Description
With its roots in ancient China and a religion still actively practiced today, Daoism has been an important aspect of Chinese culture for millennia. Despite its centrality to Chinese religious culture and history, in comparison to Buddhism, Daoism remains relatively understudied. Scholarship has largely relied on the texts collected within official Chinese histories and the Daoist canon (compiled in the 15th century), with little attention to archaeological and epigraphic resources available at sites throughout China. Dartmouth College proposes a project to invigorate the field of Daoist studies and help rewrite the history of Daoism by bringing the material record into conversation with textual sources.
Project director Gil Raz, a professor of religion at Dartmouth, explains that a critical question for Daoist studies is the relationship between Daoism as a universal religion in China and the traditions that actually make up the social reality of religious practitioners. “Throughout its history, Daoism has interacted in complex ways with local traditions, Buddhist practices, and the various ruling courts. These interactions are almost invisible in the canonic texts.”
Raz and four colleagues, all experts in the academic study of Daoism, will lead project activities. The co-directors represent the disciplines of archaeology (Bai Bin, Sichuan University), Chinese studies (Richard Wang, University of Florida), art history (Li Song, Peking University) and history (Lei Wen, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences). They will invite a broader group of Chinese and American scholars and students, both graduate and undergraduate, to join them in conducting fieldwork at Daoist sites and archives in China. Participants will then gather in workshops to collate, categorize and map, temporally and geographically, the materials studied in the field, including sculptures, tomb artwork, and inscriptions from cave temples, stelae and gravestones. The project will focus on specific sites in order to provide contextualized studies of Daoism as lived and practiced in particular places and moments. For example, tomb inscriptions of the Tang Dynasty (7 th – 9 th centuries) in Henan Province reveal social networks of Daoist priests and priestesses as they circulated between the Tang court, urban institutions and mountain monasteries, information not available in the textual sources. A culminating conference and publications will bring key findings of the project to a wider audience.
The project leaders envision the work resulting in a strengthened international network and pipeline of emerging scholars trained to incorporate archaeological and epigraphic materials into their research and teaching, and equipped with new, multi-disciplinary interpretive strategies. This focused attention, they propose, will provide a more nuanced picture of how Daoism was lived by its adherents over the centuries. It will also, they hope, inspire the interest and support necessary to help conserve key Daoist materials and sites.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a four-year grant of $350,000 to Dartmouth College to support the collaborative research project Advancing Daoism: Using Epigraphic and Archaeological Materials to Broaden Scholarship & Understanding .
Approved by the Board: March 7, 2018
