Journal articles: 'Early Chinese cosmogony'

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Ames, Roger T. "COLLATERALITY IN EARLY CHINESE COSMOLOGY: AN ARGUMENT FOR CONFUCIAN HARMONY (HE和) ASCREATIO IN SITU". Early China 37 (5 червня 2014): 445–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/eac.2014.2.

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AbstractOne important benefit of the Guodian and Shanghai Museum slips is the new insights they are providing in our understanding of the early intellectual evolution of classical Chinese philosophy. But there is a second important opportunity that the newly recovered documents provide. Beyond what is new in them, these same materials can be used to qualify, corroborate, and reiterate perhaps old but still undervalued insights into the interpretive context within which we construct our understanding of early China. Indeed, our best interpreters of classical Chinese philosophy are explicit in rejecting the idea that Chinese cosmology begins from some independent, transcendent principle and entails the metaphysical reality/appearance distinction and the plethora of dualistic categories that arise from such a worldview. In fact, the recently recovered Guodian materials provide us with both the resources and the occasion to revisit three related cosmological issues: What is distinctive about classical Chinese cosmogony and its notion of origins? What is the Chinese alternative to the assumptions about our own familiarcreatio ex nihilosource of meaning? And how is “creativity” expressed in the Chinese philosophical vocabulary?

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Filonov, Sergey V. "INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND DIGITAL CONCORDANCES AS TOOLS FOR THE EXPLICATION THE SUBJECTIVE REALITY OF THE AUTHORS OF THE SECRET TAOIST SCRIPTURES." Humanities And Social Studies In The Far East 18, no. 4 (2021): 158–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.31079/1992-2868-2021-18-4-158-173.

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The article reflects the experience of using a modern academic, instrumental and methodological base for the analysis and introduction into a wide research circulation of the poorly studied written monuments of the Supreme Purity (Shangqing) Taoist lineage, that reflect specific cosmological issues. The author believes that the modern academic base, prepared by the pioneering research works of Western scholars, supplemented by the outstanding achievements of Japanese and Chinese Sinology and signifi-cantly expanded by prominent Taiwanese researchers, combined with up-to-date digital tools for information analysis, makes it pos-sible to move on to a scrupulous study and translation of even the most secret scriptures of the early Supreme Purity Taoist lineage. The paper presents the results of a preliminary study of one of these texts, namely «Scripture on Dipper Transfer with Three Limits for Opening Heaven» (HY 1306). These results allow to conclude that in early Shangqing Taoism there was an integral system of cosmological concepts based on the special perception of the stars of the Northern Dipper (Big Dipper) and including the following components: a notion typologically comparable with the concept of “creative cosmogony” by Stanislav Lem, reflected in his “The New Cosmogony” («Alfred Testa “Nowa Kosmogonia”»); the notion of Multiple universes; ideas about the parallel universes; psy-chotechnical techniques of “time management”, and algorithms and procedures for “Chronotope travel”.

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Lyzohub, V. A. "The main aspects of the early «classical» stage of the formation of the Confucian doctrine of traditional China." Theory and practice of jurisprudence 2, no. 20 (2021): 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.21564/2225-6555.2021.2.244459.

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The article is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of the main sources, works that developed and supplemented the main elements of Confucian doctrine that appeared during the lifetime of Confucius. The main data on the life and work of thinkers who developed and supplemented the teachings of the Great Teacher of antiquity, the main options for translating and interpreting the names of treatises and basic terminology are outlined. It outlines the main provisions and ideas of the treatise "Zhong Yun" written by Confucius 'direct students, which is of fundamental importance for the process of historical evolution of Confucian doctrine, and clarifies, details and deepens the theses of Confucius' main book "Lun Yu". Against the background of the basic traditional Chinese picture, one of the key principles of Confucianism is pointed out – the principle of the "golden mean", the critical importance of personal virtue of rulers, and the main approaches to determining the formula of human nature. It is determined that the subject of interest "Zhong Yun", broader than the basic treatise "Lun Yu" and denotes cosmogonic and moral properties of the spirit, more richly interprets the inner content of the fundamental category of humanity ("Ren") constructs an integral system of categories, the sources of which are in the depths of ancient Chinese mythology. The main concepts and meanings of the work "Da Xue" ("great teaching") are established, one of the most fundamental traditional categories of which is the concept of "where" – personal "grace", "achievement, acquisition", and the uniqueness and special place of a person in the universe is the ability to follow "due justice". The quintessence of the DA Xue worldview system is the presumption of immanent virtue of human nature, which should radiate from those in power in the form of "humanity"; the basic thesis of the treatise is the attitude according to which the ruler who "does not show" virtue is deprived of his right to rule. It is stated that the work named after the outstanding thinker of traditional China, Meng Tzu, was of fundamental importance for the long evolution of Confucianism. (Meng Ke), who not only expanded the leading principles of Confucius, but also improved the teachings of the great teacher by actualizing and considering new issues. This approach transformed the teachings of Kun Tzu into a harmonious construction of judgments, which later turned into the official government ideology and worldview system of the Great Chinese society, which has existed for thousands of years. It is to Meng Tzu that the orientation to consider human nature moral goes back, one of his most original ideas is the concept of the heart-mind, which is provided on the one hand by an innate, intuitive ability, moral instinct, and on the other by benevolence. On the contrary, the approaches of another thinker, Sun Tzu, were completely antagonistic to Meng Tzu's ideas and proved the conclusion that human nature is evil. Sun Tzu's concept is located exactly on the border between Confucianism and legalism, but the Thinker (unlike the legists) believed that it was not punishments and rewards that should curb the evil nature of a person, but moral improvement and high literature, that is, culture. Sun Tzu was the first in Confucianism and proved the concept of an enlightened monarchy based on the principle of both traditional morality and the authority and power of the law. Against the background of the study of significant monographic literature, conclusions are drawn about the almost instantaneous beginning of the complex deepening, improvement and development of teaching, already by the first students of Confucius. Confucianism was formed as a method of interpreting the ancient Chinese system of symbols and concepts, categories laid down in mythological form in an active, active spirit. The development of Confucian doctrine was due to the incorporation of elements of other teachings. Confucianism essentially developed through finding common ground with other Chinese doctrines. The key idea that emerged in the development of Confucianism is the statement that everything in a person, including his inner world, is just a reflection of the natural world, and the restoration of perfect social institutions will not mechanically restore perfect order in the Middle Kingdom. The core of the DA Xue ideological system is the assumption of the inner virtue (de) of human nature, which must be shown by those in power. In the course of its long evolution, Confucian traditional thought put certain fundamental problems and categories on the agenda much earlier than European thinkers did, of course, at the ancient, traditional level synchronous with that distant century

