Monastic Life in Medieval Daoism: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (review)

This is the first general Western-language monograph on Daoist monasticism. It opens with a chapter on monasticism as a cross-cultural phenomenon and type. Chapter 2, "Origins and History," contrary to its title is not a history of Daoist monasticism—a history that began in the late fifth century C.E.—but rather a sketch of its prehistory. Chapter 3, "The Monastic Vision," presents some basic goals and values of Daoist monasticism as outlined in a few key texts; chapter 4, "Relation to Society," discusses monastic–State relations and rules for interactions between monastics and laity; and chapter 5, "Buildings and Compounds," sketches the prescribed spatial layout of monasteries. The final three chapters treat monastics' daily discipline, implements and vestments, and liturgies. The work concludes with a useful synopsis of textual sources, a glossary of Chinese names and terms, and an index.

As the book's subtitle makes clear, Monastic Life in Medieval Daoism attempts a cross-cultural, "comparative and theoretical placement of medieval Daoist monasticism" (xii). Aside from reminding readers that Daoism is not the only religion to have developed a monastic tradition, however, the purpose of Kohn's comparative asides is not clear; they mostly consist of simply pointing out that other traditions share some of the basic-level features of the tradition she writes about. At one point, she characterizes the purpose of her comparisons as "enhanc[ing] the importance of the Daoist tradition by providing a sense of classification, theoretical evaluation, and cross-cultural perspective" (xii), but it is hard to see how providing these things works to "enhance the importance" of Daoism, nor is it clear why Daoism is something whose importance requires enhancement, or why this is a worthy goal for critical scholarship. Cutting against these comparative remarks, meanwhile, is Kohn's repeated tendency to characterize this or that feature of Daoist monasticism as "unique," a term that, taken strictly, implies the impossibility of any meaningful comparison. And this talk of uniqueness is undercut in its turn by Kohn's occasional admission of what is very hard to deny: that a great many fundamental features of Daoist monasticism were borrowed directly from, and explicitly modeled on, Buddhist monastic culture in China—an aspect of the book's subject that would bear closer examination than it receives here.

The book's fundamental problem, however, is that it very often takes textual prescriptions as straightforward descriptions of actual practice, even at times to the point of adopting these prescriptions as its own point of view [as, for example, in the rather strange statement, "Daoist monasteries as sacred institutions in direct contact with the divine need special structures to manifest themselves physically" (87)]. Much of the book is taken up with summaries of what a small handful of texts have to say on various aspects of monastic life; the text Kohn relies on most heavily is the early seventh century Fengdao kejie (Rules and Precepts for Worshiping the Dao). This encyclopedic text, each passage of which opens with the formula "The norm says . . . ," presents an ideal vision of monastic life: that is to say, an argument about what this life should look like; it is an argument, moreover, ultimately derived to a large extent from Buddhist models and sources. Close attention to the prescriptions of a text such as this is certainly an important and worthy contribution to scholarship, but to assume that this textual ideal necessarily corresponded to historical reality is to make a major category or genre mistake; it is a bit like reading Thomas More's Utopia or Samuel Butler's Erewhon—or, for that matter, Augustine of Hippo's City of God or Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy—as descriptions of actual places at particular times. Kohn would have done well, in other words, to take much more seriously the word "vision" in the title of her third chapter. This book, in short, is not a history of Daoist monastic institutions or practices. Instead...