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25th Annual Southeast Early China Roundtable
February 18, 2022 @ 5:00 pm
“Like Drops from the Spring: Textuality in Early Daoism”
Professor Stephen R. Bokenkamp (Arizona State University)
Scriptures in medieval Daoism were regarded as faint copies of celestial originals. This is a well-known feature of the religion. Yet the full implications of this simple claim remain to be explored. While translating the fifth century Declarations of the Perfected (Zhen’gao 眞誥) I have several times stumbled over textual anomalies that resulted from our failure to think about what such a principle of textual production might mean in practice. In this talk, I will explore a few of these instances so that we might think more clearly about what such an approach to text might mean for textual research into Daoism and beyond into other domains of textual knowledge and production.
“Master Zhou’s Dreams”
Professor Robert F. Campany (Vanderbilt University)
Records of Master Zhou’s Communications with the Unseen Realm (Zhoushi mingtong ji 周氏冥通記, 517 CE) is, among other things, a record of dozens of dreams young master Zhou Ziliang 周子良 had between the summer of 515 and his untimely death in December of 516. What role did these dreams play in his process of self-cultivation? How do they compare to the waking visions he also reported having? Why did he record them at all, and why did he do so only partially? What did his master, Tao Hongjing 陶弘景, make of them?
Bios
Stephen R. Bokenkamp is Regents Professor of Chinese in the School of International Letters and Cultures at Arizona State University. He specializes in the study of medieval Chinese Daoism, with a special emphasis on its literatures and its relations with Buddhism. He is the author of Early Daoist Scriptures; Ancestors and Anxiety; as well as more than 35 articles and book chapters on Daoism and literature. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Award a National Endowment for the Humanities Translation Grant. In addition to his position at Arizona State, he has taught at Indiana University, Stanford University, and short courses for graduate students at Princeton and Fudan Universities.
Robert F. Campany is Professor of Asian Studies and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in history of Chinese religions; methods and history of the cross-cultural study of religion and culture; and thought and culture in late classical and early medieval China (300 BCE – 600 CE). He is a winner of the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion and the author of six books to date, including Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China; To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendent; and most recently, The Chinese Dreamscape, 300BCE-800CE, in the Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series.