, DZ 141 Ziyang zhenren Wuzhen pian zhushu 5.3a, where the zuqi is said to be the ineffable and unknowable “ancestral breath of Yuanshi tianzun” (yuanshi zhi zuqi 元始之祖氣) active in the alchemist’s cauldron.
DZ 770: Hunyuan shengji 2.9b–10b.
Chauvet, Sacraments, 101.
MS 109, pp. 89–90, quoted here from Rhees, “Wittgenstein on Language and Ritual,” 74. Rhees continues by explaining that by “the causal theory,” Wittgenstein means “‘the causal theory of meaning’ which we find, for instance, in The Meaning of Meaning by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards (London, 1923) and in many writings of Bertrand Russell.”
See Rhees, 73.
See Chavannes, Le jets des dragons, 172–74.
Maspero, Le Tao Isme, 388. Note that the last sentence, 得補上仙, means, rather, that “he succeeds in filling the office of a Supreme Immortal.”
Schipper, L’empereur Wou des Han, 72.
Møller, Filosofiske Essays og Strøtanker, 138–39.
In modern times, the title “Zhenren” sometimes appears to be reserved for the first Celestial Master, Zhang Daoling, and for subsequent Celestial Masters up to the present day. On priestly titles, see chapter 6.
I shall further develop these fundamental issues of ontology and identity in chapter 5.
4. Liturgical Symbols and Images
Rousseau, Les Confessions, 183–84; following Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 97–98, for the quotation translated there.
Badiou, Ethics, 12
Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 45–50
Badiou, 49. In this regard, Badiou is not far removed from Kant’s philosophy of the “transcendental subject,” which functions as the fundamental guarantor of the unity of all experience, but whose being as it is in itself remains forever unknown and cannot be experienced as an “absolute subject.” See Kant, Prolegomena, 87–92. On the unity of experience, see also chapter 5 of this book.
Note that Badiou’s “immortality” is likewise conceived as something that occurs unpredictably. See Badiou, Ethics, 12; and Logics of Worlds, 86.
Van der Leeuw, Phänomenologie der Religion, 769.
See Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood, 17.
See, for instance, Schipper, Taoist Body; Lagerwey, Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History; Dean, Taoist Ritual and Popular Cults of Southeast China. For a seminal work in Japanese, see Ofuchi Ninji 大淵忍爾, Chūgokujin no shükyö girei. See also my article on jiao in Pregadio, Encyclopedia of Taoism, 539–44. My special expertise within this field of study are the practices of bugang (walking along the guideline), bianshen (the transformation of the body/self [or spirit]), and fuzhang (submitting the petition, through an inner journey to heaven)—all of which will also take center stage in the discussions of Daoist ritual in this book.
Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 385–86. See Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 1–9, 22, 176–80. For an account of Daoist ritual based on Deleuze’s concept of the event, see Dean, Lord of the Three in One. I have offered a critique of Dean’s approach in Andersen, “Concepts of Meaning,” where I state that “according to Dean, the true agents of ritual performances are not ‘individual subjects’ in any conventional understanding of this term, but rather the ‘collective subjectivities’ of a more temporal nature that proliferate during ritual-events, and ultimately ‘the self-organizing forces of existence’ themselves …. In other words, when it comes to the question of the subjects of ritual, we should look, not for people (in any ordinary sense of this term), but … for more or less abstract, extra-personal entities, that nonetheless are capable of experiencing ritual as well as for
Badiou, Being and Event, 25.
Badiou, Court traité d’ontologie transitoire, 164 (emphasis added).
Badiou, Being and Event, Meditations 16, 17, and 31. Cf. Daode jing, chapter 25, and Taiyi shengshui as cited in chapter 3 of this book.
Badiou, “Thinking the Event,” 26
Cf. the notion that “ritual refers to nothing but itself” introduced into Daoist studies by Kristofer Schipper. See Schipper, “Outline of Taoist Ritual,” 121, and Blondeau and Schipper, Essais sur le rituel, 1: XII, Staal, “Meaninglessness of Ritual,” and Andersen, “Concepts of Meaning,” 162n22. Contrary to the claims by Schipper and Staal, the self-referential quality of ritual of course does not render ritual meaningless.
Andersen, “Practice of Bugang ,” 47–48.
Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, 30–31. Cf. the translation by Hong and Hong in Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1: 23–24
See Marion, God without Being, 167–82. On Christian temporality, see also Belting, Likeness and Presence, 172–83
On the term nieshi, see Andersen, “Practice of Bugang ,” 26–27. The manual is the famous Huangshu guodu yi 黄書過度儀 (Initiation Ritual of the Yellow Book), which describes a sexual initiation ritual transmitted within the Zhengyi tradition since its inception in the second century CE. The text has figured prominently within Daoist studies over the last forty years. For recent English language contributions, see Raz, “Way of the Yellow and the Red,” and Kleeman, “Performance and Significance.”
Daozang biyao 44a–b.
DZ 770: Hunyuan shengji 2.29a.
Andersen, “Practice of Bugang ,” 16.
See Andersen, 47.
The Santian neijie jing modifies this account by adding, “in fact, there was no mother Li” but only “his own empty body, which transformed itself into the shape of Mother Li.” DZ 1205: Santian neijie jing 1.3b–4a.
See Li Ling, Zhongguo fangshu kao, 77–79.
See Andersen, Demon Chained, 54–66.
Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, 89.
Ray, Approach to Indian Art, 201. Cf. Williams and Boyd, Ritual Art and Knowledge, 6.
See, for instance, DZ 1205: Santian neijie jing 2.1b.
The term “straw dogs” may refer either to substitute animals used in sacrifice or to scapegoats used in exorcistic rituals. According to chapter 14 of the Zhuangzi, straw dogs were treated with the greatest deference before they were used as offerings, only to be discarded and trampled on as soon as they had served their purpose. See Lau, Tao Te Ching, 9.