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Tsygankov, Alexander S. "History of Philosophy. 2018, Vol. 23, No. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Theory and Methodology of History of Philosophy Rodion V. Savinov. Philosophy of Antiquity in Scholasticism This article examines the forms of understanding ancient philosophy in medieval and post-medieval scholasticism. Using the comparative method the author identifies the main approaches to the philosophical heritage of Antiquity, and to the problem of reviving the doctrines of the past. The Patristics (Epiphanius of Cyprus, Filastrius of Brixia, Lactantius, Augustine) saw the ancient cosmological doctrines as heresies. The early Middle Ages (e.g., Isidore of Seville) assimilated the content of these heresiographic treatises, which became the main source of information about ancient philosophy. Scholasticism of the 13th–14th cent. remained cautious to ancient philosophy and distinguished, on the one hand, the doctrinal content discussed in the framework of the exegetic problems at universities (Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, etc.), and, on the other hand, information on ancient philosophers integrated into chronological models of medieval chronicles (Peter Comestor, Vincent de Beauvais, Walter Burleigh). Finally, the post-medieval scholasticism (Pedro Fonseca, Conimbricenses, Th. Stanley, and others) raised the questions of the «history of ideas», thereby laying the foundation of the history of philosophy in its modern sense. Keywords: history of philosophy, Patristic, Scholasticism, reflection, critic DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-5-17 World Philosophy: the Past and the Present Mariya A. Solopova. The Chronology of Democritus and the Fall of Troy The article considers the chronology of Democritus of Abdera. In the times of Classical Antiquity, three different birth dates for Democritus were known: c. 495 BC (according to Diodorus of Sicily), c. 470 BC (according to Thrasyllus), and c. 460 BC (according to Apollodorus of Athens). These dates must be coordinated with the most valuable doxographic evidence, according to which Democritus 1) "was a young man during Anaxagoras’s old age" and that 2) the Lesser World-System (Diakosmos) was compiled 730 years after the Fall of Troy. The article considers the argument in favor of the most authoritative datings belonging to Apollodorus and Thrasyllus, and draws special attention to the meaning of the dating of Democritus’ work by himself from the year of the Fall of Troy. The question arises, what prompted Democritus to talk about the date of the Fall of Troy and how he could calculate it. The article expresses the opinion that Democritus indicated the date of the Fall of Troy not with the aim of proposing its own date, different from others, but in order to date the Lesser World-System in the spirit of intellectual achievements of his time, in which, perhaps, the history of the development of mankind from the primitive state to the emergence of civilization was discussed. The article discusses how to explain the number 730 and argues that it can be the result of combinations of numbers 20 (the number of generations that lived from the Fall of Troy to Democritus), 35 – one of the constants used for calculations of generations in genealogical research, and 30. The last figure perhaps indicates the age of Democritus himself, when he wrote the Lesser Diakosmos: 30 years old. Keywords: Ancient Greek philosophy, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Greek chronography, doxographers, Apollodorus, Thrasyllus, capture of Troy, ancient genealogies, the length of a generation DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-18-31 Bembya L. Mitruyev. “Yogācārabhumi-Śāstra” as a Historical and Philosophical Source The article deals with “Yogācārabhūmi-Śāstra” – a treatise on the Buddhist Yogācāra school. Concerning the authorship of this text, the Indian and Chinese traditions diverge: in the first, the treatise is attributed to Asanga, and in the second tradition to Maitreya. Most of the modern scholars consider it to be a compilation of many texts, and not the work of one author. Being an important monument for both the Yogacara tradition and Mahayana Buddhism in general, Yogācārabhūmi-Śāstra is an object of scientific interest for the researchers all around the world. The text of the treatise consists of five parts, which are divided into chapters. The contents of the treatise sheds light on many concepts of Yogācāra, such as ālayavijñāna, trisvabhāva, kliṣṭamanas, etc. Having briefly considered the textological problems: authorship, dating, translation, commenting and genre of the text, the author suggests the reconstruction of the content of the entire monument, made on the basis of his own translation from the Tibetan and Sanskrit. This allows him to single out from the whole variety of topics those topics, the study of which will increase knowledge about the history of the formation of the basic philosophical concepts of Yogācāra and thereby allow a deeper understanding of the historical and philosophical process in Buddhism and in other philosophical movements of India. Keywords: Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra, Asaṅga, Māhāyana, Vijñānavāda, Yogācāra, Abhidharma, ālayavijñāna citta, bhūmi, mind, consciousness, meditation DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-32-43 Tatiana G. Korneeva. Knowledge in Nāșir Khusraw’s Philosophy The article deals with the concept of “knowledge” in the philosophy of Nāșir Khusraw. The author analyzes the formation of the theory of knowledge in the Arab-Muslim philosophy. At the early stages of the formation of the Arab-Muslim philosophy the discussion of the question of cognition was conducted in the framework of ethical and religious disputes. Later followers of the Falsafa introduced the legacy of ancient philosophers into scientific circulation and began to discuss the problems of cognition in a philosophical way. Nāșir Khusraw, an Ismaili philosopher of the 11th century, expanded the scope of knowledge and revised the goals and objectives of the process of cognition. He put knowledge in the foundation of the world order, made it the cause and ultimate goal of the creation of the world. In his philosophy knowledge is the link between the different levels of the universe. The article analyzes the Nāșir Khusraw’s views on the role of knowledge in various fields – metaphysics, cosmogony, ethics and eschatology. Keywords: knowledge, cognition, Ismailism, Nāșir Khusraw, Neoplatonism, Arab-Muslim philosophy, kalām, falsafa DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-44-55 Vera Pozzi. Problems of Ontology and Criticism of the Kantian Formalism in Irodion Vetrinskii’s “Institutiones Metaphysicae” (Part II) This paper is a follow-up of the paper «Irodion Vetrinskii’s “Institutiones Metaphysicae” and the St. Petersburg Theological Academy» (Part I). The issue and the role of “ontology” in Vetrinskii’s textbook is analyzed in detail, as well as the author’s critique of Kantian “formalism”: in this connection, the paper provides a description of Vetrinskii’s discussion about Kantian theory of the a priori forms of sensible intuition and understanding. To sum up, Vetrinskii was well acquainted not only with Kantian works – and he was able to fully evaluate their innovative significance – but also with late Scholastic textbooks of the German area. Moreover, he relied on the latters to build up an eclectic defense of traditional Metaphysics, avoiding at the same time to refuse Kantian perspective in the sake of mere reaffirming a “traditional” perspective. Keywords: Philosophizing at Russian Theological Academies, Russian Enlightenment, Russian early Kantianism, St. Petersburg Theological Academy, history of Russian philosophy, history of metaphysics, G.I. Wenzel, I. Ya. Vetrinskii DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-56-67 Alexey E. Savin. Criticism of Judaism in Hegel's Early “Theological” Writings The aim of the article is to reveal the nature of criticism of Judaism by the “young” Hegel and underlying intuitions. The investigation is based on the phenomenological approach. It seeks to explicate the horizon of early Hegel's thinking. The revolutionary role of early Hegel’s ideas reactivation in the history of philosophy is revealed. The article demonstrates the fundamental importance of criticism of Judaism for the development of Hegel's thought. The sources of Hegelian thematization and problematization of Judaism – his Protestant theological background within the framework of supranaturalism and the then discussion about human rights and political emancipation of Jews – are discovered. Hegel's interpretation of the history of the Jewish people and the origin of Judaism from the destruction of trust in nature, the fundamental mood of distrust and fear of the world, leading to the development of alienation, is revealed. The falsity of the widespread thesis about early Hegel’s anti-Semitism is demonstrated. The reasons for the transition of early Hegel from “theology” to philosophy are revealed. Keywords: Hegel, Judaism, history, criticism, anti-Semitism, trust, nature, alienation, tyranny, philosophy DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-68-80 Evgeniya A. Dolgova. Philosophy at the Institute of Red Professors (1921–1938): Institutional Forms, Methods of Teaching, Students, Lecturers The article explores the history of the Institute of the Red Professors in philosophy (1921–1938). Referring to the unpublished documents in the State Archives of the Russian Federation and the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the author explores its financial and infrastructure support, information sphere, characterizes students and teachers. The article illustrates the practical experience of the functioning of philosophy within the framework of one of the extraordinary “revolutionary” projects on the renewal of the scientific and pedagogical sphere, reflects a vivid and ambiguous picture of the work of the educational institution in the 1920s and 1930s and corrects some of historiographical judgments (about the politically and socially homogeneous composition of the Institute of Red Professors, the specifics of state support of its work, privileges and the social status of the “red professors”). Keywords: Institute of the Red Professors in Philosophy, Philosophical Department, soviet education, teachers, students, teaching methods DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-81-94 Vladimir V. Starovoitov. K. Horney about the Consequences of Neurotic Development and the Ways of Its Overcoming This article investigates the views of Karen Horney on psychoanalysis and neurotic development of personality in her last two books: “Our Inner Conflicts” (1945) and “Neurosis and Human Grows” (1950), and also in her two articles “On Feeling Abused” (1951) and “The Paucity of Inner Experiences” (1952), written in the last two years of her life and summarizing her views on clinical and theoretical problems in her work with neurotics. If in her first book “The Neurotic Personality of Our Time” (1937) neurosis was a result of disturbed interpersonal relations, caused by conditions of culture, then the concept of the idealized Self open the gates to the intrapsychic life. Keywords: Neo-Freudianism, psychoanalysis, neurotic development of personality, real Self, idealized image of Self DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-95-102 Publications and Translations Victoria G. Lysenko. Dignāga on the Definition of Perception in the Vādaviddhi of Vasubandhu. A Historical and Philosophical Reconstruction of Dignāga’s Pramāṇasamuccayavṛtti (1.13-16) The paper investigates a fragment from Dignāga’s magnum opus Pramāṇasamuccayavṛtti (“Body of tools for reliable knowledge with a commentary”, 1, 13-16) where Dignāga challenges Vasubandhu’s definition of perception in the Vādaviddhi (“Rules of the dispute”). The definition from the Vādaviddhi is being compared in the paper with Vasubandhu’s ideas of perception in Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (“Encyclopedia of Abhidharma with the commentary”), and with Dignāga’s own definition of valid perception in the first part of his Pramāṇasamuccayavṛtti as well as in his Ālambanaparīkśavṛtti (“Investigation of the Object with the commentary”). The author puts forward the hypothesis that Dignāga criticizes the definition of perception in Vādaviddhi for the reason that it does not correspond to the teachings of Vasubandhu in his Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, to which he, Dignāga, referred earlier in his magnum opus. This helps Dignāga to justify his statement that Vasubandhu himself considered Vādaviddhi as not containing the essence of his teaching (asāra). In addition, the article reconstructs the logical sequence in Dignāga’s exegesis: he criticizes the Vādaviddhi definition from the representational standpoint of Sautrāntika school, by showing that it does not fulfill the function prescribed by Indian logic to definition, that of distinguishing perception from the classes of heterogeneous and homogeneous phenomena. Having proved the impossibility of moving further according to the “realistic logic” based on recognizing the existence of an external object, Dignāga interprets the Vādaviddhi’s definition in terms of linguistic philosophy, according to which the language refers not to external objects and not to the unique and private sensory experience (svalakṣaṇa-qualia), but to the general characteristics (sāmānya-lakṣaṇa), which are mental constructs (kalpanā). Keywords: Buddhism, linguistic philosophy, perception, theory of definition, consciousness, Vaibhashika, Sautrantika, Yogacara, Vasubandhu, Dignaga DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-103-117 Elizaveta A. Miroshnichenko. Talks about Lev N. Tolstoy: Reception of the Writer's Views in the Public Thought of Russia at the End of the 19th Century (Dedicated to the 190th Anniversary of the Great Russian Writer and Thinker) This article includes previously unpublished letters of Russian social thinkers such as N.N. Strakhov, E.M. Feoktistov, D.N. Tsertelev. These letters provide critical assessment of Lev N. Tolstoy’s teachings. The preface to publication includes the history of reception of Tolstoy’s moral and aesthetic philosophy by his contemporaries, as well as influence of his theory on the beliefs of Russian idealist philosopher D.N. Tsertelev. The author offers a rational reconstruction of the dialogue between two generations of thinkers representative of the 19th century – Lev N. Tolstoy and N.N. Strakhov, on the one hand, and D.N. Tsertelev, on the other. The main thesis of the paper: the “old” and the “new” generations of the 19th-century thinkers retained mutual interest and continuity in setting the problems and objectives of philosophy, despite the numerous worldview contradictions. Keywords: Russian philosophy of the nineteenth century, L.N. Tolstoy, N.N. Strakhov, D.N. Tsertelev, epistolary heritage, ethics, aesthetics DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-118-130 Reviews Nataliya A. Tatarenko. History of Philosophy in a Format of Lecture Notes (on Hegel G.W.F. Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik. Vorlesungsmitschrift Adolf Heimann (1828/1829). Hrsg. von A.P. Olivier und A. Gethmann-Siefert. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2017. XXXI + 254 S.) Released last year, the book “G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik. Vorlesungsmitschrift Adolf Heimann (1828/1829)” in German is a publication of one of the student's manuskript of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics. Adolf Heimann was a student of Hegel in 1828/29. These notes open for us imaginary doors into the audience of the Berlin University, where Hegel read his fourth and final course on the philosophy of art. A distinctive feature of this course is a new structure of lectures in comparison with three previous courses. This three-part division was took by H.G. Hotho as the basis for the edited by him text “Lectures on Aesthetics”, included in the first collection of Hegel’s works. The content of that publication was mainly based on the lectures of 1823 and 1826. There are a number of differences between the analyzed published manuskript and the students' records of 1820/21, 1823 and 1826, as well as between the manuskript and the editorial version of H.G. Hotho. These features show that Hegel throughout all four series of Berlin lectures on the philosophy of art actively developed and revised the structure and content of aesthetics. But unfortunately this evidence of the permanent development was not taken into account by the first editor of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics. Keywords: G.W.F. Hegel, H.G. Hotho, philosophy of art, aesthetics, forms of art, idea of beauty, ideal DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-131-138 Alexander S. Tsygankov. On the Way to the Revival of Metaphysics: S.L. Frank and E. Coreth Readers are invited to review the monograph of the modern German researcher Oksana Nazarova “The problem of the renaissance and new foundation of metaphysics through the example of Christian philosophical tradition. Russian religious philosophy (Simon L. Frank) and German neosholastics (Emerich Coreth)”, which was published in 2017 in Munich. In the paper, the author offers a comparative analysis of the projects of a new, “post-dogmatic” metaphysics, which were developed in the philosophy of Frank and Coreth. This study addresses the problems of the cognitive-theoretical and ontological foundation of the renaissance of metaphysics, the methodological tools of the new metaphysics, as well as its anthropological component. O. Nazarova's book is based on the comparative analysis of Frank's religious philosophy and Coreth's neo-cholastic philosophy from the beginning to the end. This makes the study unique in its own way. Since earlier in the German reception of the heritage of Russian thinker, the comparison of Frank's philosophy with the Catholic theology of the 20th century was realized only fragmentarily and did not act as a fundamental one. Along with a deep and meaningful analysis of the metaphysical projects of both thinkers, this makes O. Nazarova's book relevant to anyone who is interested in the philosophical dialogue of Russia and Western Europe and is engaged in the work of Frank and Coreth. Keywords: the renaissance of metaphysics, post-Kantian philosophy, Christian philosophy, S.L. Frank, E. Coreth DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-139-147". History of Philosophy 23, № 2 (2018): 139–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-139-147.

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Francesca, Puglia. "Tian wen 天問". Database of Religious History, 27 червня 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12573317.

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The Tianwen 天問 ("Heavenly questions") is a long poem structured in a series of questions (wen 問) directly asked to Heaven (tian 天) or concerning heavenly matters, included in the ancient poetry collection entitled Chuci 楚辭 ("Songs of Chu", often translated into English as "Songs of the south"). Alternative translation for the title Tian wen, besides "Heavenly questions", are "Asking Heaven" and "Heaven asks". The poem is attributed to the 4th century BCE Chu 楚 state official and poet Qu Yuan 屈原 (340–278 BCE), yet his authorship of the poem as a whole is debated. The broad range of topics treated and their loose arrangement (possibly due to the mixing up of the slips in the original bamboo copy of the text) support the hypothesis of a collective authorship. Field advances the thesis that Qu Yuan, during one of his trips to Qi, collected diversified fragments circulating at the Ji Xia 稷下 and put them together forming the Tian wen (Field 1986). Hinton suggests that Qu Yuan, in writing the Tian wen, might have drawn most of the material from ancient oral sources (Hinton 2009). The Eastern Han 東漢 (25 CE – 220 CE) poet and librarian Wang Yi 王逸 (fl. 130–140 CE), claiming to have based on Liu Xiang's 劉向 (79 CE - 8 CE) text, edited the first Chuci anthology with a commentary, the Chuci zhangju 楚辭章句, transmitted in the received version, compiled in the 12th century CE, under the title Chuci buzhu 楚辭補注. Wang Yi's edition of the Chuci is preserved in the received text, and comprises both a general foreword and several distinct introductions specific for each of the various works, in which he ascribes the Tianwen and other poems, such as the Li sao 離騷, to Qu Yuan. Regarding Qu Yuan's inspiration for the writing of the poem, Wang Yi refers to an anecdote that allegedly occurred during the author's exile, an episode that is generally considered not to be historically reliable: according to Wang Yi's introduction (or rather, according to the source to which the commentator refers), the author would have been inspired by seeing murals depicting spirits, deities, landscapes, mythological characters, and more, painted on the walls of the Chu ancestral temple, and would have written these questions on the same walls (Chuci zhangju, Tianwen zhangju 天問章句). Also in Sima Qian's 司馬遷 Shiji 史記 the Tian wen is ascribed to Qu Yuan. Regarding its structure and content, the Tianwen lists circa 170 enigmatic and mysterious questions, which remain unanswered, directed to Heaven. It consists of about 370 tetrasyllabic lines arranged in around 90 quatrains, of which the even lines rhyme. On a general level, but there are various exceptions, two lines form a semantic unity, in which the first one introduces the topic, while the second one asks the actual question. In contradistinction to all the other poems attributed to Qu Yuan, in the Tian wen the nonce word xi 兮 is completely absent, fueling skepticism about his authorship of the work. The language is archaic as nowhere else in the Chuci, with the exception of few lines of the Li sao. The topics of the diverse lines are extremely varied and range from cosmogonic matters to the actions of divine and mythological beings and religious beliefs. The poem is traditionally divided into three sections, at least starting from the Tang dynasty 唐 (618-907) times, that separate heavenly, earthly, and human matters (although different commentators divide the poem differently). The first section is concerned with cosmogonic myths and theories, cosmology, and celestial mechanics (e.g. the unaccountability of the origins of the world, the sun and moon's celestial motion, the stars' array, etc.); the second section's focus is put on the asset of earth (e.g. the flood myth, the tilt between the sky and earth resulted from Kang Hui's 康回 anger, Yi's 羿 shooting at the suns, etc.); the third and last section refers to the deeds and achievements of legendary characters and to human events (e.g. Yu's 禹 vicissitudes, the decline of the Xia 夏 dynasty, Nüwa's 女娲 myth, etc.). Of the questions asked, although for none is an answer offered in the text, some appear to possibly have a knowledgeable answer, while for others a sharp skepticism on the part of the author is evident. It is the case, for example, of the opening verses of the first section: 遂古之初,誰傳道之?At the beginning of distant antiquity, who transmitted the account? 上下未形,何由考之?When above and below had not yet achieved form, how could it be examined? 冥昭瞢暗,誰能極之?When darkness and brightness were confused and indiscernible, who could tell them apart? The poem is almost unique in his genre of listing unanswered questions. The only comparable literary work consisting of a list of riddles on a similar subject, yet considerably shorter, is found in the opening lines of chapter Tian yun 天運 ("Heaven's revolution") of the Zhuangzi 莊子.

