Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai

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Xun Liu

Daoist Modern

Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai

Xun Liu

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English

Harvard University, Asia Center
01 July 2009

Taoism

Series: Harvard East Asian Monographs

This book explores the Daoist encounter with modernity through the activities of Chen Yingning (1880–1969), a famous lay Daoist master, and his group in early twentieth-century Shanghai. In contrast to the usual narrative of Daoist decay, with its focus on monastic decline, clerical corruption, and popular superstitions, this study tells a story of Daoist resilience, reinvigoration, and revival.

Between the 1920s and 1940s, Chen led a group of urban lay followers in pursuing Daoist self-cultivation techniques as a way of ensuring health, promoting spirituality, forging cultural self-identity, building community, and strengthening the nation. In their efforts to renew and reform Daoism, Chen and his followers became deeply engaged with nationalism, science, the religious reform movements, the new urban print culture, and other forces of modernity.

Since Chen and his fellow practitioners conceived of the Daoist self-cultivation tradition as a public resource, they also transformed it from an ""esoteric"" pursuit into a public practice, offering a modernizing society a means of managing the body and the mind and of forging a new cultural, spiritual, and religious identity.

By: Xun Liu
Imprint: Harvard University, Asia Center
Country of Publication: United States
Volume: No. 313
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 33mm
Weight: 720g
ISBN: 9780674033092
ISBN 10: 0674033094
Series: Harvard East Asian Monographs
Pages: 396
Publication Date: 01 July 2009
Audience: Adult education , Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Xun Liu is Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University.