Laozi Daode jing, 5.
DZ 3: Yuanshi shuo xiantian daode jingzhujie. See the article on this text by Ursula-Angelika Cedzich in DZTK 706–7.
DZ 3: Yuanshi shuo xiantian daode jing zhujie 1.5a.
Marion, God without Being, 176.
Marion, 176–80. The quotation at the end is from Saint Bonaventure, Brevilo-quium, and is shown to echo a text by Saint Augustine.
See Jungmann, Mass, 442.
Cf. Jungmann, Mass, 175–95, “Meaning of the Mass: The Mass and the Church.” In contemporary Catholic liturgical theology, the Eucharist is constituted both as a re-enactment of Christ’s self-sacrifice and as a “sacrifice of the Church” (the community of the faithful), through which the faithful offer a gift of homage to God and seek to initiate a new life in Christ’s image—and thus on an elevated level of being. The Catholic liturgy since Vatican II stipulates that the sacrifice of the Church is to be understood to depend on “an internal giving of oneself to God” on the part of the participants, signifying “what the soul intends” in the symbols and signs of the ritual (Jungmann, 188–89). This specific social dimension of the symbolism is not found in the contemporary Daoist liturgy of the Qingwei Lingbao tradition, which focuses on the planting of the five True Writs in the sacred area behind closed doors. While the participation of the people of the community—who have called for the performance of the liturgy in the first place—clearly represents an important component of the overall meaning of the event, it is highly unlikely that the common people of the community in question have any awareness of the use of the True Writs, let alone of any specific interpretations of the Writs.
See Schipper, “Vernacular and Classical Ritual,” and Davis, Society and the Supernatural.
. In historical Daoist texts, the term xingdao sanshi 行道三時 (to walk the Way three times) means to perform the Three Audiences.
See Andersen, “Practice of Bugang.” It should be noted that whereas the return to the beginning enacted in Daoist ritual is often achieved in a forward movement through the cycles of time, the patterns that achieve this goal alternatively may rely on a backward movement. See Schipper and Wang, “Progressive and Regressive Time-Cycles.”
DZ 99: Jiutian yingyuan leishengpuhua tianzun yushu baojing jizhu 1.16b.
See Marion, God without Being, 167–82.
Cf. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 139.
Campany, Strange Writing, 101–3.
Chunqiu and Zuozhuan are included together in Shisan jing zhushu, 2: 1697–2188.
In ancient Chinese texts, the words chi and mei are typically used as a compound, chimei 爐魅, referring to various mountain and forest monsters, whereas the wangliang 爐魅 are considered to be water demons, or sprites. See, for instance, Andersen, Demon Chained, 15 and 26.
Following the translation in Campany, Strange Writing (with one minor modification).
Lunheng 8, chapter 26: “Ruzeng pian”儒增篇 (Lunheng jijie, 172).
The fact that the images on the tripods portrayed demonic beings from the borderlands of the Central Kingdom is far from discrediting this idea. Typically, the guardians of the sacred area of Daoist ritual are precisely demons of this kind that have been subdued and made to “serve the law” (hufa 護法). As demonstrated by Kristofer Schipper (with reference to Marcel Granet), the special guardian mandated during the Great
See Gell, Art and Agency. The experience of images coming alive has been explored from a cognitive perspective in Freedberg, Power of Images; from the point of view of aesthetic theory, in Williams and Boyd, Ritual Art and Knowledge; and as represented in classical Chinese tales, in Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange.
On the issue of the “sparseness” or “discreteness” of liturgical symbols, see the excerpt from Chauvet, Sacraments, in chapter 3.
Kundera, “Art of Fiction,” 109–10. See Broch, Geist and Zeitgeist, 77–95.
DZ 1285: Yisheng baode zhuan. Cf. Davis, Society and the Supernatural, chapter 4, and Andersen, “Tianxin Zhengfa.”
DZ 1285: Yisheng baode zhuan 1.1b.
See, for instance, Kleeman, “Licentious Cults.”
See Goux, Symbolic Economies, chapter 8.
Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, 32–35
Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies, 2: 254–55.
I am grateful to James Robson for pointing out that this is what in Buddhism is referred to as “twilight language.” Personal communication, fall 2017.
See the section “Inwardness” in this chapter.
Saint Augustine, On Christian Teaching, book 1, pp. iv, section 8. See Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Teaching, p. 9.
Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, 41.
Compare Clement of Alexandria, Miscellanies, chapter 12, which is entitled “God Cannot Be Embraced in Words or by the Mind.”
Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, 209.
Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, 411–12, following the translation in Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, 209–10, with some modifications.
Schlegel, Die Kunstlehre, 81–82.
Novalis Werke, 426.
See Belting, Likeness and Presence, 173.
See Chauvet, Sacraments, 100–101.
See Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism.
See, for instance, the introduction in Sharf and Sharf’s Living Images.
Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 11, 18–20.
Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen, 4e.
See Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 51.
ZWDS 29, 135–43.
ZWDS 29, 142.
On the Tianxin and Lingbao dafa traditions, see chapter 6.
ZWDS 29, 142–43.
See, for instance, Kohn, Taoist Mystical Philosophy, 140–46.
Note that the same character, yuan 圓, is translated here first as “round,” then as “complete.” The playful use of homonyms (or the same word with different meanings) is a stylistic feature of the text—indeed, it is a fundamental key to the interpretation of
The later passage explicates this by stating, “To be square means to be impeded, it is a sign of disruption” (方者妨也, 不泰之). Note that throughout the text, the pattern “X Y也)” typically implies both “meaning” and “being.” Roundness means to be unimpeded, and that which is round is unimpeded. In the following I have mostly translated the pattern using the verb “to represent,” and occasionally the classical semiotic expression “to stand for.”