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Matthew, Hamm. "All Things Flow Into Form (Fanwu liuxing 凡物流形)". Database of Religious History, 27 червня 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12572482.

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The Fanwu Liuxing 凡物流形 ("All Things Flow into Form") is a bamboo text within the "Shanghai strips" collection. This collection consists of a number of bamboo texts that were purchased by the Shanghai Museum (Shanghai Bowuguan 上海博物館) in 1994. Most likely, the texts were looted from a tomb and, as such, their provenance is unknown. However, similarities between the Shanghai strips and the Guodian strips excavated in 1993 suggest a tentative dating for the Shanghai strips of 300-278 BCE. For a more detailed description of the Shanghai strips, see the entry on the "Zigao 子羔" by Sarah Allan. The Fanwu Liuxing was previously unknown to scholars as it was not part of the "received tradition," the body of textual materials passed down and recopied over the course of Chinese history. However, the Shanghai collection contains two manuscripts of the text, suggesting the early import of the text. Of the two manuscripts, one, Manuscript B, is damaged and the total length of the text is 30 bamboo strips. As with most excavated materials, the Fanwu Liuxing is not easily classified according to the "schools" rubric of later history. Instead of appearing as a work of Daoism, Confucianism, etc., the text appears to stand on its own as a cosmogonic work that endeavours to explain the cosmos according to a single origin that it terms the "One" (yi 一). Together with other excavated texts such as the Taiyi Shengshui 太一生水, Hengxian 恆先, and Guodian Laozi 老子, it thus appears to be representative of the "cosmogonic turn" in early Chinese thought, meaning the shift that appears to have occurred in early texts from advancing theistic explanations of the cosmos to advancing monistic and naturalistic explanations. Of these early works, the Laozi is the only one to have been passed down in the later tradition and appears to have been the winner of this early debate. The Fanwu Liuxing itself may have been excluded from the later tradition because its arguments were integrated into, and appropriated by, the Laozi in the course of its textual evolution. This process can be reconstructed through excavated versions of the Laozi, though later editing can obscure the evidence for in the received version of the text. More specifically, the Fanwu Liuxing is structured into two parts. The first contains a series of questions on a range of subjects, including the basic constituents of the world and how they take form, the nature of human beings and their formation, the relationship of human beings and ghosts with reference to sacrifices, concerns over rulership, specific aspects of the natural world, and various divinities (all of whom are subordinated to the original origin of the cosmos). The second part of the text provides an answer to these questions in the form of a description of the One and the way in which it both gives rise to the cosmos and also remains immanent within it so that it may function. The text emphasizes that, because the One is simply the totality of all things, it can be grasped through the senses and understood through the heart-mind. It concludes by arguing that if a ruler is able to grasp the One through self-cultivation then he will be able to create political order. The text thus draws a direct line between its cosmogonic explanations and the practical exercise of political power.

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Francesca, Puglia. "Heng xian 恆先". Database of Religious History, 27 червня 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12573775.

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The Heng Xian 恆先 (Before Constancy) is a looted bamboo manuscript acquired by the Shanghai Museum from the Hong Kong Antiquites Market in 1994. The manuscript has been dated by archaeologists around the 300 BCE and it is deemed as an original Chu 楚 state text. The text, consisting of 13 bamboo slips, has been reconstructed by scholars from a total of around 1200 bamboo slips acquired from the same market. The first edition of the text has been published in 2003 by the paleographer Li Ling 李零. Since then, the manuscript has been analyzed by many scholars, yet there is still no consensus among them regarding the arrangement of the slips. It is even possible that part of the original text is missing: in fact, some passages that are linguistically unusual or odd in content might be the result of an erroneous assembling of the slips. Most of the thirteen bamboo slips in the Shanghai Museum's possession are intact, yet some characters are corrupted and hardly legible, while some others can be possibly read in more than one way, posing further difficulties for the understanding of the text. The title "Heng Xian" appears on the back of the third slip with the writing 㔰, the ancient form for 恆. The character heng 恆, as defined in the Shuowen Jiezi 說文解字, means "constancy" (恆,常也), originally related to the constancy of lunar phases (Shuowen Jiezi on 㔰: 古文恆, 从月). The phrasing Heng xian 恆先, as it emerges from the text, appears to indicate a state of emptiness and stillness preceding the constancy that characterizes the workings of nature. Along the lines of this understanding of the manuscript, Sixin Ding equates the concept of Heng with the tiandao 天道 (Way of Heaven). The text can be summarily divided into two halves, with significant variations in content: the first half is a cosmogonic account in which material reality comes into being starting from a state of absence of being; the second half is concerned with human affairs that should always be conducted in accord with the tiandao. The cosmogony presented in the first half of the Heng Xian recalls Daoist cosmological thinking, since it describes the arising of reality from an original state of wuyou 無有 (non-being). This primordial state is defined as pu 樸 (simple), jing 靜 (quiet), and xu 虛 (empty). The cosmogonic process is initially set in motion by the arising of yu 域 (space, boundary), originally written on bamboo as huo 或, followed by qi 氣, defined in the text as self-generating (zi sheng 自生) and self-arising (zi zuo 自作), you 有 (being), shi 始 (beginning), and wang 往 (direction). The text proceeds with the description of the coming into being of the sky and the earth: turbid qi (濁氣) forms the earth, while clear qi (清氣) forms the sky, thereby setting up the space for the various things to reproduce. In the second half of the manuscript, the topic changes considerably. From strictly cosmogonic matters, the text moves to human and linguistic matters. First, humans are identified as the cause of the disorder on earth. The text reads: 先者有善, 有治無亂。有人焉有不善, 亂出於人, "formerly there was good, order, and no chaos. Once there were humans, there was non-good, chaos comes from humans." Subsequently, the manuscript focuses on the mechanisms of reproduction (fu 復) of things and on the origins of names (ming 名). Fu 復 is most commonly intended in the meaning of "returning", as for example it its occurrences in the Daodejing 道德經. Yet, in this context, the idea of "repetition" implied by the verb fu seems to be more properly connected to the reproduction of things within the cosmogonic process. In fact, the manuscript does not only give a definition of fu as the process of generation of life (復, 生之生行), it also states that only fu is the means to avoid dying out (唯復以不廢). With regard to the names, they are said to be established emptily (xu shu 虛樹) to become unchanging (bu ke gai 不可改) only via usual practice (xi 習). Names in the text also appear to be subject to a cosmogonic process: they are said to come from speech, while services in turn come from names (名出於言, 事出於名). The discourse on names, and especially their relationship with the objects to which they refer, was particularly lively during the Warring States (475-221 BCE), especially among the thinkers of the Ming jia 名家 (School of Names) and later Mohists. Slip 13 directly involves the enlightened ruling elite (ming wang 明王, ming jun 明君, ming shi 明士) that should be knowledgeable of the cosmology described in the manuscript and, consequently, manage human affairs so to conform them to the "constancy" of the natural proceedings. The manuscript represents one of the earliest testimony on cosmogonic origins from Warring States China. With its detailed account on the transition from an undifferentiated primeval state to the multifaceted reality of the variety of things (cai wu 彩物) through a process of self-generation and self-arising, it provides a crucial insight for the understanding of the cosmogonic thought of ancient China. In particular, the Heng Xian does not only refer to terms prevalent in the cosmogonic debate of the time (such as qi 氣, you/wuyou 有/無有, etc.), but it also incorporates less common categories (such as yu 域 and wang 往) that contribute to making this manuscript distinctive.

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Francesca, Puglia. "Taiyi sheng shui 太一生水". Database of Religious History, 27 червня 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12573563.

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The Taiyi sheng shui 太一生水 is a fourth century BCE Chu 楚 manuscript written on 14 bamboo slips, discovered in 1993 in the archaeological excavation of the Guodian 郭店 tomb n.1, in Jingmen 荊門, Hubei 湖北 province. It has been given the title Taiyi sheng shui by the editors of the Guodian Chu mu zhujian 郭店楚墓竹簡, based on the first four characters written on what is deemed to be the first strip. The text, written in the Chu script, appears to be divided into two main halves, and the debate is still open as to whether they represent two sections of a consistent text or two separate documents. The first half describes a cosmological cycle that begins with Taiyi making water alive and ends with the the completion of a yearly cycle, through a process of reciprocal assistance by a series of dyadic couples (the sky and the earth, shen 神 and ming 明, yin and yang, the four seasons, cold and warmth, wetness and dryness); the second half deals with various topics: the workings of the tiandao 天道 (way of the sky); the different designations assigned to Taiyi 太一, the "Great One", whose names, ming 名, are qing 清 (bright) and hun 昏 (dark), and whose honorific, zi 字, is dao 道 (way); the services performed by the sage and by the people, who both need to rely on the names of Taiyi; the tilt that occurred between the sky and earth, whereby the sky is insufficient in the north-west, while the earth is insufficient in the south-east (a recurring account on the asset of the sky and the earth in Chu texts, e.g. Tianwen 天問). The Taiyi sheng shui appears to share the same material carrier with one of the three Laozi 老子 manuscripts found in the same tomb, the Guodian Laozi C 郭店老子丙, and for this reason the majority of scholarly works hypothesize a correspondence of Taiyi to the Laozian dao. This supposed connection between the two texts led to an understanding of the first half of the Taiyi sheng shui as a cosmogony connected to the cosmogonic chapters of the Daodejing 道德經 (ch. 25;42), despite the process ending with the completion of the year (cheng sui 成歲) rather than with the coming into being of material reality. Within this framework, Taiyi in this text has been understood as a name for the dao (Allan 2003; Cook 2012; Brindley 2019; Wang 2016), as the homonymous god known from Han religious cults (Harper 2001), as a name for the pole star and its god (Allan 2003). A recent study (Puglia 2021) reads the two halves of the manuscript as a consistent whole, in which Taiyi is a name for the sun that apparently moves along with the seasons in the sky, marking the completion of the year, and tracing the tiandao that people should understand in order to act timely and get accomplishments done. The identification of Taiyi with the sun in this manuscript is based on the detailed description of its movements provided in the text. It is said to proceed with the seasons (行於時), to make a cycle and begin anew (周而又始), and to hide in water (藏於水): the employment of the verbs xing 行 and zhou 周, tipically used to define the sun's motion in astronomical pre-Qin and early imperial accounts (e.g. Lüshi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋, Huainanzi 淮南子, etc.) recalls the completion of the yearly cycle as the end of the cosmology described in the first half of the manuscript; the hiding in water, on the other hand, parallels the topos of the sun disappearing in water at sunset in the Chu tradition (e.g. Tianwen 天問). Also the names qing and hun given to Taiyi, following Donald Harper's reading of the same characters in the Mawangdui 馬王堆 medical text entitled Quegu Shiqi 卻鼓食氣, indicate dawn and dusk (Harper 2001), while its honorific dao might refer to the sun's ecliptic, the huangdao 黃道 (simply referred to as dao in other pre-imperial sources, such as the Lüshi Chunqiu). Taiyi is also defined as the mother of the ten thousand things (萬物母): if Taiyi is the sun, this passage would refer to its essential function of ensuring the conditions for the existence and reproduction of things on earth, providing light and heat, and driving the water cycle (also explaining the fundamental role of shui 水, water, in the manuscript). Taiyi is finally said to weave making the warp of the ten thousand things (以紀為萬物經): the sun was traditionally taken both as a spatial and as a temporal benchmark for all things on earth, based on the directions of its rising and setting and on the regularity of its yearly cycle. According to this reading, the two halves of the text are consistent with each other: the first half provides a clarification of the various steps which cooperate for the completion of the year, which is marked by the apparent revolution of the sun in the sky. This revolution of the sun recalls the tiandao of the second half of the text, on which people should base their activities.

