Secrecy and display in the quest for transcendence in China, ca. 220 BCE-350 CE

History of Religions

Volumn 45, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 291-336

  Campany, Robert Ford ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61449182606     PISSN: 00182710     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/507857     Document Type: Review

References (83)

1. Some useful recent works include Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
2. Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986)
3. Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987)
4. Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism (New York: Harper, 1987)
5. Karen King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)
6. Jason David BeDuhn, The Manichaean Body in Discipline and Ritual (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)
7. David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
8. William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994)
9. Kees W. Bolle, ed., Secrecy in Religions (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987)
10. Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)
11. Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink, eds., Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)
12. Antoine Faivre and Karen-Claire Voss, "Western Esotericism and the Science of Religions," Numen 42 (1995): 48-72
13. Antoine Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000)
14. Arthur McCalla, "Antoine Faivre and the Study of Esotericism," Religion 31 (2001): 435-50 (helpful on some problems implicit in Faivre's work)
15. Paul J. Bagley, "On the Practice of Esotericism," Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 231-47
16. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)
17. Peter Burke, The Art of Conversation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993)
18. Of course, esoteric and "magical" religious practices persisted in early modern Europe and still persist today; the culture Shapin documents did not so much replace earlier cultures of secrecy as it displaced them from positions of prestige. If applied to Chinese materials, an analysis of Shapin's type, combining socio-cultural history with the history of epistemology and of cognitive and textual practices, might reveal the earlier rise of analogous cultures in China, though without the concomitant rise of science to which such cultures are linked in the West; such an analysis would constitute a methodological advance in the rather tired discussion of why no scientific revolution took place in China. I borrow the fine phrase "practically religious" from the title of Ian Reader and George J. Tanabe Jr., Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998)
19. See Georg Simmel, "The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies," retranslated, abridged, and anthologized in Edward A. Tiryakian, ed., On the Margin of the Visible (New York: Wiley, 1974), a volume also containing other attempts at a sociology of esoteric culture
20. and Edward Tiryakian, "Toward the Sociology of Esoteric Culture," American Journal of Sociology 78 (1972): 491-512
21. Tiryakian, "Toward the Sociology of Esoteric Culture," 498-501
22. See the remarks in Donald Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature (London: Kegan Paul, 1998), 60-62
23. See, in particular, Hugh B. Urban, "The Torment of Secrecy: Ethical and Epistemological Problems in the Study of Esoteric Traditions," History of Religions 37, no. 3 (February 1998): 209-48
24. and "Elitism and Esotericism: Strategies of Secrecy and Power in South Indian Tantra and French Freemasonry," Numen 44 (1997): 1-38
25. Lamont Lindstrom, Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific Society (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990)
26. and Beryl Bellman, The Language of Secrecy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984)
27. Urban, "The Torment of Secrecy," 235
28. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 47; cf. 140
29. On which see Steven Van Zoeren, Poetry and Personality: Reading, Exegesis, and Hermeneutics in Traditional China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991)
30. and Haun Saussy, The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993)
31. See Stephen W. Durrant, The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 58
32. See Lisa Raphals, Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 101
33. For bibliography on this topic, see my Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 118 n. 46
34. See Michael Loewe, "The Religious and Intellectual Background," in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 1, The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 B.C.-A.D. 220, ed. Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 650
35. Paul Demiéville, "Philosophy and Religion from Han to Sui," in ibid., 811-12; Donald Harper, "Warring States, Qin, and Han Manuscripts Related to Natural Philosophy and the Occult," in New Sources of Early Chinese History: An Introduction to the Reading of Inscriptions and Manuscripts, ed. Edward L. Shaughnessy (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China and Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1997), 227-28
36. Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature, 49 n. 1
37. and Tsien Tsuen-hsuin, Written on Bamboo and Silk: The Beginnings of Chinese Books and Inscriptions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 15
38. Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature, 64
39. Fan Ye, Hou Han shu 91:2705
40. Li Ling, Zhongguo fangshu kao (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 2000)
41. Zhengtong daozang $ % & (DZ) 885, 1:1a. Here and throughout, texts in the DZ (the Daoist canon of the zhengtong reign period [1436-49]) are cited by their number in Kristofer Schipper and Franciscus Verellen, eds., The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), followed by fascicle and folio page numbers ("a" indicating recto, "b" verso pages)
