In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future by James Miller
  • Dan Smyer Yü
James Miller, China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. xxvi, 200 pp. US$60 (HB). ISBN 978-0-231-17586-9

James Miller’s China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future is an integral part of his ongoing work in religion and ecology, an emerging but rapidly expanding interdisciplinary study of religious values and practices with ecological and environmental implications.1 As a text of religion and ecology, the structure and contents of the book characteristically show the alliance of religious studies and the discourses of the world’s current ecological conditions and environmental issues—a prominent feature of the Harvard Project of religion and ecology initiated twenty years ago.2 The book consists of eight chapters, thematically centered upon the multidimensional intersection of religion, ecology, modernity, and sustainability demonstrated in Miller’s interpretation of Daoist texts, practices, and their potential value for an environmentally healthier China and a sustainable world. Dao, in Miller’s religion-ecology approach, is not a thing-in-itself but a “cosmic power” that saturates nature as a locally expressed “self-generating, creative power” (p. 33) and pervades the human body as a symmetrical embodiment of the local environment (p. 81). From this perspective, Miller proposes Daoist ecology as a “liquid ecology” (pp. 43–88, 110–132) pertaining to the ecological nexus of body, environment, and cosmos, and, thus, envisions the foundation of a sustainable future as an “aesthetic experience of the local world in the personal body” (p. 166).

In China’s Green Religion, Miller offers a globally engaged “new vision” of nature, one that generates new possibilities for the flourishing of humans and the natural world from a Daoist perspective (p. 166). The book’s proposed goal is not limited to the fulfillment of a disciplinary endeavor only framed in religious studies (as Daoist studies is sometimes pigeonholed); instead it presents Daoism as “an intellectual tradition” (p. 139) offering us a transformative understanding of the relationships between religion and modernity, nature and humankind, landscape and bodyscape, ecology and economy, and Daoist practice and a commitment to a healthy future. Miller convincingly navigates the textual and conceptual labyrinths of these relationships, and offers the reader a Daoist vision of a sustainable, flourishing future. [End Page 210]

Miller’s interdisciplinary approach elaborates fresh insights from Daoism as an indigenous religious and intellectual tradition of China, and offers the reader an understanding of the ecological value of Daoism from a globally engaged interpretive perspective. In particular, his adoption of Michael LaFargue’s “confrontational hermeneutics” (p. xxi) opens up more possibilities not only to reaffirm the originally intended meanings of Daoist texts, but also to see their critical relevance in contemporary social and environment contexts of China and the world. Throughout the book, and in dialogue with his peers, e.g. Chris Coggins (pp. 45–46), Willis Jenkins (pp. 92–109), and Robert Weller (p. 129), Miller presents a Daoist perspective for the understanding of environmental problems as the concurrent problems of landscape, bodyscape, and cosmology (p. 109), all of which are interconnected by qi 氣, the Daoist understanding of the vital energy of nature.

In Miller’s interpretation, qi is a kind of “liquid vitality” (p. 44) that permeates everything and everywhere, and that takes particular physical forms to amass, shape, and re-express itself in relational terms. In other words, the “liquid” nature of qi permits different kinds of vitality to connect, merge with one another, embody one another, and co-create synergetic natural-social environments. From this “liquid” perspective, Miller then asserts that the cultivation of Dao is an ecological process in which human body and its environment mutually saturate and embody one another. In this ecological process, the wellbeing or ill-being of the human body coincides with that of the environment (p. 81). Here Miller emphasizes that it is the porosity of the human body that makes possible the environmental flows and cosmic energies pervading the body; therefore, humans and nature coexist within the same enclosure rather...

pdf

Share