A Poetry Debate of the Perfected of Highest Clarityстатья из журнала
Аннотация: The past thirty years have witnessed the publication of an ever increasing amount of scholarship dealing with the Daoist revelations from the heaven of Highest Clarity (Shangqing 上清), bestowed on and recorded by Yang Xi 楊羲 during the years 364 to 370. The story of the midnight visits by the Shangqing divinities to Yang Xi, their manifold communications to him in both prose and verse, the dispersal of their message at first to a small circle of aristocratic southern families and later to a wider audience, and the collection, editing, and codification of Yang Xi’s original manuscripts over a century later by Tao Hongjing 陶 弘景 (456–536) has fostered its own sub-field of study. There is no need to give again the details of this new celestial dispensation, so momentous in its influence over the following four centuries on medieval Chinese social, literary, political, and religious history. 1 But it is disappointing that the field of Daoist studies has shown a tendency to close around itself, much as the field of Buddhist studies did previously, and that few of its important findings have been integrated into the larger context of studies on medieval China. This has meant that scholars of medieval literature in particular still show scant awareness of Daoist texts that could both deepen and broaden their own work, much as they have for long avoided personal engagement with Buddhist texts, regarding them as the delimited province of Buddhologists. In what follows I hope to make a small contribution to bridging this disciplinary gap, by presenting a group of poems from a key Shangqing text, which can and should be seen in the light of literary and intellectual—as well as religious—history. The group of poems in question comes from the Zhen gao 真誥, containing Yang Xi’s transcription of the oral communications bestowed on him by the Perfected (or “Realized Persons,” zhenren 真人) of Highest Clarity. I have written about various of the Zhen gao poems on other occasions. 2 Here I should like to focus on an unusual set of eleven poems composed by ten different divinities as part of a group activity on the night of 4 October 365. This kind of composition by several individuals on a shared theme is a familiar occurrence in medieval Chinese poetry, the earliest extant such groups of significance being from poets at the Cao 曹 family court during the Jian’an 建安 reign-period (196–220). It should not surprise us that the zhenren may likewise find this activity enjoyable. They are members of a higher court, if you will, but they too value the creation of refined verse, as the first
Год издания: 2012
Авторы: Paul W. Kroll
Издательство: American Oriental Society
Источник: Journal of the American Oriental Society
Ключевые слова: Chinese history and philosophy, Japanese History and Culture, Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 132
Выпуск: 4
Страницы: 577–577