42. See Donald Harper, "A Chinese Demonography of the Third Century B.C.," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 45 (1985): 491
43. my translation follows that of Stephen R. Bokenkamp, "The Peach Flower Font and the Grotto Passage," Journal of the American Oriental Society 106 (1986): 68-69
44. see the translation of the opening section in Stephen R. Bokenkamp, Early Daoist Scriptures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 307-13. A Lingbao example may be found in DZ 22, with its extensive lead-in narrative portraying its own divine origins as a virtually cosmogonic event
45. Kristofer Schipper ("Le calendrier de jade: Note sur le Laozi zhongjing," Nachrichten der Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens 125 [1979]: 77) is of the opinion that it predates the Eastern Jin (317-420 CE)
46. compare Schipper and Verellen, The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion, 95-96
47. On this text see Schipper, "Le calendrier de jade"; Schipper and Verellen, The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion, 92-94
48. and Isabelle Robinet, La révélation du Shangqing dans l'histoire du taoïsme (Paris: École Française d'Extrême-Orient, 1984), 1:27
49. On the possible meaning of its title, see Schipper, "Le calendrier de jade," 117. On esotericizing hermeneutics, see Urban, "Elitism and Esotericism," 11-17
50. Baopuzi neipian jiaoshi 19:336
51. see TL, 136
52. See TL, 135, for the context of the passage, important variant versions, and annotations to the details found here
53. For a summation of this text's complex history, see Nathan Sivin, "Huang ti nei ching," in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe (Berkeley: Society for the Study of Early China, 1993), 196-215
54. For further examples of oaths of secrecy concerning scriptures, see Michel Strickmann, Chinese Magical Medicine, ed. Bernard Faure (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 15, 82, 98, 232
55. Baopuzi neipian jiaoshi 2:21-22
56. and Mark Edward Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 99-100
57. For an engaging study of this motif in early Chinese literature more broadly, see Eric Henry, "The Motif of Recognition in Early China," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47 (1987): 5-30
58. and for more on the importance of recognizing talent in early medieval discourse, see J. K. Shryock, The Study of Human Abilities (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1937)
59. and Richard Mather, Shih-shuo Hsin-yü: A New Account of Tales of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), xxii-xxiii, 248-73
60. See Stephen R. Bokenkamp, "Simple Twists of Fate: The Daoist Body and Its Ming," 151-68
61. and Robert Ford Campany, "Living off the Books: Fifty Ways to Dodge Ming in Early Medieval China," 129-50
62. both in The Magnitude of Ming: Command, Allotment, and Fate in Chinese Culture, ed. C. Lupke (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005)
63. Baopuzi neipian jiaoshi 3:53-54
64. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribners, 1958)
65. On the complexities of the traditions and discourse of "reclusion" and "recluses" throughout this period - by no means a simple or unitary type - see Aat Vervoom, Men of the Cliffs and Caves: The Development of the Chinese Eremetic Tradition to the End of the Han Dynasty (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1990)
66. and Alan J. Berkowitz, Patterns of Disengagement: The Practice and Portrayal of Reclusion in Early Medieval China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000)
67. On mountain deities see especially Terry Kleeman, "Mountain Deities in China: The Domestication of the Mountain God and the Subjugation of the Margins," Journal of the American Oriental Society 114 (1994): 226-38
68. "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971): 94
69. See Vervoom, Men of the Cliffs and Caves, index, s.v. "fame"; Berkowitz, Patterns of Disengagement, 118, 136-38, 173
70. TL, 187
71. See Brown, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man"; Stanley J. Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
72. As would be asserted by later hagiographers, starting - at least among extant texts - with Ge Hong's Traditions of Divine Transcendents; see TL, 222-25
73. As does Berkowitz, Patterns of Disengagement, 173
74. Compare Vervoom's formulation in Men of the Cliffs and Caves: "an elaborate demonstration of lofty personal ideals designed to attract the world's attention" (139, emphasis added). The stance dates back to Lu Xun: see Vervoom, Men of the Cliffs and Caves, 15
75. See Gopal Sukhu, "Monkeys, Shamans, Emperors, and Poets: The Chuci and Images of Chu during the Han Dynasty," in Defining Chu: Image and Reality in Ancient China, ed. Constance A. Cook and John S. Major (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999), 160-61. Sukhu speaks here not of Li but of a similar practitioner, Luan Da, whom we will meet shortly
76. Shiji 118:3086, emphasis added
77. and Max Kaltenmark, Le Lie-sien tchouan (Peking: Université de Paris, Centre d'études sinologiques de Pékin, 1953), 107-8
78. and Kaltenmark, Le Lie-sien tchouan, 130-32
79. On questions of dating of these texts and for translations I have relied on Thomas E. Smith, "Ritual and the Shaping of Narrative: The Legend of the Han Emperor Wu" (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1992), passim
80. See also Campany, Strange Writing, 318-21
81. Fan Ning, ed., Bowu zhi jiaozheng (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 180), item 8, p. 97
82. The quoted words are found in Fritz Graf, "Prayer in Magical and Religious Ritual," in Faraone and Obbink, Magika Hiera, 195-96
83. Graf is invoking a familiar trope: the notion that "magic" implies a lack of communal or social context goes back to Emile Durkheim's Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse and earlier - but not to Marcel Mauss, who saw, in his work on magic, the fundamental importance of the public clientele in constituting the magician's power; see Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (New York: Norton, 1972), 132-44