The sentence is parallel with the following four-character sentences, which all consist of a verb followed by the object pronoun, zhi 之, and a verbal complement initiated by yu 於. For reasons unclear to me, however, the space of the verb is left open in the first sentence, leaving only the phrase zhiyujun 之於君.
ZWDS 29, 142.
Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, 177–87. Cf. translation by Hong and Hong in Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1: 193–205.
Miscellanies, v, iv, pp. 233–34; see also Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, 193.
See Müller, Søren Kierkegaards kommunikationsteori.
Kierkegaard, Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift, 44. Cf. translation by Hong and Hong in Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1: 38.
Chauvet, Sacraments, 100–101.
See, for instance, “The Magical Power of Words,” in Tambiah, Culture, Thought, and Social Action. All traditional cultures appear to have taboos against revealing a person’s most intimate names to outsiders, because knowing these names would give the outsider power over the person. In China, this tradition is manifest in specific rules for acquiring new names through the life of an individual, from the personal names used during childhood, to the “style names” given to the young adult for the more formal and public persona, to the posthumous names that in principle replace all former names after death. A more explicit expression of the power of names is found in Daoist talismans that are often interpreted as the secret names of certain deities, that is, the names that are immediate representations of the true reality of the deity and therefore may serve to command the presence of the deity.
See chapter 3.
Robinet, Taoism, 122.
Andersen, “The Life of Images.”
See chapter 3.
See Little, Taoism and the Arts, 163–87.
See Sharf and Sharf, Living Images, 3.
See Strickmann, Mantras et mandarins, 165–211: “L’icône animée.”
Freedberg, Power of Images, 82–98.
See Williams and Boyd, Ritual Art and Knowledge, 15–35.
Freedberg, Power of Images; Belting, Likeness and Presence.
See, for instance, Eck, Darśan; Davis, Lives of Indian Images.
Belting, Likeness and Presence, 145–46.
Freedberg, Power of Images, 283–316: “Live Images: The Worth of Visions and Tales.”
Belting, Likeness and Presence, 172, 174, 183.
The expression “as a being” (weiwu 爲物) is from chapter 21 of the Daode jing, in which we are told that the Way is completely chaotic and inscrutable, and yet contains an essence that is very real (shenzhen).
Badiou, Being and Event, 66–69.
See the definition of the void in Badiou, Being and Event, 526: “Non-one of any count-as-one (except within the ontological situation), the void is that unplaceable point which shows that the that-which-presents wanders throughout the presentation in the form of a subtraction from the count” (my emphasis). The “ontological situation” is defined as the discourse on true being or “being-qua-being.”
5. Unity and Identity
Andersen, Demon Chained, 46.
It is true that local traditions concerning a certain deity may well include an abundance of tales about the efficacy of the god, including tales about miracles performed by the god—or indeed, by the statue of the god. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the status of such more or less random narratives and the status of the crucial narrative of Christianity. The latter narrative constitutes the foundation of the whole edifice of the religion, which depends entirely on the authenticity of the story about the passion of Christ. According to Kierkegaard, it is exactly the disparity between such a historical event and the eternal salvation of a person’s soul that constitutes the fundamental paradox of Christianity. See, especially, Kierkegaard, Philosophiske Smuler and Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift.
The tendency to see each of the high gods of a major, unified world religion as the one and only, primordial “creator god” or “highest ultimate reality” is noticeable especially in Hinduism. See, for instance, Doniger, “Hinduism,” 245–48, on the relationship between Vishnu and Shiva in a variant of the myth of the origin of the linga: “In some versions of the variant, each of this pair says to the other, ‘You were born from me,’ and both of them are right. Each god sees all the worlds and their inhabitants (including both himself and the other god) inside the belly of the other god. Each claims to be the creator of the universe, yet each contains the other creator.”
See Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 283–90, on the opening sentence of the Shema as an example of “ultimate sacred postulates,” which are characterized by being both unquestionable and, in terms of formal information theory, devoid of information.
See Leibniz, Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence, 120–23.
Kant, Prolegomena, 88–92. See also Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 231–32.
Badiou, Court traité d’ontologie, 153–64.
Badiou, 160.
See chapter 3.
DZ 1168: Taishang laojun zhongjing, chapter 37 (“the Way is I”); quoted in DZ 132: Taiqing zhenren luoming jue 2a (“the I is the Way”). See also Schipper, “The Inner World of the Lao-tzu chung-ching.” Note that in the title of the Daozang version of the Laozi zhongjing, the name “Laozi” is replaced by “Taishang laojun.”
See, for instance, Andersen, “Practice of Bugang.”
Compare Isabelle Robinet, in Pregadio, Encyclopedia of Taoism, 974: “From the point of view of the phenomenal world, ti is the noumenal world (Xiantian) and permanence or emptiness; yong is the phenomenal world (Houtian) and change or fullness (shi 實, in the sense of ‘reality’).”
See also Wang Bi’s commentary on Daode jing, chapters 11 and 25.
Mollier, Buddhism and Taoism, 174–208. Note that in Lagerwey, China, 191, the chapter title is misquoted as “Guanyin in a Daoist Disguise” (emphasis added).
See also Verellen, “Evidential Miracles,” 234–35.
The earliest hagiography of Taiyi is DZ 351: Taiyi jiuku hushen miaojing, which dates from the Tang dynasty. It is noteworthy that in this text the god is referred to not only as Taiyi jiuku tianzun but also quite frequently simply as Taiyi. The worship of Taiyi jiuku tianzun is introduced in this text by the highest-ranking Daoist deity, Yuan-shi tianzun, who teaches Taishang laojun and other immortals to recite the name of the god. As a result, a lad (重子) appears and declares that Taiyi is his master (太一爲我師). The lad takes the shape of an imperial lord (帝君), and subsequently is transformed into Taiyi jiuku tianzun—with the precise features that characterize the god’s iconography in Daoist ritual scrolls. These features include the nine-headed lion on which the god is riding, in Buddhist iconography typically associated with the bodhisattva Wenshu (Manjusri). See plate 3.