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Heng, Du. "Chuci zhangju." Database of Religious History, June 27, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12572754.

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The /Chuci zhangju/ 楚辭章句 (The Section and Sentence Commentary to the /Verses of the Chu/) is a collection of verses written in the Chuci—or "Verses of the Chu"—genre, compiled and annotated by Wang Yi 王逸 (fl. 130–140 CE), a scholar-official of the Eastern Han (25–220). The word "Chu" designates the watery southern region of present-day China along the Yangzi River, at one point an independent kingdom before its conquest in 223 BCE by the expanding Qin empire (221–206 BCE). The founders of the subsequent Han empires (202 BCE–220 CE) hailed from the Chu region. As one of the two oldest extant collections of Chinese verses, the /Chuci/ is traditionally conceived of as the younger, southern, and "romantic" counterpart to the /The Classic of Poetry/ (Shijing 詩經), the older, northern, and canonical anthology associated with the culture of the Zhou polity (ca.1046–256 BCE). The term "Chuci" can be used to designate both this anthology and the Chuci genre or style (also known as the /sao/ 騷). Poems written in the Chuci or /sao/ style employ a distinctive meter and a specialized repertoire of vocabularies and formulae, in addition to references to the landscape and mythology of the south. They also tend to be fantastical and elegiac in content and tone. || Wang Yi ascribes the first seven titles (in the received 12th-century /Chuci buzhu/ 楚辭補注 edition), roughly the earliest layer of this compilation, to the archetypical poet of the Chuci genre, Qu Yuan 屈原 (trad. 343–290 BCE). An upright minister of Chu, Qu Yuan is said to have been exiled on account of slander and wrote a body of verses during his banishment, before drowning himself in the Miluo 汨羅 river. The most well-known among these verses is the first piece of the compilation, "Li sao" 離騷 (Encountering Sorrow). Except for the final piece associated with Wang Yi, the remaining titles are attributed either to Qu Yuan's purported disciples or to literary figures of the Western Han (202 BCE–7 CE). The earliest historical event known to be associated with this text took place in 139 BCE, when Liu An 劉安 (179?–112 BCE), the King of Huainan, paid a visit to his nephew, Emperor Wu of Han (r.141-87 BCE), and is said to have presented Chuci materials to the young emperor (/Hanshu/ 44.2145). Wang Yi claims as the basis of his commentary in /Chuci zhangju/ earlier exegetical writings, which include a work attributed to Liu An. || Prior to its introduction to the Han imperial court, verses composed in the Chuci genre might have been employed in ritual and performative settings, although the extant poems in /Chuci zhangju/ are best understood as literary rewritings that indirectly preserve traces of the earlier ritual contexts. Each piece within the poetic suite "Nine Songs" (Jiu ge 九歌), for instance, addresses a god or a type of spirit in a pantheon of deities, most of whom are associated with nature. Two of the three "Summons" (/zhao/ 招) pieces, such as "Summoning the Soul" (Zhao hun 招魂), call upon deceased spirits, and might have evolved from funerary chants. "Heavenly Questions" (Tianwen 天問) contains over 150 questions concerning cosmogony, cosmology, legendary and historical heroes, including the kings of the Chu state. "Far Roaming (Yuan you 遠遊) suggests a process of self-cultivation or even self-divinization. Some of the motifs and formulae appear to have religious significance, such as the failed quests for goddesses and heavenly processions encircling a mandala-like cosmos. || The formation process of the anthology /Chuci zhangju/ attests to the incorporation of this body of materials into Han elite literary culture. The composition of the written pieces in this anthology involves the reworking and re-interpretation of existing verses as the literary compositions of the scholar-official class, whose ethos is embodied by the archpoet Qu Yuan. Its later, imitative pieces, along with its exegetical writings, are centered around the political and moral concerns of the scholar-officials. Formulaic phrases that might have once been associated with ritual purification, for example, became metaphors for moral purity in the context of court politics. Since the Han, composing Chuci verses and imitating the /Chuci zhangju/ often functioned as a space of negotiation between political loyalty and dissent. || The /Chuci zhangju/ also has its legacy in popular culture. Folk worship of Qu Yuan during the Duanwu 端午 (Fifth Day of the Fifth Lunar Month) became one of the major yearly festivities in traditional and contemporary China. The commemoration of the drowned poet serves as the etiological explanation for customs such as the dragon boat race. || In existing scholarship, the Chuci corpus has often been understood through the lens of shamanism—translators from Arthur Waley to Gopal Sukhu have rendered the religious specialist "wu" 巫 as "shaman"—which is nevertheless a much-debated interpretative framework. Due to the near absence of direct evidence external to the text, reconstructions of the time, place, belief systems, and practices of its earlier religious contexts are at best educated guesses. This entry focuses on the formation process of the /Chuci zhangju/ as a literary anthology in the Han imperial and elite circle, between Liu An's visit in 139 BCE and Wang Yi's period of activities. It will nevertheless acknowledge the religious elements explicitly mentioned within the poems, such as its pantheon and cosmology.

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Zongli, Lu. "Chen-Wei Texts." Database of Religious History, June 27, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12573285.

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The Chen-Wei Texts, or "prophetic-apocryphal" texts, refer to a corpus of religious texts that prevailed from the 1st to the 7th century C.E. in China. Chen 讖, meaning subtle and fulfilled prophecy, represents a number of esoteric writings, such as the Hetu 河圖"Diagram of the Yellow River" and Luoshu 洛書 "Script of the Luo River." An early appearance of Hetu in pre-Qin texts was described as precious stone or treasurable book. No later than the Warring States period, Hetu and Luoshu were commonly regarded as auspicious portents, in the form of texts with diagrams recording divination and prophecy. It was also believed that these texts sprang up from the Yellow and Luo rivers carried by mysterious animals, such as the dragon and turtle. Earlier Han (202 B.C.E.-8 C.E.) practitioners of magic methods produced a number of esoteric texts named after the Hetu and Luoshu. These texts circulated among the practitioners of magic methods (fangshi方士) and proto-Daoists from the Third to the First centuries B.C.E. These writings covered and mixed with knowledges and concepts of astrology, geography, divination, traditional medicine, ancient myths, and witchcraft, etc. In the Earlier Han, these writings were sometimes used as prognostication books for political interests, especially when imperial legitimation and Heaven's Mandate were under examination. A high tide of political manipulation of the chen texts took place during Wang Mang's 王莽usurpation of the Earlier Han and the establishment of Later Han (25-220), between 8 to 25 C.E. Once Emperor Guangwu 光武, the founding emperor of the Later Han, secured his throne, he instructed a few learned Confucian scholars to collate and purify the chen texts, ensuring that the prophetic messages were in favor of the Han imperial house. The Earlier Han Confucian teachings that had a mystical nature, such as the teachings of the Gongyang公羊 School, the Chunqiu fanlu春秋繁露 by Dong Zhongshu, the Jingshi Yizhuan 京氏易傳, Interpretation Associated with the Book of Change by Jing Fang京房, and Liu Xin's 劉歆theories on Hongfan wuxing洪範五行, were also merged into "prophetic interpretation" (jingchen 經讖) associated with the Confucian canons. In the last year of Emperor Guangwu's reign (56 C.E.), an endorsed version of the prophetic texts was publicly announced. According to Zhang Heng張衡(78-139), a renowned astronomer and writer, the endorsed version, under the corpus title of tuchen圖讖 "Diagram and Prophecy", consisted of eighty one titles or volumes, including both Hetu and Luoshu and the prophetic interpretations associating with the "seven canons." "Five Canons" and "Six Canons" were common terms used to refer to the Confucian classics in the Earlier and Later Han. "Seven Canons" occurs a few times in the Later Han materials, sometimes together with prophetic interpretations. The "Seven" indicates the Book of Change易, the Book of History書, the Book of Odes詩, the Book of Rites禮, the Book of Music樂, the Annals春秋, and the Book of Filial Piety孝經 (and in some occasions the Analects 論語). Encouraged by the Later Han authorities, the learning of prophetic texts played a predominantly ideological role during the Later Han and the Three Kingdoms periods. These prophetic interpretations, which prophesized the Han House's legitimacy to receive Heaven's Mandate, were soon accepted as a secret canon among the Later Han Confucian schools. The two branches of the texts, the esoteric writings named after the Hetu and Luoshu, and the prophetic interpretations associated with the seven canons, although derived from different religious or intellectual origins, soon began to interact each other and mutually penetrated. In the late period of the Later Han and then after, these texts were taken as a corpus often referred to as Chen-Wei, literally "prophecy and weft" (a counterpart to Jing經, "classic" or warp), a corpus of prophetic-apocryphal texts. Naming the prophetic interpretation texts after wei was a late Later Han phenomenon yet prevalent in post-Han eras. As a double-edged sword routinely used in socio-political struggles, established powers became vigilant about the prophecies and offensive ideas in the Chen-Wei texts. A series of bans against the Chen-Wei texts were issued repeatedly by authorities one after another from the Third to Seventh centuries. Most parts of the Chen-Wei texts are no longer extant. From the middle of 14th to early 21st century, scholars have been working hard to collect and collate fragments of Chen-Wei and have been trying to put them together, wishing to restore the Han dynasty Chen-Wei texts to a certain extent. Dozens of Chen-Wei collections have been published. The most influential collection should be the Jushu Isho Shusei 重修緯書集成 [Revised Edition of the Collection of the Apocryphal Texts] (1971–1991) by Yasui Kôzan and Nakamura Shôhachi. However, textual problems remain in all existing collections: wrong collection, missing- collection, wrong title, wrong or missing source, suspicious source, wrong dating, etc. Currently, a research project led by Lu Zongli is in progress, attempting to re-collect and re-collate the Chen-Wei texts, which should be more accurate, more reliable and more authentic.

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Corina, Smith. "Huainanzi 淮南子". Database of Religious History, 27 червня 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12572762.

