Creative Daoism

by Monica Esposito

Overview

Just as Christianity has its Vatican in Rome, modern Daoism boasts of a unique center of religious authority and administration: the Temple of the White Clouds (Baiyun guan) in Beijing, seat of the general headquarters of the Chinese Daoist Association. This temple complex in Beijing, called by Dr Esposito "modern Daoism's Vatican," houses the grave of the mythical founder of Daoism's Quanzhen tradition and celebrates the patriarchs of its Longmen ("Dragon Gate") branch as his legitimate heirs. This book shows in detail how Daoist masters and historiographers in China, much like their Catholic counterparts in Europe, invented a glorious patriarchal lineage as well as a system of ordination designed to perpetuate orthodox transmission and central control. They also created a kind of New Testament: a new canonical collection of scriptures entitled "The Gist of the Daoist Canon" (Daozang jiyao). This ultimate canon of Daoism contains hundreds of texts including the Daoist classic The Secret of the Golden Flower which achieved fame through the commentary by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. A classic study on the invention of religious traditions, the four parts of Creative Daoism describe the creation of the Daoist Vatican's Longmen lineage of patriarchs, system of ordination, canon of sacred scriptures, and doctrine of universal salvation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783906000053
Publisher:	Universitymedia
Publication date:	03/10/2016
Pages:	418
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.93(d)

About the Author

Born in Italy's port city of Genova, Monica Esposito studied Chinese at the Università Ca'Foscari in Venice and Fudan University in Shanghai. After numerous prolonged sojourns in China during which she developed a deep interest in China's religious practices and their history, she published her first book in 1987 (La pratica del Qigong in Cina) and continued her studies in Paris under the direction of Isabelle Robinet, the noted specialist of Daoism. Her Ph.D. thesis on the Longmen tradition of Daoism (La Porte du Dragon, 1993), a pioneering deconstruction of a dominant foundation myth of modern Daoism, has become a classic in the field.From 1997 to 2011, Dr Esposito pursued her research in Japan, first as a postdoctoral fellow at Kansai University and then as Associate Professor at Kyoto University's Institute for Research in Humanities. In addition to six documentary films she published groundbreaking articles in English, Japanese, and Chinese that established her reputation as one of the world's foremost scholars of Daoism. She founded and directed the International Daozang jiyao Project with over sixty scientific collaborators studying this most important and voluminous canon of Daoist texts of the Qing dynasty. Creative Daoism presents the sum of twenty-five years of research.