DZTK 637, 1082, 1092, 1098.
Note also that the outer, yong, part of the sacred area here as practically everywhere houses the members of the Thunder Department, Leibu, under the command of Puhua tianzun, though not showing him with the appearance of the military commander that constitutes the yong version of the god.
See Qiu Kunliang, “Mu-lien ‘Operas,’” 105–6, and Ebert, Kaulbach, and Kraatz, Religiöse Malerei, 23, 56–57, 64–66, 68–69, and 91. The diagram in the first of these sources has reversed the placement of the two bodhisattvas, but the fact that Samantabhadra should be in the west and Manjusri in the east is amply demonstrated by both the visual materials and the extended discussion in the latter source. Note also the opposite placement of Puhua and Jiuku in the east and the west, respectively, reported in the survey of Daoist temples in China in Hachiya, Chūgoku no dōkyō, 21 and 561.
Collection of Li Yuanguo. For an interpretation of the phoenix, see Li Yuanguo, “Guanyu daojiao Shenzhen tu de kaobian,” 16–18.
Seidel, La divinisation de Lao Tseu.
See Seidel, 44 and 59, referring to DZ 1168: Taishang laojun zhongjing 下.1band 8b.
Seidel, La divinisation de Lao Tseu.
DZ 1168: Taishang laojun zhongjing, chapters 12, 19, and 37.
DZ 1168: Taishang laojun zhongjing, chapter 17.
DZ 719: Daode zhenjing shuyi 4.7a.
DZ 725: Daode zhenjing guangsheng yi 5.1a.
DZ 682: Daode zhenjing zhu 1.7b.
The text of the Xiang’er commentary was published in Rao Zongyi, Laozi Xiang’er zhu. See the translation of the commentary in Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 78–148.
See Bokenkamp, 89.
See ZHDZ 9.171.
DZ 725: Daode zhenjing guangsheng yi 33.2b; DZ 682: Daode zhenjing zhu 3.2b.
DZ 693: Daode zhenjing zhigui 7.9a.
DZ 704: Daode zhenjing zhu 1.9a–b.
DZ 725: Daode zhenjing guangsheng yi 2.21b–22a. See Seidel, La divinisation, 115–16. The term “Taiyi yuanjun” occurs already in the Baopuzi neipian (c. 320 CE), where it seems to refer to two female deities, Taiyi and Yuanjun, who were the teachers of the Yellow Emperor, Huangdi, and Laozi, respectively. See DZ 1185: Baopuzi neipian 13.4a. According to Du Guangting, the single deity existed in heaven as the Jade Woman of the Mysterious Wonder (Xuanmiao yunü) before descending to earth as Taiyi yuanjun and becoming the mother and teacher of Laozi.
DZ 1205: Santian neijie jing 1.3b–4a. Note that in the early second-century BCE image of Taiyi, excavated in a grave in Mawangdui, it is the earth altar, she, that appears in the left armpit of the god. See plate 1.
DZ 171: Qingwei xianpu 11b–12a.
See, for instance, DZ 1220: Daofa huiyuan 97.9a–10a.
For an overview of methods of rainmaking in Late Imperial China, see Snyder-Reinke, Dry Spells.
Taiyi Yuebo mifa. ZWDS 29.57.
See Kalinowski, Cosmologie et divination, 378–82. On the movement of Taiyi, see also Andersen, “Practice of Bugang ,” 29–35.
See Li Ling, Zhongguo fangshu xukao, 216–18 and 230–36.
Cf. Kalinowski, Cosmologie et divination, 382.
The astronomical reference of the term ru 乳 (“to breast-feed; milk”) is not entirely clear to me, but I assume that it has to do with the appearance of Lunar Comet being shrouded or clear-cut. Cf. the term “Milky Way” in Western astronomy.
ZWDS 29.58.
See, for instance, DZ 223: Qingweiyuanjiang dafa 22.8a–9a.
See La Voie du Tao, 116–17.
DZ 1313 :Dongzhen gaoshang yudi dadong ciyi yujian wulao baojing 37b.
DZ 1313 :Dongzhen gaoshang yudi dadong ciyi yujian wulao baojing 38a–b.
DZ 1032: Yunji qiqian 23.12b–13b.
See Andersen, “Talking to the Gods,” and Raz, “Time Manipulation,” on the Eight Archivists (Bashi 八史), who clearly are related to the Emissaries.
DZ 1184: Huainan honglie jie 13.10a. See Andersen, “Practice of Bugang ,” 23–29.
Xiao Dengfu, Daojiao diyu jiaozhu, 4 and 57–58.
On this novel, see Meulenbeld, Demonic Warfare.
Grootaers, Sanctuaries, 87.
Grootaers, “Rural Temples,” 61.
Grootaers, Sanctuaries, 203.
Grootaers, Sanctuaries, 147 and plate 62. See also Grootaers, “Temples and History,” 251, where he adds, “His body is covered with an elaborately decorated armor, his feet are bare.”
See, for instance, Little, Taoism, 291–311.
For the relation of the novel to Daoist ritual, see Meulenbeld, Demonic Warfare.
Werblowsky, Dieux de Chine, 81; Doré, Researches, figure 207; Hachiya, Chūgoku no dōkyō, 2:380 (see diagram in 1:561).
DZ 1382: Shangqing jiudan shanghua taijing zhongji jing, dated to the Eastern Jin (317–420). See Robinet, Taoist Meditation, 139–43.
Robinet, 141.
It may be added that the whole cosmology of the early Shenxiao tradition that was introduced at court in the beginning of the twelfth century, with its group of Nine Monarchs and its focus on notions of the Nine Heavens, depended heavily on the formulation of these ideas within the Lingbao tradition as transmitted in the early Song. See also the account of the vast administration surrounding the Divine King Flying to Heaven (Feitian shenwang 飛天神王), who is described as overseeing the universe in a way quite similar to Puhua tianzun. See DZ 397: Dongxuan lingbao ziran jiutian shengshen y uzha ng ji ng jie 2.3a–4b.
