China and Inner Asia

Organized Panel Session

(1) - Being Seen to Communicate with the Unseen

As Daoism specialists know, Master Zhou’s Records of Communications with the Unseen Realm (Zhoushi mingtong ji) is a four-scroll-long document presented by Daoist master Tao Hongjing to Emperor Wu of the Liang in 517 CE and later collected into the Daoist canon. Tao crafted the text’s outer frame, recounting how his disciple, Zhou Ziliang, came to live on Mount Mao and eventually ended his own life at age nineteen by ingesting an alchemical elixir. Inside this frame are Zhou’s own records, carefully arranged and commented on by Tao, of the visions and dreams he had over a fourteen-month period prior to his death.

I will show the text’s religious and rhetorical complexity while situating it in the wider culture of dreams and visions in which it participates. I begin by asking what Zhou’s 63 entries recording waking visions and 46 describing dreams are about. The answer: they tell of visits by various Shangqing deities (or else Zhou’s dream-journeys to distant sites), the purpose of all of which is to further his progress in self-cultivation. The text thus participates in an understanding of dreams and visions that was old and widespread: that they might form an integral part of a self-cultivator’s training. I then ask: what was the text constructed to do? I argue that both Tao’s textual frame and Zhou’s records were carefully constructed to (among other things) display the fruits of secret arts while simultaneously concealing those arts’ details.

Speaker(s)

• RC

  Robert Campany

  Vanderbilt University