To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth
University of California Press (Verlag)
978-0-520-23034-7 (ISBN)
In late classical and early medieval China, ascetics strove to become transcendents--deathless beings with supernormal powers. Practitioners developed dietetic, alchemical, meditative, gymnastic, sexual, and medicinal disciplines (some of which are still practiced today) to perfect themselves and thus transcend death. Narratives of their achievements circulated widely. Ge Hong (283-343 c.e.) collected and preserved many of their stories in his Traditions of Divine Transcendents, affording us a window onto this extraordinary response to human mortality. Robert Ford Campany's groundbreaking and carefully researched text offers the first complete, critical translation and commentary for this important Chinese religious work, at the same time establishing a method for reconstructing lost texts from medieval China. Clear, exacting, and annotated, the translation comprises over a hundred lively, engaging narratives of individuals deemed to have fought death and won.
Additionally, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth systematically introduces the Chinese quest for transcendence, illuminating a poorly understood tradition that was an important source of Daoist religion and a major social, cultural, and religious phenomenon in its own right.
Robert Ford Campany is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is coeditor of the Journal of Chinese Religions and author of Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (1996).
List of Illustrations Foreword Preface Acknowledgments PART ONE: TRADITIONS OF DIVINE TRANSCENDENTS AND ITS CONTEXT Opening Ge Hong and the Writing of Traditions of Divine Transcendents The Nature of the Religion Reflected in Ge Hong's Works Text-Critical Matters PART TWO: A CRITICAL, ANNOTATED TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY Group A: Earliest-Attested Hagiographies Group A: Earliest-Attested Fragments Group B: Early-Attested Hagiographies Group B: Early-Attested Fragments Group C: Later-Attested Hagiographies PART THREE: TEXT-CRITICAL NOTES On the Source Tests and the Temporal Differentiation of Passages Group A: Sources of Earliest-Attested Hagiographies Group A: Sources of Earliest-Attested Fragments Group B: Sources of Early-Attested Hagiographies Group B: Sources of Early-Attested Fragments Group C: Sources of Later-Attested Hagiographies Items Attributed to Shenxian zhuan Excluded from This Translation Bibliography Index
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 9.4.2002 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | Daoist Classics ; 2 |
| Zusatzinfo | 4 b-w illustrations |
| Verlagsort | Berkerley |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
| Gewicht | 953 g |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Weitere Religionen |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-520-23034-5 / 0520230345 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-520-23034-7 / 9780520230347 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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