It should be noted that although the distinction between the two forms, and two iconographies, of the god—in terms of the complementary concepts ti and yong —are clearly indicated in the texts (along with the division of the Yushu jing into a ti and a yong part, which is explicitly mentioned), the nomenclature of the “ti form” and “yong form” are my translations of expressions used, for example, by Huang Chengshu in his discussion of these iconographic forms, summing up the list of features pertaining to the first of these forms by saying, “this is (his) essence” (tiye 體也).
DZ 99: Yushu baojing jizhu 2.16a.
Compare the illustrations to the scripture shown in plate 6, in which also the Milky Way, referred to in the hymn as the god’s path through the universe, is represented.
The scroll was donated to the museum in 1945 by Sophus Black (1882–1960), a former branch manager of the Great Nordic Telegraph Company, who had been stationed in China from 1902 to 1931, mostly in Beijing, where he had acquired many pieces from local “curio dealers.” See Dansk Biografisk Leksikon. Neither Black himself, nor the experts at the museum, knew what the painting represented, and in the museum catalogue the subject was given simply as “Daoist gods and demons.” Sometime in the late 1980s, the museum curator for Asia asked for my opinion about this matter, and I was able to identify the totality of the figures in the painting. See the website of the Daoist Iconography Project (DIP), http://manoa.hawaii.edu/daoist-iconography, which includes
See, for instance, DZ 1220: Daofa huiyuan 61.1a–2a.
DZ 1253: Daofa xinchuan 27a–28a. Bai Yuchan (1194–1229) is normally listed as the Fifth Patriarch of the Southern School of inner alchemy, and he was a major promoter of both the Yushu jing and its main deity, Puhua tianzun. He was born in Hainan and grew up in Leizhou (the center of the above-mentioned cult of the Thunder King), and many have looked to Bai or one of his associates as the real author of the scripture. He appears to have had the scripture printed in ten copies and distributed among his elite friends in southern China, and he is the first and most important commentator in the four-commentary version of the Yushu jing published by Xu Daoling 徐道齡 in 1333. Bai’s commentary set the tone for a certain “spiritualized” interpretation of the scripture, adhered to also by Xu, and crucial to what has been called the “new Shenxiao” tradition. See Li Fengmao, Xu Xun yu Sa Shoujian, 185–206.
DZ 1253: Daofa xinchuan 27a–28a.
Badiou, Court traité transitoire, 164. Cf. Badiou, Being and Event, 23–24. Compare the story in the web version of the Daily Mail, October 18, 2015, about the British jihadist Abu Omar al-Britani, who took part in a suicide bombing that killed or wounded some eighty people. A photo shows him armed with the Quran, a grenade, and a handgun, and pointing his index finger to the sky “to show his oneness with God.” There is here no question of union with God, but of an imagined oneness with God’s will, which is used to justify subjective agency of the murderous kind.
The transformation taking place in this picture is thus from one aspect of the god to another.
See, for instance, DZ 1227: Taishang zhuguo jiumin zongzhen biyao, the earliest compilation of the methods of the Tianxin tradition (1116), chapter 8, which presents the section on practices in the hand under the heading Zhangmu jue 掌目铁 (“instructions on points in the palm of the hand”).
Andersen, “Practice of Bugang.”
Xuanke miaojue 28a.
See Kalinowski, “La literature divinatoire.”
Lüzu quanshu 28.14a–28b. On the Collected Works, see Yau Chi On and Yau Hok Wa, Shuzhai yu daochang, 220–21.
ZWDS 4:696. See also Shum Chun, “Qingdai mu huozi ben.”
Lüzu quanshu 28.26a.
Xuanmiao guan zhi 9.7b–8b.
Li Fengmao, Xu Xun yu Sa Shoujian.
See also Wan, “Building an Immortal Land.”
Liji jinyi jinshi 9.306; Lüshi chunqiu jishi 5.4b–7a. See Andersen, “Practice of Bugang ,” 29.
DZ 99: Yushu baojing jizhu 1.15b.
DZ 99: Yushu baojing jizhu 1.15a.
DZ 99: Yushu baojing jizhu 1.16b.
DZ 99: Yushu baojing jizhu 1.16a–b.
DZ 99: Yushu baojing jizhu 1.16b.
DZ 99: Yushu baojing jizhu 1.16b.
DZ 99: Yushu baojing jizhu 1.17b.
DZ 99: Yushu baojing jizhu 1.19a.
DZ 99: Yushu baojing jizhu 1.19b.
See, for instance, Tu Wei-ming, Centrality and Commonality.
See Zheng Zhiming, Mingdai Sanyi jiaozhu; Dean, Lord of the Three in One.
Shum Chun, “Qingdai mu huozi ben.”
Yushu jing yue, preface by the author (ZWDS 4:690).
Yushu jing yue 24.15b–19a, 22.10b–17a.
Lüzu quanshu 28.17b–18a.
DZ 745: Nanhua zhenjing zhushu 8.39a–b; 6.36b. I have relied on Graham, Chuang-tzu, p. 80, for this interpretation of the Zhuangzi.
See Andersen, “The Transformation of the Body.”
See, for instance, Mozina, “Quelling the Divine,” 101–43.
The image shows Chen Rongsheng as he impersonates Taiyi jiuku tianzun, who invites the lost souls who suffer in the underworld to come to the ritual of Universal Salvation to be fed and, it is hoped, saved.
Rixia jiuwen kao, 41.2b–4b; Wanli yehuo bian, j. 2:48–49; and Ming shilu, vol. 82, Shizongshilu 260.2a, p. 5189. See also Maggie Wan, “Ceramics in Context.”