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(1) Huainanzi 淮南子 (lit. Masters of Huainan) is an encyclopaedic cosmological treatise dating from the early Western Han 漢 (205 BC–9 AD). The text was produced at the court of the kingdom of Huainan 淮南. The finer details of the text's composition process, as well as the identity and role of a possible author, remain the subject of debate among scholars. The text was presented to Emperor Wu of Han 漢武帝 (r. 140–87 BC) in 139 BC by his own uncle and second king of Huainan, Liu An 劉安 (c. 179–122 BC), under the simple title of Neishu 内書 (Inner Writings). The occasion is described in Liu An's official biographies in Sima Qian's 司馬遷 (d. c. 86 BC) Shiji 史記 (Records of the Grand Historian) and Ban Gu's 班固 (32–92) Hanshu 漢書 (Book of the Han), as well as in Gao You's 高誘 (c. 168–212) preface to his commentary to Huainanzi. (2) The Huainanzi comprises of twenty-one treatises (xun 訓), normally called "chapters", each of which encapsulates a thematic body of knowledge. Their content ranges from proto-science, metaphysics, and cosmogony to the more practical milieus of military strategy, ritual practice, and statecraft. By Huainanzi's own explicit claim in its postface "Yaolüe" 要略, its cycle of treatises synthesises, subsumes, and renders obsolete all other conceptual projects, past, present, and future, in order to formulate a perfect, complete articulation of the world. The ruler who digests this cosmological schema will master the fundamental workings of the realm and beyond, making Huainanzi the ultimate ruler's manual. (3) Many scholars have attempted to give full expression to the unitary nature of the cosmology put forth in Huainanzi. Michael Puett argues that it is a "phenomenology" that pushes the notion of "a monistic cosmos" to "the point when absolutely everything is seen as fully and inherently linked – not just seen as undifferentiated, but as even so linked that the very distinction of differentiated and undifferentiated is obliterated." ("Violent Misreadings: The Hermeneutics of Cosmology in the Huainanzi," Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 72 [2000]: 40.) Benjamin Wallacker states that, in it, "[e]ach unique phenomenon is both part of and equal to the great unity of the cosmos." (The Huai-nan-tzu, Book Eleven: Behavior, Culture, and the Cosmos [New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1962], 10.) It is my personal interpretation that Huainanzi's diverse chapters are given to the formulation of a fractal cosmology, thereby achieving within limited text space a schema that is theoretically infinite in scope, application, and inter-connectedness. (4) Four of the most crucial features of Huainanzi's cosmology are "resonance" (ganying 感應, lit. "affecting and responding"), qi 氣 (vital breath, energy-matter), shen 神 (spirit, the numinous), and dao 道 (the Way). Resonance refers to the ability of separate entities to affect each other remotely, without any apparent transaction of physical force. The cosmic medium through which resonance is carried is qi; all forms, from the mythical to the mundane, are coalescences of qi. More rarefied coalescences of qi are associated with shen, a term that is variously used in reference to specific spirits and gods; to spirits and the supernatural in general; and to "the numinous" as a general, nebulous aspect pervading the world. Dao corresponds to reality at its most rarefied, referring to something like "ultimate reality" or "reality as it really is," before and beyond the bewildering frenzy of qi coalescences. "Dao" also suggests the force that gives motion and direction to reality, with its frenzy of qi coalescences. (5) Huainanzi's cosmological model extends to the delimitation of moral and other norms. However, I would argue that these norms must always be understood as artefacts of the text's overarching cosmological project. In other words, what norms are posited are done so as a reflection of their contextual application within this wider schema and their utility in its articulation, and must not be isolated from this precise context. (6) Huainanzi's ambitious claim to cosmological comprehensiveness has proved controversial on a number of interconnected fronts. First and foremost, scholars have not always been convinced that there is unity and consistency of thought across the text's chapters. The present consensus is that the twenty-one chapters build upon one another, establishing the text as a conceptual whole through sequence, at least. The claim that Huainanzi might demonstrate a unity thought has sat uneasily alongside the text's traditional affiliation of "miscellaneous" or "eclectic" (zajia 雜家), per the ideological categorisation rubric of the Han imperial librarians. This claim is also, in the view of some scholars, implicated in uncertainties regarding the identity/ies and number of the text's author(s). Some scholars, moreover, have convincingly argued that any reconstruction of Huainanzi's cosmology ought to be tempered by the wider political contexts of the text's production, about which much remains tantalisingly uncertain. Contemporary Huainanzi scholarship unfortunately remains in a less advanced state than that of many other equivalent texts, and so many of these concerns are yet to be explored in-depth through the dialogues of multiple studies. (7) Huainanzi had a notable impact on premodern thought in China. Throughout the premodern period, the text impacted proto-scientific thought from the natural philosophy of Wang Chong's 王充 (27–100) Lunheng 論衡 (Discourses Balanced) to the Song 宋 (960–1279) encyclopaedia Taiping yulan 太平御覽 (Imperial overview of the Taiping period). The text was an important source within religious and philosophical Daoist discourse, with Liu An entering an evolving pantheon of Daoist "immortals" (xian 仙; see Ge Hong's 葛洪 [283–343] hagiography "Huainan wang" 淮南王 in Shenxian zhuan 神仙傳 [Biographies of Deities and Immortals], Wenyuange siku quanshu 文淵閣四庫全書 vol. 1059, 253–311 [Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1986], 284–5.) However, as far as is known, there is, either during the Han or shortly after, no organised religious group whose form or practices are directly associated with the text or take the text as scripture. Any database questions referring to religious groups should be understood in this context. (8) During the modern period, Huainanzi has remained consistently understudied relative to other early texts. After a series of Japanese critical translations appeared in the 1910s and 1920s, there were no major developments for several decades, until translations and studies of individual chapters began to appear in Western languages from the late 1950s onwards. The first complete critical translation in a Western language was a French edition released in 2003 as part of the Collection Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

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Francesca, Puglia. "Changsha Zidanku Chu bo shu 長沙子彈庫楚帛書 1 (Chu Silk Manuscript)". Database of Religious History, 27 червня 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12573444.

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The Zidanku Silk Manuscript 1, also known as the Chu Silk Manuscript from Zidanku in Changsha (Changsha Zidanku Chu bo shu 長沙子彈庫楚帛書), and commonly referred to as the Chu bo shu 楚帛書 (Chu silk manuscript), is a silk manuscript (47 cm long and 38 cm wide) unearthed by robbers in 1942 from a Warring States tomb in Zidanku, southeast of the former city walls of Changsha. The tomb has been dated by archaeologists as having been closed around 300 BCE. The manuscript, which contains a brief cosmogonic account, is mainly concerned with astronomical and astrological content and is deemed to have been used in divination practice. The Chu bo shu has been buried together with at least two other silk manuscripts, and these three texts represent the only silk manuscripts from Warring States China that have been discovered to date. After having been stolen, the Chu bo shu has been first acquired by an art collector called Cai Jixiang 蔡季襄 (1897–1980). In 1945, he personally published the first examination of the manuscript. Subsequently, the manuscript has been transferred to the United States of America and is now stored at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. The most distinctive feature of this manuscript is that it consists of both text and illustrations. The central part of the silk cloth displays two main texts, that are arranged in opposite directions. These two central texts are surrounded by twelve zoomorphic figures pictured in the peripheral area of the cloth, each of which is accompanied by a brief text. Each figure (with its respective short text) corresponds to one of the twelve months of the year. The three months making up each season are oriented toward a particular direction and each side of the cloth represents a season. There are four colored trees, each drawn in one of the four angles of the cloth. Due to exposure to light, folds, and worn edges, the Chu bo shu is unreadable in several spots. Nevertheless, the division into three main sections is clearly noticeable. Each of the three sections is concerned with some aspects of the lunisolar calendar: the longer one in the central section of the cloth is focused on the year; the shorter one in the central section, with the seasons; the short captions which accompany the twelve figures ringed around the main texts, with the twelve months. The main interest of the author of the Chu bo shu seems to be to avoid catastrophic events by having the calendar used with proper respect and knowledge. The three sections of the Chu bo shu: - The short text: the main subjects of the inner short text are the seasons. This section displays cosmogonical mythologies dealing with gods and with the establishment of natural order, based on the proceeding of the sun, the moon, and the seasons. - The long text: the main subject of the inner long text is sui 歲 (year). This section focuses on the possibility of disrupting the established natural order accounted for in the seasons' section of the manuscript. The main concern is the danger subsequent to a possible disruption of this order and therefore the importance attached to the knowledge and the understanding of the year for the purpose of avoiding this risk. The knowledge of the year is based on the observation of the proceeding of the celestial bodies, and in particular of the sun and the moon. - The twelve short texts: twelve hemerological captions which accompany the same number of zoomorphic figures, understood as gods associated with the twelve months. Each of the twelve texts presents the name of the lunar month (or its spirit), followed by a two-character definition of its functions, and a brief paragraph in which it is stated whether certain actions are permissible or not in a given month, in the guise of the monthly ordinances that we find in the Lüshi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋. The longer text written in the center of the silk cloth is positioned with the three winter months on top, spring months on the right, summer months below, and autumn months on the left, with the shorter text (also written in the middle of the cloth) arranged upside-down on its side. The manuscript's layout suggests that it is purposely cardinally oriented and probably conceived in such a way to be rotated during its reading and use. The fact that the layout of the Chu bo shu requires its reader or user to rotate it (or to circle around it) suggests that it is related to divination practices. In fact, this mechanism of rotation, together with the concern with the motion of the celestial bodies and the flowing of time, is reminiscent of the function and the working of a divination object known as the shi 式 (cosmograph or diviner's board), in which a round disk (that represents the sky) rotates upon a square base (that represents the earth).

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Francesca, Puglia. "Heshang Gong 河上公 commentary on the Daodejing 道德经". Database of Religious History, 27 червня 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12573985.

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The Heshang Gong 河上公 commentary, deemed to have been completed before the end of the Han 汉 dynasty, is the earliest complete commentary on the Daodejing 道德经 ("Classic of the Way and Virtue") that survived until the present day. It represents, together with Wang Bi's 王弼 edition, the most circulated edition of the Daodejing. The author, considered a Daoist hermit, is only known by the pseudonym Heshang Gong. His real name is unknown and very little is known about his life. The first mention of a Daodejing commentary bearing the name Heshang Gong appears in the catalogue of Daoist literature of the Sui shu 隨書: here an edition of the Daodejing in two parts, accompanied by a Heshang Gong's commentary (from the time of Han Wendi 文帝) is mentioned. Some biographical information is known from the preface to the commentary written by the Daoist Ge Xuan 葛玄 in the third century CE. Of him, it is said that he lived in a hut on the banks of the Huanghe 黃河 and that he devoted himself exclusively to the study of the Daodejing. There is also an anecdote that describes him as a sage with mystical abilities: after declining Wendi's invitation to court, when the emperor came to him seeking guidance on understanding the Daodejing, Heshang Gong is said to have ascended to heaven, floating in mid-air, admonishing the emperor - and then, according to this account, he finally provided the emperor with his commentary on the text. However, such an account is unrealistic for at least two reasons: firstly, the large number of synonymic compounds reveals a later date of the commentary's compilation; secondly, if the emperor had indeed received a copy, it would certainly have been catalogued in the Han shu 漢書. But thanks to direct references to the commentary or to Heshang Gong's proposed reading of the Daodejing in the Huainanzi and other texts, we know that it must have been compiled by the end of the later Han 后汉 (220 CE) at the latest – although the Laozi 老子 attached to it may have been interpolated by later editors. As pointed out by Robinet, the commentary uses a twofold register, serving both as a guide to individual self-cultivation practice (thus preparing the reader for the book's practical use as a guide to meditation) and as a political device for the state. In this way, the commentary reveals a Huanglao 黃老 approach, offering an understanding of the dao 道 on the one hand cosmological and on the other pragmatic and political. Methodologically, Heshang Gong uses an exegetical method distinctive of the Han period, namely the zhangju 章句, dividing the text into 81 chapters and glossing it sentence by sentence. The reading of the text proposed by Heshang Gong in his commentary introduces new concepts, absent or almost absent from the text, and gives particular prominence to certain ideas, such as that of unity or oneness (yi 一), which is recognized as an ordering principle. It makes extensive reference to concepts rooted in correlative cosmology, such as the principles of yin 陰 and yang 陽, theorizing a system of complete correspondence between cosmos, society and human beings, in which the sage embraces the one and emulates it through non-action, regulating his body as well as ordering the state. The philosophical analysis proposed in the commentary identifies the dao of heaven with the dao of the human being, theorizing a parallel development of the cosmic order, the socio-political order and individual longevity. From a prosodic point of view, compared to the bamboo and silk versions, the Daodejing accompanied by the Heshang Gong commentary amplifies the tendency to have four-character sentences. If some sentences of this type were already present in the manuscript editions, in the text of Heshang Gong, the 4-character sentences became a proper pattern. Both the received versions of Heshang Gong and Wang Bi manifest this tendency towards four-character sentences, basically achieved through the elimination of particles. Of the approximately 400 characters that have been eliminated in these editions, compared to the silk manuscripts, most are represented by particles such as zhi 之 or ye 也. For example, the following sentence from chapter 2: "有亡之相生也" in the Mawangdui editions became "故有無相生" in the Heshang Gong edition. In this sentence, another linguistic difference can be highlighted when compared to the earlier manuscript versions, namely the almost exclusive use of the negation wu 無 where the manuscripts have wang 亡. Furthermore, the Heshang Gong commentary provides titles for the individual chapters of the Daodejing, which almost serve as instructions for the reader, although these headings may have been added later by religious Daoists. For instance, the first chapter is titled Ti dao 體道 ("embodying the way"), the second, Yang shen 養身 ("nourishing the body/person"), the third, An min 安民 ("pacifying the people), and so on.

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Francesca, Puglia. "Wang Bi's 王弼 commentary to the Daodejing 道德經: the Laozi Daodejing zhu 老子道德經注". Database of Religious History, 27 червня 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12574448.

