Title Index to Daoist Collections (review)

Title Index to Daoist Collections by Louis Komjathy provides a combined index to the titles of the works contained in seven of the most important collections of Daoist texts. In addition to the Ming dynasty Daoist Canon of the Zhengtong reign period, Zhengtong daozang—first printed in 1444-1445, with a supplement printed in 1607—the collections include the Daoist manuscripts found in Dunhuang (published by Ōfuchi Ninji in 1979), Daozang jiyao (1906), Daozang jinghua lu (1922), Daozang jinghua (1963) (volume titles only), Zangwai daoshu (1992-1995), and Qigong yangsheng congshu (1990).

Part 1 of the book consists of separate Chinese-character indexes to the book titles in each of these collections, arranged in the order of their appearance in the respective collections and with reference to their sequential numbering, volume number, and starting-page number in one edition of the collection (pp. 29-107). Part 2 is a combined pinyin index to all of these titles (as well as to abbreviated versions of some titles), arranged alphabetically and cross-referenced with the character indexes (pp. 109-211). In addition, the book contains two appendixes: (1) a Chinese-character index to the titles of the texts included in the sixteen volumes of the above-mentioned Daozang jinghua that happened to be available to the author, according to whom the complete collection (of 107 volumes) is not to be found in any major North American library, and (2) a Chinese-character index to the book titles in the Daozang xubian, a collection of twenty-three internal alchemy works published by Min Yide in 1834 (pp. 213-216). The titles contained in these appendixes are not included in the pinyin index.

The book is beautifully produced and conveniently organized, and it will no doubt prove to be a useful reference tool for students involved in the study of Daoism based on primary sources. Apart from the Zhengtong daozang, none of the collections have been indexed with a proper numbering system before, and the fact that they are provided here with a combined index has the advantage of allowing the researcher to get an immediate overview of the available versions of any text that is included in these collections. It should be noticed, however, that the usefulness of the combined index is somewhat reduced by the lack of a consistent analysis of the individual titles of texts in terms of their most significant parts, and the absence of systematically sound choices concerning what abbreviated versions of the titles to include in the index. In this respect, the present book remains infinitely inferior to the existing standard concordance to the titles of the Zhengtong daozang, published by Kristofer Schipper in 1975 and included as a supplement volume in the most widely used sixty-volume reprint of the Canon (issued in Taiwan in 1977). As noted by the author of the present book, this concordance has the advantage over the earlier Harvard-Yenching Index from 1935 in that it lists the titles of the Daozang under every possible character. The inclusion of abbreviated versions of titles in the present index clearly is intended to make up for the absence of this kind of systematic indexing. It is equally clear, however, that this measure does not completely resolve the problem, and that consequently the present book in no way supersedes the earlier index as far as the basic Ming dynasty Canon (representing some 40 percent of the totality of Chinese-character indexes in the book) is concerned. A couple of random spot checks using abbreviated titles brought this out to this reviewer.

The book is a reference tool—that is, not for systematic reading—so in order to put it to a test I chose to look up a couple of titles with which I have recently been concerned in the course of my research on Daoism. The first was the Wucheng fu (shang)jing, one of the key texts of the early Lingbao tradition (promulgated around 400 C.E.). The result was disappointing, as the combined...