Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE

Author:
Robert Ford Campany

Publication Date: 
04/18/2023

Publisher:
Harvard University Asia Center

Abstract:
Practitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in ancient and medieval China engaged daily in practices meant to bring their bodies and minds under firm control. They took on regimens to discipline their comportment, speech, breathing, diet, senses, desires, sexuality, even their dreams. Yet, compared with waking life, dreams are incongruous, unpredictable—in a word, strange. How, then, did these regimes of self-fashioning grapple with dreaming, a lawless yet ubiquitous domain of individual experience?
In Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE, Robert Ford Campany examines how dreaming was addressed in texts produced and circulated by practitioners of Daoist, Buddhist, Confucian, and other self-cultivational disciplines. Working through a wide range of scriptures, essays, treatises, biographies, commentaries, fictive dialogues, diary records, interpretive keys, and ritual instructions, Campany uncovers a set of discrete paradigms by which dreams were viewed and responded to by practitioners. He shows how these paradigms underlay texts of diverse religious and ideological persuasions that are usually treated in mutual isolation. The result is a provocative meditation on the relationship between individuals’ nocturnal experiences and one culture’s persistent attempts to discipline, interpret, and incorporate them into waking practice.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Approaching Dreaming and Self-Cultivation
1. Purifying
2. Diagnosing
3. Spilling Over
4. Not Dreaming, Waking Up, and Not Minding the Difference
Epilogue: Fish Traps and Rabbit Snares
Appendix A: Dream Signs in Explication of Dreams for Bodhisattvas
Appendix B: Comparing Versions of the Chapter on Diagnostic Dreams in Perfection of Wisdom Texts
Appendix C: Incubatory Spells in Three Dongshen Registers of Red Writs of the Most High

Dao Companion to Xuanxue 玄學 (Neo-Daoism)

Editor: 

Chai, David 

Publisher: 

Springer

Publication date:

September 30, 2020

Abstract:

This comprehensive volume surveys an important but neglected period of Chinese intellectual history: Xuanxue (Neo-Daoism). It provides a holistic approach to the philosophical and religious traits of this movement via the concepts of non-being, being, and oneness. Thinkers and texts on the periphery of Xuanxue are also examined to show readers that Xuanxue did not arise in a vacuum but is the result of a long and continuous evolution of ideas from pre-Qin Daoism.

The 25 chapters of this work survey the major philosophical figures and arguments of Xuanxue, a movement from the Wei-Jin dynastic period (220-420 CE) of early-medieval China. It also examines texts and figures from the late-Han dynasty whose influence on Xuanxue has yet to be made explicitly clear. In order to fully capture the multifaceted nature of this movement, the contributors brilliantly highlight its more socially-oriented characteristics. 

Overall, this volume presents an unrivaled picture of this exciting period. It details a portrait of intellectual and cultural vitality that rivals, if not surpasses, what was achieved during the Warring States period. Readers of the Yijing, Daodejing, and Zhuangzi will feel right at home with the themes and arguments presented herein, while students and those coming to Xuanxue for the first time will acquire a wealth of knowledge.     

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Chai, David

Xuanxue’s Contributions to Chinese Philosophy
Sellmann, James D.

The Metaphysical Style and Structural Coherence of Names in Xuanxue
Rošker, Jana S.

Oneness in the Taipingjing
Hendrischke, Barbara

Yin and Yang in the Taipingjing
Hendrischke, Barbara

Dao and Ziran in Heshanggong’s Commentary on the Daodejing
Tadd, Misha

The Walking Dead: Morality, Health, and Longevity in the Xuanxue Method of the Xiang’er Commentary on the Laozi
Littlejohn, Ronnie

Wang Chong’s View of Ziran and its Influence on Wang Bi and Guo Xiang
McLeod, Alexus

He Yan’s “Essay on Dao” and “Essay on the Nameless”
D’Ambrosio, Paul

He Yan’s Collected Explanations on the Analects
Lo, Yuet Keung

Ruan Ji’s “On Comprehending the Zhuangzi”
Chai, David

Ji Kang’s “On Dispelling Self-Interest”
Chai, David

The Aesthetics of Musical Emotion in Ji Kang’s “Music has in It Neither Grief nor Joy”
Park, So Jeong

The Ontology of Change: Wang Bi’s Interpretation of the Yijing
Hon, Tze Ki

Language and Nothingness in Wang Bi
Nelson, Eric S.

Metaphysics without Ontology: Wang Bi and the Daodejing
Fox, Alan

Re-envisioning the Profound Order of Dao: Pei Wei’s “Critical Discussion on the Pride of Place of Being”
Chan, Alan K. L.

Metaphysics and Agency in Guo Xiang’s Commentary on the Zhuangzi
Fraser, Chris

Lone-Transformation and Intergrowth: Philosophy and Self-Justification in Guo Xiang’s Commentary on the Zhuangzi
Lo, Yuet Keung

Guo Xiang’s Theory of Sagely Knowledge as Seen in his “Essentials of the Analects”
Lynn, Richard J.