A description of such a performance in 1624, during the reign of Emperor Xi-zong 喜宗, is quoted by Zhu Yizun from a commentary on a ci 詞 poem from the period (Rixiajiuwen kao, 41.2a). It refers to an “Offering for the aversion of calamity” (rangjiao 壤離) in response to a major flooding in the area of Wu. The emperor ordered the eunuchs of the Depot of Daoist Scriptures (Daojing chang 道經處) to instruct several tens of palace ladies in the performance of this ritual. They were dressed up like Daoist priests, and “a particularly beautiful one was selected to be adorned as a celestial god, who brandished a sword and ascended the altar to perform ritual” (選軀體豐碩者一人飾爲天祌仗劍登壇行法).
Rixia jiuwen kao, 41.2b–4b; Wanli yehuo bian, 2;48–49.
Lagerwey, China, 33.
See Strickmann, “Longest Taoist Scripture.”
DZ 1220: Daofa huiyuan 80.5a–b.
Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 45. (Emphases in the original.)
Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 22–23, as summarized in Timothy McDermott’s Concise Translation (Aquinas, Summa Theologie, 17).
Leibniz, Principes de la nature, 67–127.
See Andersen, Method of Holding the Three Ones.
Meyer, Leibniz, 120; Bobro, Self and Substance, 1.
Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 30. For the interpretation of Augustine, see Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, 40–59.
Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 16–17; Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, 41.
Alexandrakis, “Neoplatonic Influences,” 81.
Hubler, “The Role of Aesthetics,” 193.
Krulak, “The Animated Statue,” 190, quoting Hermeias (c. 410–c. 450).
Cf. Puett, To Become a God, 80–121.
Alexandrakis, Neoplatonism and Western Aesthetics, x.
Derrida, Archive Fever, 78.
Nancy, Ground of the Image, 25–26.
Nancy, 26. (Emphases added.)
Jullien, La grande image, 14 and 97.
Derrida, Work of Mourning, 139–64.
Derrida, 145.
Derrida, 149. (Emphases in the original.)
Derrida, 149.
Jullien, Grande image, 81–82, 94–95.
Badiou, “Jullien the Apostate,” 345–46. French version, Allouch et al., 149–50. (Emphases added.)
Derrida, Work of Mourning, 147.
Derrida, Work of Mourning, 153
See, for instance, Andersen, “Life of Images,” 537–40.
Derrida, Work of Mourning, 153 and 162.
Derrida, 162, directly quoting Marin.
See, for instance, Derrida, La voix.
See, especially, his essay “On Painting (and) Presence” in The Birth to Presence (1993), 341–67, and his book The Ground of the Image, published in French in 2003.
Nancy, Birth to Presence, 343.
Nancy, 347–48.
Nancy, 356. (Emphasis added in the last sentence.)
Nancy, Ground of the Image, 26–27.
Nancy, 17–18.
Badiou, Being and Event, 327, and “Thinking the Event,” 26. See chapter 1.
Nancy, Ground of the Image, 21 and 23. (Emphases in the original.)
See chapter 1.
Lacan, Écrits, 327. (Emphasis added.)
Jullien, La grande image, 82.
Derrida, Work of Mourning, 162, directly quoting Marin.
Nancy, Ground of the Image, 21.
6. Sincerity and Ascent to Heaven
DZ 99: Yushu baojing jizhu 1.19a.
See, for instance, Yushu jing yue, ZWDS 4: 698–99.
Zeng was particularly annoyed with the way in which Lai had conducted the first major ritual of the jiao, the Yutan fabiao 玉壇發表 (Announcement of the Jade Altar), performed in the morning of the first day of the program (or during the night before). It is a ritual that is very rich in esoteric elements, described in the secret manual of the high priest and added by him along with the more public performance of the
It should be mentioned that after my stay in Tainan, the Japanese scholar Maruyama Hiroshi 丸山宏 did fieldwork in Tainan, studying with Zeng Chunshou in particular, and that the publications and notes by this scholar obviously provide a more detailed account of Zeng’s tradition. See, for instance, Maruyama, “Historical Traditions.”
November 28, 1978, in a three-day jiao in the Zhen’an Temple in Maming shan, and February 17, 1987, in a five-day jiao in the Jintang Temple in Jiali.
See chapter 4.
See Badiou, Being and Event, Meditations 16, 17, and 31.
Lai Longfei, personal communication; cf. chapter 4.
DZ 99: Yushu baojing jizhu 1.17a–b. It must be remembered that “oneness with the Way” is not the same as identifying with the Way. We saw in chapter 5 that the early Daoist scripture Laozi zhongjing did, in fact, proclaim that “the I is the Way,” but no such claim is being made in the context of the practices described here.
DZ 1010: Xuanpin zhi men fu 1a
DZ 1010: Xuanpin zhi men fu 1b.
DZ 1010: 2a. Ziyang is Zhang Boduan 張伯端 (984?–1082), the author of the Wuzhenpian 悟眞篇 (Essay on Awakening to True Reality), who was later considered to be the first patriarch of the Southern School of inner alchemy.
Unnoticed by me, the batteries in my flashlight had run dry during the Noon and Evening Audiences, and thus, sadly, I do not possess pictures from these two events. On the meanings associated with the qilin, see below.
See chapter 5.
The equally breathtaking version of the fuzhang practiced by Chen Rongsheng is touched on in my articles “Transformation of the Body” and “Practice of Bugang.” The inner incantations and specific visualizations for this are prescribed in the Chen family secret manual, Longhu shan laozu zhengyi tianshi Zhang zhenren yujue 龍虎山老祖正乙天師張眞人玉铁 (Precious Instructions of Zhang the Perfected, Celestial Master of Orthodox Unity, Ancient Patriarch of Mt. Longhu), which I quote here from the version written in the hand of Chen Tinghong (1838–1908) and possessed by Chen Jinxi. The photograph reproduced in figure 12 was taken during the fuzhang in the Evening Audience in a five-day jiao in Jiali (see note 5), but the posture of Chen Rongsheng seen here was explained by him as that of the Noon Turtle (Wugui 午象).
