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  • Religion and Chinese Society. Volume 2, Taoism and Local Religion in Modern China
  • Christian Jochim (bio)
John Lagerway , editor. Religion and Chinese Society. Volume 2, Taoism and Local Religion in Modern China. Hong Kong and Paris: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press and École française d'Extrême-Orient, 2004. vii, 410 pp. (pp. 517-927). Hardcover $80.00 (2-volume set), ISBN 962-996-.23-7.

This is the second of two volumes containing a total of twenty-one essays resulting from a conference celebrating the centennial of the École française d'Extrême Orient. The twenty essays are arranged chronologically, with those in volume 2 covering "modern China" from the Yuan dynasty until today.

The essays exemplify the richness and maturity of the current scholarly work on Chinese religions. Their richness is evident in the painstaking historical research and detail-oriented fieldwork on which they are based. These are the kind of essays that will be the building blocks from which scholars will create an improved general understanding of Chinese religious life. The maturity of the approaches to this subject is seen in the degree to which the various studies go beyond historical and ethnographic detail and tackle important theoretical issues, such as the exact relationship of religious life to economic, judicial, political, and social life; the "invented" nature of traditions (whether sacred lineages, reputations of cult centers, or hagiographies of deities); the line of demarcation between local temple cults and voluntary religious groups operating in a region as well as between hereditary and "conversion" religions as organizational types within national traditions, such as Taoism; the role of religion in maintaining both social distinctions and communal identities; and the comparison of urban and rural forms of cults and festivals for regional deities. Since each essay in this volume makes its own unique contribution, I cover each separately in the following paragraphs.

Alexei Volkov seeks to clarify the relation of Taoism to developments in the history of Chinese science through a study of Chen Zhixu (1290-1368?), a Yuan-era Taoist of the Quanzhen school, and, to a lesser extent, Chen's master, Zhou Youqin (1271-1335?). Volkov surveys debates on this issue between Joseph Needham and Nathan Sivin, generally siding with the latter. Then he points out that both share a classification scheme that is based on the distinction between two ideologies and two kinds of science. The ideologies are official Confucian, or "orthodox," on one side, and unofficial Taoist, or "unorthodox," on the other. Confucian officials supposedly had a proclivity for orthodox sciences, such as astrology, astronomy, and harmonics, while Taoist priests or adepts favored unorthodox sciences, such as geomancy and alchemy. Through detailed studies of the writings of Zhou and Chen, Volkov has discovered that the two scholars, who were even more "Taoist" than according to Nathan Sivin's strict definition [End Page 192] (i.e., those ordained into a Taoist religious sect), contributed to the development of Chinese astronomy and its attendant mathematics. Moreover, he provides evidence that their approach was synthetic, combining their interest in astronomy and inner ("alchemical") cultivation, and that their contemporaries saw them as filling this dual role. Volkov thus helps to disabuse us further of simplistic distinctions between official Confucian and unofficial Taoist and also warns us against imposing a modern dualism like "science" versus "religion" on traditional Chinese intellectual life.

Pierre-Henry deBruyn, focusing on temples and their activities on Wudang Shan, a group of mountains in northwest Hubei Province, seeks answers to some key questions regarding the evolution of the cult of Lord Xuanwu. The questions coalesce around efforts to understand why there are four kinds of statues of Xuanwu in the artistic tradition of his cult, described by deBruyn as follows:

. . . first, the figure of a snake coiled around a turtle which could be considered simply as Xuanwu and has no special link to Wudang shan; second, the figure of a monk sitting in meditation which corresponds more precisely to Zhenwu, a Taoist monk living on Wudang shan . . . [;] third, some kind of synthesis of Xuanwu and Zhenwu as an exorcist . . . partially influenced by the competing Tantric figure of Mahakala and known by the...

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