Ge Hong and the Darkness
Raz, Gil

Seeking Immortality in Ge Hong’s Baopuzi Neipian
Pregadio, Fabrizio

Ge Hong’s Evolving Discourse on You and Wu and its Roots in the Daodejing
Michael, Thomas

The Xuanxue Lifestyle: Self-Cultivation and Qi Practices
Kohn, Livia

Zhi Dun on Freedom: Synthesizing Daoism and Buddhism
Zhang, Ellen Y.

Dao and Sign in History: Daoist Arche-Semiotics in Ancient and Medieval China

Author: 
Daniel Fried

Publisher:
SUNY

Publication date:
November 2018

Abstract:

From its earliest origins in the Dao De Jing, Daoism has been known as a movement that is skeptical of the ability of language to fully express the truth. While many scholars have compared the earliest works of Daoism to language-skeptical movements in twentieth-century European philosophy and have debated to what degree early Daoism does or does not resemble these recent movements, Daniel Fried breaks new ground by examining a much broader array of Daoist materials from ancient and medieval China and showing how these works influenced ideas about language in medieval religion, literature, and politics. Through an extended comparison with a broad sample of European philosophical works, the book explores how ideas about language grow out of a given historical moment and advances a larger argument about how philosophical and religious ideas cannot be divided into “content” and “context.”

Zhuangzi’s Critique of the Confucians: Blinded by the Human

Author:
Kim-chong Chong

Publisher:
SUNY Press

Publication Date:
2016

Abstract:

The Daoist Zhuangzi has often been read as a mystical philosopher. But there is another tradition, beginning with the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian, which sees him as a critic of the Confucians. Kim-chong Chong analyzes the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi, demonstrating how Zhuangzi criticized the pre-Qin Confucians through metaphorical inversion and parody. This is indicated by the subtitle, “Blinded by the Human,” which is an inversion of the Confucian philosopher Xunzi’s remark that Zhuangzi was “blinded by heaven and did not know the human.” Chong compares Zhuangzi’s Daoist thought to Confucianism, as exemplified by Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi. By analyzing and comparing the different implications of concepts such as “heaven,” “heart-mind,” and “transformation,” Chong shows how Zhuangzi can be said to provide the resources for a more pluralistic and liberal philosophy than the Confucians.

Table of Contents:

Blinded by heaven
The pre-established heart-mind
The transformation of things
Zhen, some normative concerns
The facts of human construction
Metaphor in the Zhuangzi and theories of metaphor
Self, virtue (de) and values in the Zhuangzi

Vanishing into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition

Author:
Allen, Barry

Publication Date:
24 April 2015

Publisher:
Harvard University Press

Abstract:
Vanishing into Things explores the concept of knowledge in Chinese thought over two millennia, from Confucius to Wang Yangming (ca. 1500 CE), and compares the different philosophical imperatives that have driven Chinese and Western thought. Challenging the hyperspecialized epistemology of modern philosophy in the West, Barry Allen urges his readers toward an ethical appreciation of why knowledge is worth pursuing.

Western philosophers have long maintained that true knowledge is the best knowledge. Chinese thinkers, by contrast, have emphasized not the essence of knowing but the purpose. Ideas of truth play no part in their understanding of what the best knowledge is: knowledge is not deduced from principles or reducible to a theory. Rather, in Chinese tradition knowledge is expressed through wu wei, literally “not doing”—a response to circumstances that is at once effortless and effective. This type of knowledge perceives the evolution of circumstances from an early point, when its course can still be changed, provided one has the wisdom to grasp the opportunity.

Allen guides readers through the major Confucian and Daoist thinkers including Kongzi, Mengzi, Xunzi, Laozi, and Zhuangzi, examining their influence on medieval Neoconfucianism and Chan (Zen) Buddhism, as well as the theme of knowledge in China’s art of war literature. The sophisticated and consistent concept of knowledge elucidated here will be of relevance to contemporary Western and Eastern philosophers alike.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: To Really See the Little Things
1. Confucians
2. Daoists
3. The Art of War
4. Chan Buddhism
5. The Investigation of Things
6. Resonance
Chronology
Notes
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Index

In the Shadows of the Dao: Laozi, the Sage, and the Daodejing

Author:
Thomas Michael

Publication Month:
October, 2015

Publisher:
New York: State University of New York Press

Abstract:

Thomas Michael’s study of the early history of the Daodejing reveals that the work is grounded in a unique tradition of early Daoism, one unrelated to other early Chinese schools of thought and practice. The text is associated with a tradition of hermits committed to yangsheng, a particular practice of physical cultivation involving techniques of breath circulation in combination with specific bodily movements leading to a physical union with the Dao. Michael explores the ways in which the text systematically anchored these techniques to a Dao-centered worldview. Including a new translation of the Daodejing, In the Shadows of the Dao opens new approaches to understanding the early history of one of the world’s great religious texts and great religious traditions.

Table of Contents:

Reading Daodejing synthetically
Modern scholarship on the Daodejing
Traditions of reading the Daodejing
The Daos of Laozi and Confucius
Early Daoism, Yangsheng, and the Daodejing
The sage and the world
The sage and the project
The sage and bad knowledge
The sage and good knowledge