Cf. Nickerson, “Attacking the Fortress.”
See Lingley, Excelling the Work of Heaven, 71–73, 100–101. The latter fact was alluded to in the interpretation of the symbolism of the qilin in the fuzhang of the Morning Audience offered to me by Zeng Chunshou.
See also the account of the two families in Ding Huang, “Tainan shiye daoshi.”
Cedzich, “Das Ritual der Himmelsmeister”; Nickerson, “Great Petition for Sepulchral Plaints.”
DZ 615: Chisong zi zhangli 2.23b–24b. See Lü Pengzhi, “Daoist Rituals.”
See, for instance, Andersen, “Practice of Bugang” and “Transformation of the Body,” and for shorter accounts, my articles on baibiao and bugang in Pregadio, Encyclopedia of Taoism.
See my articles on the Tianxin tradition and its texts in DZTK 1057–80.
See, for instance, “the deployment of the primordial guideline” (yuangang liuyan 元網流演) described in DZ 1221: Shangqing lingbao dafa 4.39b–49a, and the account of the liturgy in Cangnan, Zhejiang, in Lü Chuikuan and John Lagerwey, “Le taoïsme.” The complex bugang of the Song dynasty Lingbao dafa is still widely used today in northern Taiwan.
DZ 1221 and 1223: Shangqing lingbao dafa. See John Lagerwey in DZTK 1021–28.
DZ 1221: Shangqing lingbao dafa 4.46b.
DZ 1221: Shangqing lingbao dafa 4.49a.
DZ 1221: Shangqing lingbao dafa 4.40b–42a and 45a.
See chapters 3 and 5.
DZ 1221: Shangqing lingbao dafa 4.40a.
See Lü Chuikuan and John Lagerwey, Le taotsme. I am grateful to John Lagerwey for allowing me to copy his field notes and photographs from a three-day grand ceremony of Universal Salvation (Pudu 普度) in this place in August 1990. Apart from the focus on the salvation of lost souls, the Pudu of this region is similar in structure and function to the grand Offering (jiao) in southern Taiwan. Most important, for the present purpose, it included great audiences on the second and third days, as well as a Presentation of the Principal Memorial (Cheng dabiao 呈大表) on the third day, during all of which the submission of a petition with an inner journey to heaven was performed. The officiating high priest was Liang Huaying梁華莫, a sixteenth-generation Daoist whose ancestors originated from southern Fujian. His religious name found in all the documents for the ceremony was Liang Huanzhang梁焕章, and his title was Taishang zhengyi mengwei jinglu jiutian jinque zhongshun daifu qingwei buzheng shi 太上正一盟威經錄九天金闕中順大夫清微布政使.
DZ 466: Lingbao lingjiao jidu jinshu. See John Lagerwey’s account in DZTK 1033–36. Cf. Meulenbeld, Demonic Warfare, 161–66.
The versions found in the Chisongzi zhangli and in the texts of the Tianxin tradition talk about the priest returning through the universe in joyful leaps and bounds.
See Andersen, “Scriptural Traditions,” 25–30. For a fuller description of the ritual context of the fuzhang, see Andersen, “Transformation of the Body.”
I have relied here on the “Four Commentaries” version, DZ 87: Yuanshi wuliang duren shangpin miaojing sizhu, compiled by Chen Jingyuan 陳景元 in 1067 and translated in Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 405–38. For the following passage, see DZ 87: Yuanshi wuliang duren shangpin miaojing sizhu 3.17a–21b, and Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 423. The translation follows Bokenkamp, except that I render qi 系/氣 as “breaths,” whereas Bokenkamp prefers “pneumas.”
Xuanke miaojue huiji (no pagination).
Xuanke miaojue huiji and Daozang biyao (frontispiece).
See Tu Wei-Ming, Centrality and Commonality.
On the female founder and the early matriarchs of the Qingwei tradition, see chapter 5.
DZ 1220: Daofa huiyuan 4.7a–b.
DZ 1220: Daofa huiyuan 4.8b.
DZ 1220: Daofa huiyuan 4.9a.
DZ 171: Qingwei xianpu 5b, 8a. That the Qingwei tradition was established as a synthesis of the most prestigious early traditions of Daoism is acknowledged explicitly in the texts of the tradition.
DZ 171: Qingwei xianpu 1a.
DZ 1220: Daofa huiyuan 1.1b–2a.
DZ 1220: Daofa huiyuan 1.2b and 6a. For the term shushu, see Kalinowski, “La literature.”
See, for instance, DZ 1307: Haiqiong Bai zhenren yulu 1.8a and 15a. As mentioned above, Bai Yuchan (1194–1229) was a key figure in the new Shenxiao tradition, which emphasized a spiritualized interpretation of the Yushu jing similar to the approach of the subsequent Qingwei tradition.
Seligman et al., Ritual and Its Consequences.
Seligman et al., 20, 25. As should be clear by now, the alternative model relied on in this book is one that views ritual as a language that speaks to what is truly real.
Seligman et al., 108. That it is neither “of this world,” nor entirely disengaged from it, is of course the premise of any kind of religious experience. As we have seen, it is also a paradoxical characteristic of the “truth event” described by Badiou. See chapter 4.
Seligman et al., Ritual and Its Consequences, 112–13. We saw in chapter 2 that, quite the contrary, the notion of sincerity and faith in Kierkegaard’s Christianity is predicated precisely on the understanding that there cannot be any objective certainty of God’s existence.
See, for instance, DZ 90: Yuanshi wuliang duren shangpin miaojing sizhu 2.20a.
Snyder-Reinke, Dry Spells, 68–81.
