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Introduction The implantation of Buddhism in China, during the first centuries of the common era, was an unparalleled phenomenon in the history of religions. Unlike Christianity, which played a major cultural, social, and political role in the formation of early medieval Europe, Buddhism did not have such a pervasive effect in the Chinese world. Already five or six centuries old when it entered China, the Indian religion encountered there an ancient, highly advanced civilization. China had its own rich intellectual, philosophical, and religious traditions. It had also a strong sense of cultural and political identity, often expressed as a powerful ethnocentrism. Compared with the many other Asian nations in which Buddhism became a dominant vector of social and intellectual organization, the Celestial Empire seemingly had very little to envy with respect to India’s great civilization. Erik Zürcher’s masterpiece, The Buddhist Conquest of China (1959), which deals with the formative phase of this implantation, remains the first reference for anyone who wishes to understand the complex history of medieval Chinese Buddhism. The remarkable establishment of the Indian religion in its Chinese setting has long been a subject of fascination for scholars of Buddhism and Sinologists, who have explored its various aspects: philosophy and doctrines, textual material , social and institutional organization, art, economy, and so on. Nevertheless ,inconsideringthecomplexcourseofitssinicization,itsmanifoldintellectual influences on Chinese culture, and the magnitude of its textual and artistic remains , one cannot be surprised that large areas have remained neglected. One of them, and not the least, is the interaction of Buddhism with the other major Chinese religion, Taoism, the indigenous tradition that, in spite of its long prehistory , began its development only in the second century of the common era. The encounter of these two great religions was particularly fruitful in medieval times, when they contributed to shaping one another in many ways. Their in-  Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face terrelationship only started to be regarded as a subject of fundamental interest in the late 1970s, however, when Zürcher opened the way in the field now usually referred to as “Buddho-Taoism.” Zürcher’s interest in this large and tricky domain was, I believe, motivated by an ambitious project that had just started in Paris, namely, the detailed study of the Taoist Canon. This monumental effort was initiated and directed by the doyen of Taoist studies, Kristofer Schipper, who created a team of both senior and junior European Sinologists who would devote themselves to the analysis of the Taoist Canon’s 1,500 scriptures. For those of us who joined this enterprise , the task seemed herculean not only in terms of the quantity of texts to examine but also in terms of their difficulty. Most of these Taoist scriptures were completely unknown and untouched, whether by Chinese, Japanese, or Western scholars. By and large undated, anonymous, and written in a hermetic, esoteric style, they had issued from different Taoist schools dating from the beginning of the common era down to the Ming dynasty, when the extant Canon was compiled in the fifteenth century. The topics found in the Taoist Canon (Daozang 道藏) were also extremely diverse, including philosophy, meditation techniques, exorcism, medicine, alchemy, hagiography, messianism , and, most importantly, liturgy. The scope of the task, therefore, among its other vicissitudes, explains why it took some thirty years of labor for it to be realized . This tentacular work was finally published in 2004 by the University of Chicago Press.1 What is immediately pertinent here, however, is that, having already to deal with the difficult work of identifying and classifying such an enormous amount of material, the question of the possible Buddhist influence on some of these medieval Taoist works was not, in the first instance, viewed as a priority. It was shortly after the project had started that Erik Zürcher’s visits to Paris somehow changed this state of affairs. At the time, I was among Kristofer Schipper’s students trying to find my way in the obscure new field of medieval Taoism and in this context had the opportunity to meet Zürcher a few times, as well as another great master and pioneer of the Buddho-Taoist field, the late Michel Strickmann.2 I did not immediately realize, however, to what extent the Buddhist sūtras that Strickmann showed me as matter of comparison with the Taoist scriptures I was working on might prove relevant to my work. I already had too much on my hands just in trying to penetrate the...

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