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The Wang Bi 王弼 edition and commentaries to the Daodejing 道德經 represent, together with the Heshang Gong 河上公 edition, the most circulated editions of the text. Wang Bi, styled as Fusi 輔嗣, was born in Luoyang in 226 AD and died at the age of 23 in 249 AD, because of an epidemic. A promising philosopher already since a very young age, during the Three Kingdoms period (San guo 三國, 220 – 280 AD), he served as a bureaucrat in the state of Cao Wei 曹魏. Identified by scholarship as either Xuanxue 玄學 (with Lao-Zhuang 老莊 and Huang-Lao 黃老 influences) or primarily Confucian, he is mostly known for his commentaries on the Lunyu 論語 (of which we only have transmitted quotations), on the Yijing 易經, and on the Daodejing: the Laozi Daodejing zhu 老子道德經注 (Commentary to the Laozi) and the Laozi Zhilüe 老子指略 (Introduction to the Laozi). Wang Bi's edition of the Laozi 老子, which accompanies his commentary, is widely regarded as the standard edition of the text, despite showing some later interpolations. Nevertheless, his recension of the Laozi and the attached commentary have been translated into several languages, as well as having influenced the philosophical debate in China for nearly two millennia. The earliest transmitted copies of Wang Bi's edition of the Laozi with his commentary that have come down to us are dated to the Ming Dynasty 明朝 (1368–1644) and some discrepancies are noticeable between the Laozi edition attached to the commentary and the quotations given in the commentary itself. There is a total of 79 passages in which Wang Bi's commentary differs from Wang Bi's Laozi. In 78 of these occurrences, the reading in the commentary matches the reading found in Guodian 郭店, Mawangdui 馬王堆, and other manuscript-editions of the Laozi or in quotations from the Laozi in various earlier texts (e.g., in the Huainanzi 淮南子 or the Zhanguo ce 戰國策). It is plausible that the verses quoted in the commentary represent the Laozi known to Wang Bi, while the Laozi edition attached to Wang Bi's commentary might have suffered more than the commentary from later interpolations and changes (especially elements taken from Heshang Gong's text). The differences between quotations from Wang Bi's commentary in other texts and the transmitted version of his commentary are small, implying that it must be close to the original written by Wang Bi. Wang Bi refers to a Laozi text divided into zhang 章 and pian 篇, but without ever mentioning a division into a Dejing section and a Daojing section. In the Laozi Zhilüe, Wang Bi always refers to the Laozi, while he never calls the text "Daodejing." His philosophical analysis of the Daodejing is based on the centrality of the notion of wu 無 (non-being, nothingness) as the point of origin for the generation of the ten thousand things (wanwu 萬物). Wu, according to Wang Bi, corresponds to the Dao 道 (Way), and this concept is echoed by various metaphors in the body of the text (for example, the hub of a wheel, the valley, the door). Wang Bi also identifies wu with the function of the Dao and of Ziran 自然 (naturalness) meaning that the Dao acts out of nothing, and never acts out of something – it acts with no consciousness. And the sage does the same: he embodies wuwei 無為, not in the sense of "non-action," but rather in the sense of "non-deliberate action." Acting against the principle of wuwei, that is, against the Dao, inevitably brings danger. The sage, albeit being a human being and being involved in human affairs, according to Wang Bi, always acts naturally and responds to things spontaneously and with no personal desires. Wang Bi identifies Confucius with the Laozian sage, capable of wuwei, embodying the principle of nothingness. Wang reads the Laozi asserting that you 有 (being) comes from wu, and that wu is the ultimate substance of being, conferring enormous centrality to emptiness (xu 虛) and to the idea of emptying one's heart-mind in order to respond to things in their ziran. Because of this peculiar understanding of the concept of emptiness in the Laozi, Wang Bi's commentary played a crucial role in the popularization of Mahayana Buddhist doctrines in China. Wang Bi's provides comments on the various zhang trying to reduce ambivalence in more obscure passages through references to passages of clearer content; he explains the words, clarifies the metaphors, and provides grammatical explications where needed. Wang Bi's Laozi has been transmitted divided into 81 zhang of which two (zhang 31 and zhang 66) are not provided with a commentary. For the remaining 79 zhang, 403 commentary statements are provided in total. It is plausible that the entire comment for each zhang was originally written at the end of the zhang, justifying the presence of repeated verses from the Laozi in the commentary, preceded by 故曰/故/故云/故謂.

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Francesca, Puglia. "Mawangdui Laozi 馬王堆老子". Database of Religious History, 27 червня 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12573936.

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Mawangdui Laozi 馬王堆老子 is the name attributed to two silk manuscripts excavated from Mawangdui tomb n. 3 during an archaeological expedition in the small village of Mawangdui, in the outskirts of the city of Changsha 長沙, Hunan 湖南 province. These two silk texts represent some of the earliest versions (with the exception of the three Laozi bamboo bundles excavated from Guodian tomb n. 1) of the text later known as the Daodejing 道德經 ("Classic of the Way and Virtue") and are also known under the name Laozi boshu 老子帛書 (Laozi silk manuscripts). The two manuscripts are now preserved at the Hunan Provincial Museum (湖南省博物館) in the city of Changsha. The burial complex of Mawangdui includes three graves belonging to three members of the family of the Marquis of Dai 軑 and Chancellor of the Kingdom of Changsha, Li Cang 利蒼, who lived during the early years of the Han 漢 Dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE). Li Cang occupied tomb n. 2, his wife Xin Zhui 辛追, tomb n. 1, and one of their sons, whose name is unknown, tomb n. 3, where the two Laozi manuscripts have been found. Thanks to an inventory slip found inside the tomb, it is known that it has been sealed in the year 168 BCE. A large number of silk texts, philosophical, astronomical, military, and medical in content (to mention a few), were found inside a lacquered box inside the tomb, totaling about 120000 written words. Some of the manuscripts were already known to the tradition, such as the case of the two Laozi, the Yijing 易經 (Classic of changes) found within the same tomb, along with various commentaries related to it, and a copy of the Zhanguo ce 戰國策 (Annals of the Warring States), while others represent texts unknown until the time of the excavation or known only by their title. As regards the two Laozi, these are two versions that are roughly complete with respect to the transmitted text, and they are more alike to each other than to any other edition of the Daodejing, but they still exhibit a few discrepancies. They are referred to as Laozi A (jia 甲) and Laozi B (yi 乙), and both present various lacunae due to damage to the material support, to a greater extent in the case of manuscript A. What principally distinguishes these two versions from the transmitted text is the inversion of the two macro-sections that make up the Daodejing: meaning that, in both Mawangdui texts, the De 德 (virtue) section precedes the Dao 道 (way) section, as is also the case for the Peking University bamboo slips version of the Laozi (Hanjianben Laozi 漢簡本老子), acquired by Peking University in 2009, and dated around the reign of Emperor Wu 武 (156 – 87 BCE). Manuscript B even presents the characters De and Dao as the titles in the openings of the two sections, followed by the total number of characters, thus giving the impression that the two sections were perceived as two distinct texts. The reverse order of the two macro-sections resulted in the two manuscripts found in Mawangdui also being referred to as Dedaojing 德道經. The order of passages also varies slightly from the textus receptus. Taking the chapters of the transmitted Daodejing as a reference, the order found in the Mawangdui manuscripts is: 38-39, 41, 40, 42-66, 80-81, 67-79 (De) and 1-21, 24, 22-23, 25-37 (Dao). The sequence of the passages follows the same order in both manuscript editions. Compared to the textus receptus, some verses are incomplete, or present lexical and graphic variants – not always identical between the two editions A and B. Moreover, Mawangdui texts include a greater number of grammatical words than the transmitted Daodejing: an example is the far more frequent use of the appositional sentence final particle ye 也. Of the two manuscripts, Laozi A is earlier and dated roughly between 221 and 206 BCE; Laozi B is dated around 206-194 BCE (during the reign of Liu Bang 劉邦, emperor Gao Zu 高祖 of the Han). In support of these dating hypotheses, Laozi A is written in the Qin 秦 dynasty (221-206 BCE) xiaozhuan 小篆 (small seal) calligraphic style, while Laozi B is written in the lishu 隸書 (clerical script) calligraphic style. Furthermore, text B avoids the use of Liu Bang's name characters, employing guo 國 as a synonym for bang 邦. Yet, it does not avoid neither ying 盈 nor heng 恆, from Liu Ying and Liu Heng's names. Text A does not present such avoidance, reinforcing the hypothesis that it must have been transcribed before 206 BCE. Although the two versions are very similar to each other, some variations in wording (beyond the already mentioned tabooed words in manuscript B) are present. To cite a few examples: the second verse of the received chapter 46 in Mawangdui A reads 天下無道戎馬生於郊, while Mawangdui B reads 道戎馬生於郊, with no repetition of tianxia 天下, already present in the preceding verse, and the passage goes on reading 非莫大於可欲 in A, and 非莫大可欲 in B, with the omission of yu 於; the closing verse of received chapter 16 appears in manuscript A as 沕身不怠, and in manuscript B as 道乃沒身不殆, with either wu 沕 or mei 沒, and dai 怠 or dai 殆. Several orthographic inconsistencies suggest that manuscripts A and B may have been written by different scribes. Neither manuscript includes a systematic division into chapters and neither of them numbers them. Nevertheless, manuscript A presents a more systematized use of punctuation: comma-like strokes on the bottom right side of characters, that seems to signal a pause, and bigger dots in the center of a line at the beginning of longer textual sections that sometimes correspond to the division into chapters of the textus receptus. Laozi B only uses the comma-like stroke and does it sporadically. In some instances, chapters that are separate in the received Daodejing seem to be conceived as a continuous piece in the Mawangdui manuscripts. For example, the passage corresponding to chapter 68 from the received text starts with gu 故 (therefore) in Laozi B – indicating the connection with the preceding passage. Both the absence of a precise chapter division, particularly in Manuscript B, and the reverse order of the De and Dao sections have led scholars to question what the original structure of the text must have been. The division of the textus receptus into chapters could represent a later alteration by the commentators, but at the same time, the presence of punctuation marks that seem to signal in some way the partition between some sections in Laozi A would lead one to think that by the time that the manuscript was transcribed, some subdivisions must have already taken form. As regards the inverted order of the De and Dao sections, it could on the one hand represent a marginal issue, related to a misunderstanding in the sequence of transcription of the texts, but it could also indicate the existence, by the second century BCE, of two distinct textual traditions: one characterized by the Dao-de sequence and one by the De-Dao sequence. Even the very coexistence of two such similar manuscripts within the same burial prompts questions about their origins: it is still unclear whether these are two separate elaborations of the same original text. The two Laozi are inked on two separate silk scrolls along with other works. As for manuscript A, it is followed by four Confucian texts, while manuscript B follows a group of Huanglao 黃老 texts, known by the title Huangdi sijing 黃帝四經 (Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor). Laozi A is written on a silk cloth of about 350 cm (with the Laozi itself occupying around 170 cm in length), while Laozi B silk cloth is around 165 cm long.

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Francesca, Puglia. "Guodian Laozi 郭店老子". Database of Religious History, 27 червня 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12573902.

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Guodian Laozi 郭店老子 is the name given to three manuscripts inked on bamboo found during the 1993 archaeological excavation at Tomb No. 1 of the Guodian 郭店 Tombs near Jingmen 荊門, Hubei Province 湖北. These three manuscripts and the others (18 in total) found in the same tomb have been dated around the final phase of the Warring States period (453-222 BCE), approximately around 300 BCE. These three manuscripts, labeled as Manuscript A (jia 甲), B (yi 乙), and C (bing丙), constitute the very first edition found to date of material pertaining to the textual tradition of the Daodejing 道德經 ("Classic of the Way and Virtue"), predating by more than a century the two silk manuscripts (Boshuben 帛書本) found at Mawangdui 馬王堆 in 1973. The Laozi scrolls, along with the Ziyi 緇衣 and the Wuxing 五行, represent the only manuscripts related to already known texts found within the tomb: all other manuscripts were unknown until their discovery at Guodian. The three scrolls are distinguished by different handwriting and bamboo strips, and in total they comprise around one third of the transmitted Daodejing (about 1750 characters), presenting variations from the transmitted text in the lexicon, in the division into chapters, and furthermore they lack the canonical division into the Daojing 道經 (Classic of the Way) and Dejing 德經 (Classic of the Virtue) sections. Furthermore, the three scrolls vary greatly in length from one another. Laozi A is inked on 39 bamboo strips (32.3 cm in length), B is inked on 18 strips (30.6 cm), and C is inked on 14 strips (26.5 cm). It also needs to be noted that scroll C has identical bamboo strip length, binding marks, and handwriting from another text, that the editors of the Guodian Chumu Zhujian 郭店楚墓竹簡 (The Bamboo Manuscripts from the Chu Tomb at Guodian) entitled Taiyi sheng shui 太一生水: originally, the two texts were possibly bound together. The three bundles present only one duplication among them: in fact, the second half of received chapter 64 occurs both in bundle A and bundle C, despite presenting major variations in the two occurrences. The repetition of this passage in two scrolls, together with the division into three different scrolls of material closely related to the textual tradition of the Daodejing, and the possible coexistence of another manuscript (the Taiyi sheng shui) within the same scroll with Laozi C, suggest the possibility that, at the time of their burial around the end of the 4th century BCE, the three bundles were not perceived as forming one coherent text. Content-wise, with the only exception of the 14 bamboo strips that constitute the Taiyi sheng shui, all the material inked on the three scrolls can be traced to the transmitted Daodejing, with variations both in word choice and in the order of the passages. Most of the word variations are orthographic or homophonic, yet there are few instances in which the variations lead to significant change in meaning. Above all, in Laozi A, passage 1, which corresponds to the received chapter 19: the so-called Confucian virtues (sheng 聖, sagacity; zhi 智, knowledge; ren 仁, benevolence; yi 義, propriety) are not criticized as in its received counterpart. The questions whether these scrolls represented an older or original edition of the Laozi, or a selection from a larger corpus of textual material, or even separate texts not yet perceived as a coherent whole is still open to debate. But certainly, the Guodian archaeological find has predated to 300 BCE the existence of at least the philosophical core of the Daodejing. The themes covered within the three scrolls seem to overlap, so it seems unlikely that the three separate scrolls represent selections made from a single text based on a thematic choice. One example among all, the theme of non-action (either wuwei 無為 or wangwei 亡為 on bamboo) is present and central in all three scrolls. In particular, the person of the shengren 聖人 in the Guodian Laozi is throughout connected to the principle of non-action: the adherence to this principle appears as a crucial requirement for a person to be considered wise. The shengren is described as a person characterized by the lack of desires and by the attitude of avoiding purposeful action: in the bamboo text, not only wangwei appears eight times, but every occurrence of the word shengren is connoted by sentences with negative structure, that is, through the use of wu 無, wang 亡 or bu 不, that invoke wuwei.

