Traditionally attributed to Wei Boyang and dated to about 150 CE, The Seal of the Unity of the Three is concerned with three major subjects - Taoism (the way of "non-doing"), Cosmology (the system of the Book of Changes), and Alchemy - and joins them to one another into a unique doctrine. "Under an allusive poetical language and thick layers of images and symbols, The Seal of the Unity of the Three (Cantong qi) hides the exposition of the teachings that gave birth to Taoist Internal Alchemy, or Neidan. It is better understood as one between normative claims and those which describe an “other” kind of reality, better translated as “transcendence.” This thesis also contains reflections on the distinction in modern scholarly literature between yangsheng and xian 仙 as one between “longevity” and “immortality.” Although there is a loose and general sense of difference between the two (which is rarely made explicit in the literature), it is not made along lines of “never dying” as the immortality translation implies. Cosmological and spiritual mappings of inner nature and the body found in all three genres give rise to the fluidity of yangsheng 養生(cultivating life) practices across these categorical boundaries. It suggest phenomenology and embodiment studies as better critical tools for explaining their interrelations. It also problematizes the modern distinctions between Chinese medicine, philosophy and religion as discrete genres both in modern scholarship and imperial histories. The diversity of these sources provides a bird’s eye view into a broad array of earlier material, mainly from the Han to the Eastern Jin periods, enabling readers to get a sense of its scope and relationship to the larger fields of Daoist and medical literature. This thesis contains a critical addition and annotated translation of an eighth century Chinese health manual, as well as a philological history of all materials cited in it. It is expected to constitute a palpable contribution to Chinese studies and the discipline of philology in general. This work is the first study addressing these issues by more systematically emphasizing the connection of the text, the author, and the religious and sociopolitical settings in which these issues were embedded. A pre-modern Chinese text could have had both an author and a writer, or even multiple authors and multiple writers. Before the modern era, there existed a conceptual gap between an author and a writer. This book illustrates that although some notions about the text as the author’s property began to appear in some Eastern Han texts, a strict correlation between the author and the text results from later conceptions of literary history. The nominal author who should mainly function as a guide to text formation and interpretation is considered retrospectively as the originator and writer of the text. For a long time, the concept of authorship in the formation and transmission of early Chinese texts has been misunderstood. This book is a timely response to a rather urgent call to seek an updated methodology in rereading and reappraising early Chinese texts in light of newly discovered early writings.
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