Badiou, Being and Event, 522.
The above information is derived from the colophon of the manual, according to which Wu Yudian was from Agong dian 阿公店 in Gaoxiong County in southern Taiwan. See also Xie Conghui, “Zhengyi jinglu chutan,” 149–52.
See plate 4, in which Zhang tianjun is seen at the center left rushing forward ahead of Puhua tianzun while looking back at Xin tianjun, who follows behind holding his thunder brush (leibi 雷筆) and the records of the department.
See chapter 5.
See plate 5. The Four Great Celestial Lords are found in this scroll on the left side of the painting, with Deng tianjun, Xin tianjun, and Tao tianjun clustered in the upper left side of the painting in front of Puhua tianzun and Zhang tianjun charging ahead in the bottom left corner.
Saso, Teachings, 58.
The title of this manual is Lingbao zhizhen rangdu za wenshu 靈寶至眞讓度雜文書.
An important example is the section with the ranks and titles of Daoist priests found in the Tianhuang zhidao taiqingyuce 天皇至道太清玉册 (Jade Volumes of Great Purity of the Perfect Way of the Celestial Sovereign) by Zhu Quan 朱權 (a younger brother of the Yongle emperor, who reigned 1403–1424). (DZ 1483: Taiqing yuce 2.13b–25b.) See Richard G. Wang, The Ming Prince and Daoism. For a comprehensive overview of early ordination manuals, see Goossaert, “Jindai Zhongguo de tianshi.”
Included in Chen Rongsheng’s collection as copied from the manual of the Celestial Master in the 1960s.
See Saso, Teachings, 197. My informants for the suggestion that titles are chosen by divination include the above-mentioned Zheng Chuntai, who received his secret manual from a disciple of Lin Rumei of Xinzhu, and who at the age of twenty-three was ordained in the said way.
See Schipper, Taoist Body, 60–71; Kleeman, Celestial Masters, 274–303.
Qingwei lingbao shenxiao buzhi yuge daquan 51a.
See Kleeman, Celestial Masters, 274–303.
DZ 1208: Zhengyi mengwei lu 1.13a–15b.
DZ 1015: Jinsuo liuzhuyin 8.4b.
The use of the terms neilu and wailu is far from consistent in Daoist texts, and it would appear that wailu is more appropriate for the registers that consist of former human beings. As demonstrated by John Lagerwey, it hardly makes sense to account for the “system” of registers without considering that they are not only subject to much local variation and historical change but are also transmitted in texts by authors who do not necessarily understand the structure of the earlier registers on which they draw. See Lagerwey, “Zhengyi Registers,” 79–81.
See Kleeman, Celestial Masters, 274–75.
See Xie Conghui, “Zhengyi jinglu chutan,” 147. The scarcity of preserved certificates of this kind clearly also results from the fact that they normally are kept hidden from others during the lifetime of an ordained priest and burned at his funeral.
See Schipper, Taoist Body, 60–71.
Qingwei lingbao shenxiao buzhi yuge daquan 50a–51a.
Lagerwey, “Zhengyi Registers.”
Lagerwey, 79.
See chapters 3 and 4.
Lagerwey, “Zhengyi Registers,” 81. (Emphasis added.)
Lagerwey, 79. It should be noted that Terry Kleeman considers this system of summoning spirits to be “a rather late development in Daoism.” See Kleeman, Celestial Masters, 295.
See Andersen, “Transformation of the Body.”
As argued by Ned Davis, the category of ritual master (fashi) designates a new kind of religious professional that appeared during the Song, which represents a mediation between classical Daoist liturgies and the traditions of spirit mediums. See Davis, Society and the Supernatural.
See chapter 5.
See Goodman, Languages of Art.
See, for instance, DZ 1220: Daofa huiyuan 80.1a–b and 215.1a ff; cf. DZ 1166: Fahai yizhu.
For the murals of the Yongle gong, see Katz, Images of the Immortal, and Gester-kamp, The Heavenly Court.
Andersen, “Life of Images,” 544, following the argument in Katz, Images of the Immortal, 134.
See Andersen, “Painter-Sage.”
For my arguments against the contrary position of Paul Katz, see Andersen, “Life of Images.”
DZ 1413: Beidi fumo jing fa 11a–b.
See the History of Korean Daoism, written by Lee Nung-hwa 李能和 (1868–1945) in classical Chinese: Lee Nung-hwa, Joseon dogyo sa.
Ku Chung-hoe, Okchugyeong yeongu, 66–73.
For the early period, see especially Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures, 100–101, 144–45, and Schipper, “The True Form.”
See my entries on both the mentioned traditions in DZTK 1057–81 and 1189–92.
DZ 223: Qingwei yuanjiang dafa 25.7a. (My emphasis added for “as if.”)
. DZ 223: Qingwei yuanjiang dafa 25.4a and 6a.
DZ 1220: Daofa huiyuan 1.7a–b.
DZ 222: Qingwei shenlie bifa 1.2a–b.
DZ 1129: Daojiao yishu, pref. 3a, quoting the now lost Tang dynasty text, Duren benji jing 度人本際經.
DZ 666: Xisheng jing 3.21–22a.
See chapter 3.
DZ 666: Xisheng jing 3.21b
DZ 1125: Fengdao kejie yingshi 2.1a.
See chapter 1.
See, for instance, Montagnes, Doctrine of the Analogy of Being.
See the section “Ontology of Images” in chapter 5.
Closing Remarks
For an overview of anti-Protestant voices in the study of Chinese religion and in the history of religion, see Lagerwey, “Scriptures Are the Dregs.” An additional example is found in the book Ritual and Its Consequences by Seligman et al. discussed in chapter 6, in which the “sincere” model of existence, with its “undue concern with the authenticity of one’s actions and beliefs,” is indeed understood to be a major part of the heritage of Protestant Christianity.
Badiou, “Thinking the Event.”