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Garrido, Valeriia V. "The Symbol of the Dragon in the Cosmogonic Schemes of Ancient China." Voprosy Filosofii, March 28, 2023, 156–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.21146/0042-8744-2023-4-156-166.

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The symbol of the dragon is an important element of the cultural and historical identity of the Chinese people. This article attempts to analyze the symbol of the dragon in the genesis of Chinese philosophy, particularly in its cosmogonic and cosmological systems. The article shows that the mythological symbol of the dragon did not disappear at an early stage of the formation of Chinese civilization; on the contrary, it was fixed in the corpus of categories of philosophical thought and was used to express the cosmological laws and principles of Tao. The symbol of dragon can also be found in 4 symbols (or 4 images 四象, si xiang), 5 elements (五行, wu xing), 6 harmonies-correspondences (六合, liu he), 7 stars (七星, qi xing), 8 trigrams (八卦, ba gua) and 64 hexagrams (六十四卦, liu shi si gua). The article concludes that the symbol of the dragon lays at the very origins of Chinese culture since it expresses its main archetypal meanings; it embodies the naturalness (⾃然, zi ran) and the cycle of universal changes.

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Dong, Wang. "Western Zhou (1045 BCE - 771 BCE)." Database of Religious History, June 27, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12574565.

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Recording the state of our knowledge in March-April 2024, this entry on Western Zhou (circa 1045/1046 BCE - 771 BCE) examines the best/most creditable known primary and secondary sources (including archaeological, literary, and artistic evidence), data analysis, and approaches to and interpretations of the subject matter. As a key part of the three dynasties in Chinese history—legendary, real, imagined and unimagined— the Xia (夏, circa 2070 BCE - 1600 BCE), Shang (商, aka Yin 殷, circa 1600 BCE – 1046 BCE), and Zhou of early China, the Western Zhou (西周 circa 1046/1045 BCE - 771 BCE) began with King Wu of the Zhou in the "West" who toppled the last king of the Shang, and ended when Marquess of Shen (申) allegedly joined other tribal groups such as Quanrong (犬戎) took over the Zhou capital Hao and killed King You of the Zhou in 771 BCE, forcing the Zhou royal court to relocate (out of the Wei river valley near today's Xi'an area in Shaanxi Province) eastward to Luoyang, a strategic settlement/basin on the Yellow River in present Henan Province. In transmitted oral and written accounts especially some core texts of Confucius (551-479 BCE), the Western Zhou has been regarded highly as the "model" of ideal governance and social harmony in early China. (Li, 2006, p. 1; Wilkinson, 2012, pp. 688-702) What is "China" then? "Loosely defined, it [China] refers to the territory encompassed today by the People's Republic of China. But the original part of China where Chinese characters were written circa 1200 B.C.E. was a small region some 200 kilometers (125 miles) across. ... China's area grew and changed as surrounding peoples with different cultures and languages were defeated or absorbed." (Hansen, 2015, pp. 3-4) The very topic of Western Zhou ( circa 1046/1045 BCE – 771 BCE) also invites us living in the twenty-first century to be aware of the meaning of some key terms, religion, Chinese, non-Chinese, foreign, foreigners, the Hans, and the non-Hans, while unpacking racial nationalism, Han Chinese nationalism and sino-centrism /exceptionalism in ideological narratives, through written and archaeological records (Cheng, 2017; Marks, 2012; Wang, 2023; Wang, 2020). Religion, for instance, denotes the "belief in the existence of a god or gods, and the activities that are connected with the worship of them, or in the teachings of a spiritual leader." (https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/religion?q=religion) Generally speaking, the Western Zhou religion can be characterized mainly in the following three aspects: First, the Western Zhou shared with its predecessor, the Shang, a belief in a High God (Shangdi 上帝), ancestor worship, and divination that embodied the will of spirits and deities, although there was a lesser degree or even replacement of those practices as the Western Zhou developed. Second, the High God of the Shang slowly receded into the idea of heaven (tian 天), an abstract superbeing or overlord, and mandate of heaven (a kind of divine destiny in East Asian contexts) that justified rulership and switchover of rulers in the Western Zhou. Third, divination in the Western Zhou took places in various forms that might and/or might not have overlapped with the Shang oracle bones' practices. Transmitted classics, The Book of Changes, the Book of Documents, and the Book of Rites, have been widely considered a reflection of the Western Zhou religion. In historiography, "classical" modern scholarly works on the Western Zhou are probably mainly manifest in the modern fascination with Confucianism and Daoism, the early translations by James Legge and others, a sort of foundational trend that ran through the 19th-century sinology. Archaeological research on the Zhou arose in the 1920s alongside the excavations of Shang sites and generated considerable interest among Christian missionaries, scholars, art dealers, and others alike. Apart from artistic dimensions (e.g. bronze cauldrons), the evolution of the Chinese written language from oracle bones via bronze inscriptions to the post-Qin forms became a focus of attention, adding a linguistic layer to the understanding of the artifacts, with Bernhard Karlgren as a most prolific scholar. Although generic thematic overviews on the Zhou period as part of China's longer history abound, some research, e.g. by Friedrich Hirth, are dedicated to the history of the period in itself. One can find some trends and approaches to understanding the Western Zhou in the material listed in bibliography at the end. Most prominently are statecraft (Creel, Falkenhausen, Li), archaeology and artifacts (Shelach-Lavi, Chang, Rawson, Hsu), ritual and society (Khayutina, Cao & Chen, Rawson), socio-geographical perspectives (Flad & Chen, Li), diverse and ordinary people's lives and voices (Hansen, 2015), and long-term trajectory methodologies (Shelach and Jaffe, 2014). The Western Zhou was drawn into S. N. Eisenstadt's global argument about "axial age civilizations," through Mark Elvin, Tu Wei-ming and Cho Xun-hsu' contributions, which describe the emergence of 天 during early (Western) Zhou as a divine principle that links the Zhou up with Hellenic-Judaic-Christian (and Indic) cultures during the Axial Age, an argument that explicitly links cultural, geographical and developmental similarity during long periods of antiquity, or in today's words, international/global/world history. Lately, there have been some distinct approaches and metallic data analysis of the Western Zhou as seen in Hansen 2015 and Y.-K. Hsu, R. O'Sullivan and H. Li, 2021. Critical of the prevailing "dynastic cycle" or "traditional court historian" model of viewing history, Valerie Hansen's 2015 book breaks dynastic periodization by dividing imperial Chinese history into three phases: Inventing China (1250 BCE – 200 CE), Facing West (200 CE – 1000 CE), and Facing North (1000 – 1800) in hopes of bringing out more diverse and ordinary voices of peoples living in Chinas. Making use of published lead isotope data from artefacts and ore bodies, Hsu 2021 reveals the dynamic circulation of metal within the Zhou domains and its transportation network with neighboring regions particularly in metalliferous districts in the Yangtze area.

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Francesca, Puglia. "Daodejing 道德經". Database of Religious History, 27 червня 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12574225.

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Daodejing 道德經 ("Classic of the Way and Virtue") is the title, fixed toward the end of the second century CE, attributed to a roughly 5000-character book, divided into 81 chapters, and recognized, together with the Zhuangzi 莊子, as the fundamental text for the philosophical tradition called "Daoism" (Daojia 道家) – as well as for the later religious movement called "religious Daoism" (Daojiao 道教). The text is also known by the name of its traditionally credited author, Laozi 老子 (the Old Master) or by the title Wuqianwen 五千文 ("Classic of the Five Thousands Characters"). The historicity of its author has long been a matter of scholarly discussion: the first biographical notes on his figure, mostly inconsistent with each other, date back to the 1st century BCE and are found within Sima Qian 司馬遷 (c. 145–86 BCE) historiographical work, the Shiji 史記. To date, most scholars believe that Laozi represents a legendary figure whose historicization was the result of an attempt to legitimize philosophical and meditative practices associated with Daoism, and that the text is a collection of passages put together by different editors and compilers rather than the work of a single hand. Both transmitted and unearthed versions of this text have come down to us and are characterized by varying degrees of variation: in the total number of characters, the division into chapters, the division into the two sections of Daojing 道經 ("Classic of the Way", chapters 1-37) and Dejing 德經 ("Classic of the Virtue", chapters 38-81) and the sequence of the two sections, lexical variations, etc. Of the versions transmitted by tradition, the main ones are known by the name of the commentary to which they are attached. To name the most credited, among almost a thousand commentaries known to date, a version transmitted together with the commentary written by the Sanguo 三國 period (220 to 280 AD) philosopher Wang Bi 王弼 (226-249 AD), called the Wang Bi version; the Heshang Gong 河上公 version, which enjoyed enormous authority, but whose dating is uncertain (hypotheses range from the 2nd century BCE to the 4th century CE); the Yan Zun 巖尊 (59-24 BCE) version, which only includes the Dejing section of the text (the Daojing section apparently went lost between 1200 and 1445). As for the earliest reference to the Laozi, the earliest commentator on the text of which we are aware is the philosopher and intellectual Han Feizi (280-233 B.C.): two chapters of his work, entitled Jie Lao 解老 ("Commentary on the Laozi") and Yu Lao 喻老 ("Explanation of the Laozi"), comment on several chapters of the Laozi. The quoted passages are very close, though not identical to those found in the textus receptus. As for the unearthed sources, there have been several archaeological finds that have unearthed fragments and texts related to the Laozian textual tradition, including passages engraved on stone or jade and manuscripts on silk and bamboo. The most significant findings include manuscript versions found in Dunhuang 敦煌, Mawangdui 馬王堆 and Guodian 郭店. The so-called Xiang'er 想爾 edition of the Laozi, accompanied by the Xiang'er commentary to the text, has been recovered from the Buddhist grottoes of Dunhuang (Gansu) at the beginning of the twentieth century and only includes the Daojing section. The two archaeological discoveries at the Mawangdui site in 1973 and the Guodian site in 1993 contributed greatly to the understanding of the textual history of the Daodejing. In fact, two silk scrolls containing two almost complete copies of the Daodejing were unearthed at the Mawangdui site (Changsha, Hunan) in a tomb dated to 168 BCE, together with various philosophical and medical works. These texts, referred to as Text A (甲) and Text B (乙), distinguished by a few lexical differences, reverse the traditional order of the book's sections, having the Dejing section first and the Daojing section next. Regarding the find at the Guodian site (Jingmen, Hubei), in Tomb No. 1, dated around 300 BCE, these are three bamboo scrolls distinguished by different handwriting and bamboo strips, comprising a total of around one third of the transmitted Daodejing (about 1750 characters), with variations from the transmitted text in the lexicon, division of chapters, and the absence of the division into the Daojing and Dejing sections. Moreover, of the three scrolls, the so-called scroll C has identical bamboo strip length, binding marks and handwriting from another text, titled Taiyi sheng shui 太一生水 – possibly originally bound together with Guodian Laozi C. The division into several scrolls of material closely related to the textual tradition of the Daodejing, together with the presence of another manuscript linked to one of the three scrolls, contributed to the understanding of what might have been the perception of the Daodejing as a unitary text in the third century BCE. Conceivably, the Daodejing did not stabilize as a unified text until the second century BCE, and even in the early imperial period it seems plausible that several different editions were circulating rather than one standard or official edition. As for the content of the work, the various chapters or stanzas (zhang 章) are heterogeneous in themes and vary in length. These contain maxims and aphorisms, written in partially rhymed prose. The traditional division into the two sections of Daojing and Dejing probably originates from the very fact that the first chapter of the Daojing section focuses on the concept of Dao 道 (Way), while the first chapter of the Dejing section focuses on the concept of De 德 (Virtue). In addition to the Dao as a cosmic, ineffable principle, not expressible through language, which governs the mechanisms of the cosmos, and the De, as a potency or virtue derived from the Dao itself, the Daodejing deals with several other issues: the concept of wuwei 無為 (avoidance of action), the opposition between being (you 有) and non-being (wuyou 無有), the cosmogonic process that brings about the emergence of the ten thousand things, the simplicity that recalls the uncarved wood (pu 樸), the sage person (shengren 聖人) that avoids action and is reluctant to war, the unity with the Dao, that is the ultimate achievement of the sage, as well as an anti-Confucian stance, which is most evident in the textus receptus but significantly less explicit in the manuscript version found in Guodian.

