Religion et société en Chine ancienne et médiévale ed. by John Lagerwey (review)

Book Reviews 105 Several articles—Michael Winn’s “Daoist Internal Alchemy in the West” (pp. 179-202), Stuart Sovatsky’s “Kundalini and the Complete Maturation of the Spiritual Body” (pp. 203218 ), and Althea Northage-Orr’s “Western Parallels: The Esoteric Teachings of Hermeticism” (pp. 219-242)—present practices similar to internal alchemy in countries other than China in a comparative perspective. They show how much the approach to Asian traditions—and here the Taoist tradition—is tainted by a vocabulary and an interpretation that remain Western and draw from either the hermetic tradition or pseudo-scientific language. To point out some of this volume’s transcription errors and misspellings: gangong instead of qiangong 乾宮 (p. 38); Russelle 1933 instead of Rousselle (p. 42); Yinfu jing 音符經 in place of Yin 陰符經 (p.73); sanfeng 三豐 in place of sanfeng 三峰; Daoguan for the Daoguang era (p. 123); Daoyuan yiqi 道原一氣 in place of yuan 元 (p. 143). This collective work appears to be a good book of popularization on internal alchemy, a field particularly difficult to tackle because of its hermetic vocabulary. It is nevertheless hard to pinpoint the market for such a heterogenous collection, since some contributions are basically summaries of already existing works (sometimes forgetting to cite the major research on the subject), while others provide new elements, notably on modern and contemporary Taoism, worthy of the specialist’s interest and attention. CATHERINE DESPEUX, Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales Religion et société en Chine ancienne et médiévale Sous la direction de JOHN LAGERWEY. Patrimoines Chine. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf/Institut Ricci, 2009. 724 pages. ISBN 978-2-20400-0. €54.00 paper. The study of Chinese religion is a dynamic field. This is the consequence of recent archaeological findings which are often from graves and can therefore be expected to have a religious component. Skeptical attitudes to religion have often limited its presentation to written sources. Here archaeological findings act as a corrective. Moreover, the newfound Chinese interest in this neglected aspect of their identity has promoted research, as has ongoing world-wide curiosity about the spiritual. The fact that several decades of hard work have finally gained for Daoism an identity has also helped to give credibility and weight to the study of religion in China. As long as Daoism was a largely unknown entity, accounts of Chinese religion resembled an anatomy of the human body that ignored the function of the 106 Journal of Chinese Religions heart. The topic of the first half of Religion et société is ancient China.11 The second half that deals with the period of division is of special importance, documenting the spread of Buddhism and the formation of Daoism as a two-pronged process crucial to China’s political and cultural history. John Lagerwey argues that the Buddhist “conquest” was important in facilitating the country’s unification after centuries of political, social, and cultural separatism. This volume is a work in progress in the best sense. It is not a handbook presenting wellestablished results in restrained language but a collection of vigorous articles by leading scholars intent on communicating their latest insights. They draw pictures that stress the historicity of religions, aspects of their creation, acceptance and modification, and the controversies between them. The juxtaposition of approaches and positions works well. For instance, in regard to ritual practices during the period of division, Catherine Despeux’s stress on similarities between Daoist and Buddhist rituals works as a corrective to the isolated treatment of these practices in other contributions. To do justice to the freshness and interest of the chapters I will deal with each individually, in the chronological order in which they are presented. John Lagerwey’s introductory overview stresses continuities in religious beliefs and their political function. He notes in particular the powerful cosmological narrative of the preBuddhist era and ideological aspects of the Buddhist “conquest.” Alain Thote shows that funeral practices document the wide gap between Shang dynasty social strata, when the death of a king was accompanied by hundreds of human victims. This gap narrowed in Zhou times, together with an emancipation of the living, who gradually secluded themselves from the dead. Qin and Chu tombs from...