Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China by Robert Ford Campany (review)

Book Reviews 81 Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China ROBERT FORD CAMPANY. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009. xviii, 300 pages. ISBN 978-0-8248-3333-6. US$48.00 hardcover. Following years of painstaking textual research into the life, practices, beliefs, and writings of Ge Hong 葛洪 (283-343) and other seekers of transcendence, Robert Ford Campany has turned his attention to questions of method and theory in the reading of Chinese religious texts. Instead of focusing on how adepts sought to achieve transcendence, whether through diet, ritual, or other means, he takes a step back to examine the social contexts in which hagiographies were produced and in which their reclusive protagonists operated. In an intriguing methodological reversal, he places the spotlight not on the protagonists themselves, but on the wide cast of characters who made possible the crafting of the tradition as a social fact. These figures, whether devotees, disciples, patrons, or skeptical audience members, together constituted the network of social relations that in fact gave birth to the tradition as a whole and, more significantly, to the very transcendence that the stories’ protagonists sought to attain. Campany’s perspective thus holds transcendence, or xian-hood 仙, not as a kind of extraordinary state wondrously produced in the bodies of unique adepts, but as a socially constituted and socially enacted attribute (p. 25). The agents of transcendence are thus not the practitioners themselves but rather their social contexts. In so doing Campany draws on the work of scholars of Western and South Asian hagiography including Peter Brown, Ernest Gellner, Gavin Flood, John Stratton Hawley, and others; and more broadly he makes use of social theory regarding discourse, role, and performance, from Judith Butler and others. This language enables Campany to consider the role and subjectivity of seekers of transcendence in relation to, and in “self-conscious contrast to,” the dominant roles and subjectivities of contemporary (3rd -4th century) Chinese society. This takes Campany, in chapter 2, into a discussion of intrinsic versus extrinsic meanings of religious roles. The significance of the mountain-dwelling recluse can be understood not only in terms of the intrinsic value of mountain-dwelling, but in the extrinsic rejection of other cultural roles. To fully comprehend the roles that transcendents took thus requires placing them against the background of the paths not followed. The remainder of the book thus analyzes the various roles and repertoires assumed by transcendents and aspirants from the perspective of how much they engaged and interacted with their audiences. Chapter 3 engages the vexed question of avoiding or cutting off grains (duangu 斷穀) in one’s diet. Campany is not interested in intrinsic reasons for why grains should be avoided, such as mention of the three death-bringing worms, or why it is better to swallow qi 氣; indeed he notes that the texts themselves are remarkably lacking in explanation of why this course of action is to be recommended. Instead he focuses on the social significance of not eating mainstream foods, suggesting that cultivated grains were, “to echo a passage from 82 Journal of Chinese Religions Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘good to oppose’ rather than being seen as intrinsically ‘bad to eat’ and that they were good to oppose because of all that they expressed, symbolized and implied, all of the other cultural values and institutions to which they were attached” (p. 85). To draw an analogy, this is like suggesting that teenagers become vegetarians in order to defy the authority of their carnivorous parents as much as because of any perceived benefits that vegetarianism might confer. The significance of their vegetarianism is not simply bound up in intrinsic arguments regarding diet, ethics, or health, but invokes a more complex web of meanings involving roles, authority, power and social situation. Next Campany examines the motifs of secrecy and concealment in esoteric texts. He argues that it is necessary to understand their explicit esotericism not simply as a literary device but in terms of the social location of transcendents. Far from constituting such people as socially disengaged recluses, esotericism “amounted to the staking of claim to a separate domain of power” outside of the overarching network of officialdom and...