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Yu, Wang. "Luofu Shan." Database of Religious History, June 27, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12574544.

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Known as the "Grand Mountain of the Yue Region (粤岳)" according to the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian 司馬遷, Mount Luofu 羅浮山 held great significance as a cultural hub in southern China. It was also revered as one of the foremost mountains in Chinese history and culture due to the rich history of a significant number of practitioners of Daoism and Buddhism, as well as Confucian scholars who lived, studied, taught, and practiced their doctrines there. During its heyday, Mount Luofu was recorded as a thriving center of "Nine Taoist Temples, Eighteen Buddhist Temples, and Twenty-two Hermitages (九觀十八寺二十二庵)". The name of Mount Luofu has many legendary origins, with the most renowned myth recounting a tale from the immortal Penglai Mountain 蓬萊 where a peak named "Fu Mountain (浮山)" resided. It was said that during the era of Emperor Yao, a period marred by widespread land inundation, the "Fu Mountain" from the sea drifted to the Lingnan region, where it collided with the pre-existing "Luo Mountain (罗山)" and merged to become Mount Luofu. Geographically, Mount Luofu is situated in the northwest of Boluo County 博羅縣, Huizhou City 惠州市, Guangdong Province 廣東省, China. With a total area exceeding 260 square kilometers, its principal peak, Feiyun Peak 飛雲頂, stands at an elevation of 1,296 meters. Mount Luofu is renowned for its unique rock formations, majestic waterfalls, mystical caves, abundant rainfall, and lush vegetation, making it an ideal site for spiritual retreats, alchemical practices, and health cultivation among Daoist and Buddhist practitioners, scholars, literati, and common people throughout history. According to historical records, as early as the Qin and Han dynasties, figures such as Zhu Lingzhi 朱靈芝, Ren Dun任敦, and Liang Lu 梁盧, among others, were captivated by the scenic beauty of Mount Luofu and delved into its mountains to pursue Daoist practices. During the Xianhe period 咸和 of the Eastern Jin dynasty, Ge Hong 葛洪, one of the most important and famous Daoist practitioners and theorists, settled on Mount Luofu to engage in alchemical pursuits and established four Daoist temples: Baihe Temple 白鶴觀, Chongxu Temple 衝虛觀, Huanglong Temple 黃龍觀, and Sulao Temple 酥醪觀, recruiting disciples and conducting Daoist teachings. His wife, Baogu 鮑姑, and numerous disciples, including Teng Sheng 騰升, An Haijun 安海君, and Huang Yeren 黃野人 (who allegedly was one of the prototype of the famous healing deity Wong Tai Sin 黃大仙), significantly contributed to the development and dissemination of Daoism there. Entering the Sui dynasty, the renowned Daoist Su Yuanlang 蘇元朗 arrived at the Qingxia Valley 青霞谷 of Mount Luofu to cultivate Daoist practices. He elucidated the concept of "dual cultivation of nature and life (性命雙修)" using the terminology of external alchemy 外丹 to explain internal alchemy 內丹, revitalizing the theory of internal alchemy and pioneering the trend of internal alchemy studies in the Tang and Song dynasties, exerting a profound influence on later Daoist developments. During the Tang dynasty, notable Daoist figures on Mount Luofu included Xuanyuan Ji 軒轅集, Shen Taizhi 申太芝, and Deng Yuanqi 鄧元起. In the Song dynasty, Mount Luofu continued to produce eminent Daoist scholars, such as Deng Shou'an 鄧守安, who had a close relationship with Su Dongpo 蘇東坡, as well as prominent "Southern School (南宗)" masters such as Shi Tai石泰, Chen Nan 陳楠, Bai Yuchan 白玉蟾, and Peng Si 彭耜. Among them, Bai Yuchan studied the methods of the "Nine Tripod Golden Elixir (九鼎金丹) " with Chen Nan on Mount Luofu, later becoming one of the "Five Ancestors (五祖 )" of the Southern School of Daoism. The development of Daoism on Mount Luofu underwent significant transformations during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Previously associated with the "Lingbao Sect (靈寶派)", in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, the eleventh-generation successor of the "Quanzhen Longmen Sect (全真龍門派)" was appointed as the head of the five temples on Mount Luofu. During the Kangxi period 康熙, the Longmen Sect successor Du Yangdong 杜陽棟 assumed the position of head of the Chongxu Temple, establishing official regulations and transforming Mount Luofu into a sacred site of Daoism for the Longmen Sect. In the Daoist cosmology of "Grotto-Heavens and Blissful Lands (dongtian fudi 洞天福地) ", Mount Luofu is ranked seventh among the "Ten Major Grotto Heavens" and is referred to as the "Grotto-heaven of Vermillion Brightness Shining Truth (Zhuming yaozhen tian 朱明耀真天)". Mount Luofu is not only a celestial abode for Daoist cultivation but also a sacred site for Buddhism. As early as 359 AD, the Dunhuang monk Shandao 單道 arrived at Mount Luofu to engage in spiritual practice, marking the beginning of Mount Luofu's Buddhist history. According to the Official History of Guangdong (2007), by the end of the Jin Dynasty, approximately thirty Buddhist temples were built within the Guangdong region, with Panyu County 番禺 having the most, followed by Mount Luofu. Tang Dynasty was a flourishing period for the spread of Buddhism on Mount Luofu, during which eminent monks resided there, including Huaidi 懷迪 from Nanlou Monastery 南樓寺 who collaborated with Indian monks to translate the Lengyan Sutra 楞嚴經; the monk Yuanhui 元惠, who resided at Waterfall Rock 瀑布岩 and traveled between Mount Luofu and Mount Tiantai 天台山. In 738, Emperor Xuanzong 宣宗 built the Huashou Temple 華首寺 on the southwest foothills of Mount Luofu, where 500 monks congregated at its peaks. In the Song Dynasty, notable monks of Buddhism on Mount Luofu included Yunda 雲達, Qide 齊德, Shending 神定, and Zuyan 祖演. During the Ming Dynasty, numerous eminent monks emerged on Mount Luofu as well, including Zhikong 直空, Huiguo 晦果, Ruzheng 如正, and Shixu 十虛. Entering the Qing Dynasty, the monk Kongyin 空隱 and his disciples Hanshi 函是 and Hanke 函可 established the "Boshan Dharma Gate(博山法門)". These esteemed Buddhist figures expounded Buddhist teachings on Mount Luofu, playing a significant role in spreading Buddhist culture in South China. In addition to the developments of local history and Daoist and Buddhist teachings, Mount Luofu is also one of the birthplaces of private education. Since the Jin Dynasty, many literati and scholars have established academies and study lounges on Mount Luofu, making it a popular place for study, gathering, and teaching, thus becoming an important local educational center. For example, during the Song and Yuan Dynasties, there were official institutions like the Yuzhang Academy 豫章書院, the Jingguan Academy 靜觀書院 in Huanglong Cave 黃龍洞, and privately established academies like the Zhangliu Academy 張留書院. In the Ming Dynasty, Mount Luofu witnessed the emergence of many private study halls and libraries, such as the Bitang Study Hall 弼唐精舍 and the Xianzi Reading Platform 冼子讀書台, along with the Four Sages Shrine 四賢祠 dedicated to venerable Confucian masters. Among the numerous eminent scholars who taught and received disciples on Mount Luofu, the most renowned was Zhan Ruoshui 湛若水, who held various high-ranking positions in the Ming government. Su Dongpo 蘇東坡 also resided on Mount Luofu for an extended period, during which he penned famous works like "Miscellaneous Notes on Mount Luofu (Zashu Luofushi 雜書羅浮事)" and "Inscription at the Zuoquan Pavilion (Shu Zhuoxiquan 書卓錫泉)." Additionally, notable literary figures such as Li Bai 李白, Du Fu 杜甫, Han Yu 韓愈, Yang Wanli 楊萬里, Liu Yuxi 劉禹錫, Zhu Xi 朱熹, Qu Dajun 屈大均, and Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖 have all composed poems and writings praising and memorizing Mount Luofu. Across its storied history, both locally and statewide, Mount Luofu has served as a hallowed ground of spiritual and intellectual practice, weaving together the tapestry of religious devotion and scholarly pursuit, creating a rich mosaic of cultural and intellectual expression and leaving an indelible mark on the cultural landscape of China.

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Liying, Xu. "Lingbao Canon: Perfect Script in Five Tablets 五篇真文 and Jade Instruction Written in Red 赤書玉訣". Database of Religious History, 27 червня 2024. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12574726.

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The Lingbao (Numinous Treasure) scriptures arose around the early fifth century CE, immediately after the prevalence of the Shangqing (Upper Clarity) scriptures. We are able to get a general picture of the early Lingbao scriptures because of the work of Lu Xiujing 陸修靜 (406-477) who collected and promulgated the scriptures. The catalogue of early Lingbao scriptures written by Lu Xiujing is the earliest reliable source for modern scholars to get a glimpse of the landscape of the Lingbao movement. However, Lu's original catalogue was lost, and the restored copy based on a discovered Tang copy of Dunhuang manuscripts caused many academic issues. Basically, Lu Xiujing's catalogue divided the Lingbao canon into two sections: the Old Lingbao scriptures (jiu jing 舊經) instructed by the Heavenly Worthy of Primordial Commencement (Yuanshi Tianzun元始天尊) and the newly revealed scriptures (xin jing 新經) instructed by Xu Laile, the Perfected of Most Utmost (Taiji Zhenren Xu Laile 太極真人徐來勒). The Old Lingbao scriptures start with two essential scriptures: the first one is Scripture of Celestial Writing, Perfect Script in Jade (or Five) Tablets, Written in Red by Five Elders of Primordial Commencement元始五老赤書玉(五)篇真文天書經 that introduce the emergence of celestial scripts; the second one is Wondrous Scripture of Jade Instruction Written in Red by Numinous Treasure, Cavern Mystery of Most High 太上洞玄靈寶赤書玉訣妙經 that is read as commentary for the celestial scripts. Therefore, these two scriptures which are preserved in the in the Daoist Canon of Zhengtong (Zhengtong daozang 正统道藏) of the Ming are closely related to each other. The first scripture demonstrates the Daoist concept of genesis and celestial provenance starting from the emergence of the Perfect Scripts which symbolizes the openness of the new Kalpa cycle. The Perfected Scripts were regarded as the supreme and most powerful force in the Daoist cosmogeny, but they were invisible and intangible to humans. Then the Perfected Scripts were materialized by the highest deity Celestial Worthy of Primordial Commencement (Yuanshi Tianzun 元始天尊). Then he transmitted them to other celestial beings. The materialized Perfected Scripts were still unintelligible to humans. So, the celestial beings took the responsibility to translate the Perfected Scripts into the form of the human language which are in total thirty-six juan scriptures and two juan oral instructions These scriptures were called Old Lingbao Scriptures that were categorized into ten sections. The scripture contains the images of Cloudy seals of the Perfect Script and the Five Directional Talismans, followed by the instructions for use of the talismans. The second scripture Jade Instructions is regarded, to some degree, as the commentary of the first one. It introduces how the Lingbao scriptures, which are translation and interpretation of the Perfected Scripts done by the Most High Lord of Great Dao 太上大道君 (abbr. the Lord Dao 道君 or the Dao 道) and other celestial beings, were transmitted to the human world at the end of the Five Kalpa Cycles. The two humans who received the Lingbao scriptures from the Lord Dao were Wang Longci 王龍賜 and A Qiuzeng 阿丘曾. This scripture also provides the methods and rituals on how to use the Instruction of Five Directions to eliminate crimes and disasters. Scholars have noticed a great number of terms and concepts in the Lingbao scriptures that were adapted from Buddhist scriptures. However, the meanings and the connotations of these terms were changed and became distinct from those in the Buddhist context in order to serve the Daoist purposes, or to solve the newly emerged challenges that Daoist were encountering.

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