To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong's Traditions of Divine Transcendents (Taoist Classics, 2)

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In late classical and early medieval China, ascetics strove to become transcendents--deathless beings with supernormal powers. Practitioners developed dietetic, alchemical, meditative, gymnastic, sexual, and medicinal disciplines (some of which are still practiced today) to perfect themselves and thus transcend death. Narratives of their achievements circulated widely. Ge Hong (283-343 c.e.) collected and preserved many of their stories in his Traditions of Divine Transcendents, affording us a window onto this extraordinary response to human mortality.Robert Ford Campany's groundbreaking and carefully researched text offers the first complete, critical translation and commentary for this important Chinese religious work, at the same time establishing a method for reconstructing lost texts from medieval China. Clear, exacting, and annotated, the translation comprises over a hundred lively, engaging narratives of individuals deemed to have fought death and won. Additionally, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth systematically introduces the Chinese quest for transcendence, illuminating a poorly understood tradition that was an important source of Daoist religion and a major social, cultural, and religious phenomenon in its own right.

Author(s): Robert Ford Campany, Ge Hong
Year: 2002

Language: English
Pages: 633

ILLUSTRATIONS......Page 20
FOREWORD......Page 22
PREFACE......Page 26
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......Page 28
Opening......Page 32
Ge Hong and the Writing of Traditions of Divine Transcendents......Page 42
Traditions as Hagiography......Page 127
Text-Critical Matters......Page 147
Conventions......Page 160
Group A: Earliest-Attested Fragments......Page 316
Group B: Early-Attested Hagiographies......Page 321
Group B: Early-Attested Fragments......Page 387
Group C: Later-Attested Hagiographies......Page 389
On the Source Texts and the Temporal Differentiation of Passages......Page 404
Items Attributed to Shenxian zhuan Excluded from This Translation......Page 576
BIBLIOGRAPHY......Page 582
INDEX......Page 610