Dissertations

News of the Field / 217 Dissertations Hsin‑I Mei. ʺ The Religious Realm of Jiangxi during the Song Dynasty, 960‑1279ʺ (Spring 2011), University of California, Los Angeles, super‑ vised by Richard von Glahn (hmei@ucla.edu) My research project will examine the religious world of Jiangxi in Song China. The purpose is to explore the developments of various religious beliefs, the relationship between new Daoist exorcistic traditions and popular cults, and the changes in local, regional, and national societies. The work will center on the institutions, theologies, and ritual practices of local cults, Daoism, and Buddhism, also involving a study of the social relations revealed by the interaction, cooperation, and competition among these religious traditions and social groups. Instead of treating them as separate , I regard them as parts of a holistic religious culture. The research focuses particularly on local cults in Jiangxi as well as the development of Daoist traditions there, including Celestial Masters, Pure Brightness, and Divine Empyrean. What were religious groups in Jiangxi during the Song? How were they practiced and disseminated? What is the significance of the spatial and temporal context? What are the relationships among them and local, regional, and national commu‑ nities? The answers to these questions will enhance our understanding of the multifaceted religious world of Song China, the changes it under‑ went, and the interplay between local, regional, and national levels that shaped this world. Jennifer Lundin Ritchie. “The Guodian Laozi: A New Window into Dao‑ ist Thought” (Spring 2010), University of British Columbia, supervised by Edward Slingerland (jritchie@interchange.ubc.ca) The focus of my graduate research is a new version of the Laozi (a.k.a the Daode jing), which was discovered in a tomb at Guodian village in Hubei, China, in 1993. The Guodian Laozi is 150 years older than the previous oldest version and contains a previously unseen third section, titled Taiyi shengshui (The Great One Gives Birth to Water), the cosmology of which decentralizes yin and yang—concepts heretofore fundamental to inter‑ 218 / Journal of Daoist Studies 2 (2009) pretations of the text. The themes throughout the text also differ consid‑ erably from the received versions. Notably absent are the Laozi’s charac‑ teristic references to water and the feminine, and its vehement criticisms of Confucianism. The majority of the passages have to do with de (Virtue) as it relates to statecraft, rather than the more ‘mystical’ dao (Way). In my analysis, I plan to explore how the prominence of verses on statecraft and the de‑centralization of yin and yang affect the interpreta‑ tion and the flavor of the text as a whole. Can the Laozi still be read through the lens of dichotomy and reversal? What does this mean for the extensions of the yin‑yang dichotomy metaphor (for example male‑ female, active‑receptive, solid‑liquid, full‑empty)? Was the Laozi origi‑ nally meant to be simply a handbook for ruling the state? The answers to these questions could certainly change in significant ways the manner in which the Laozi is read. Research Projects Daoism and Psychology The government sponsored research project on “Reciprocal Influence between Daoist Thought and Western Psychological Treatments” 道学与 西方心理治疗学的互动研究 was led jointly by Daoist scholar LüXichen 吕 锡琛, Central South University, and psychologist Yang Deshen 杨德森. Completed in 2007, it resulted in a series of essays to be published by Chinese Social Sciences Press. The project consists of three parts: the cultural background and phi‑ losophical foundation of the reciprocal influence between Daoist thought and Western psychology; Daoist teaching and Western psychological treatments; research on the applications of Daoist psychological theory. In part one, the authors analyze the crisis in psychology and the changes in psychological methods due to the transformation of contem‑ porary Western thought, notably the movements of phenomenology and existentialism and the methods of psychoanalysis. Phenomenology plays an important role in building the bridge between East and West during this process. On the one hand, some phenomenologists integrate tradi‑ ...