Beyond the Daode Jing

Book Description

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  I found a lovely cheap copy of this Three pines press book on lulu and Bill bound me a physical version. It was a much more philosophical book than I'm used to reading. Most of my interest in Taoism leads me to read about the quest for immortality, thunder magic, exorcism rituals, sex rites, and the ... (continue)

  I found a lovely cheap copy of this Three pines press book on lulu and Bill bound me a physical version. It was a much more philosophical book than I'm used to reading. Most of my interest in Taoism leads me to read about the quest for immortality, thunder magic, exorcism rituals, sex rites, and the role of women in the religion. It's much more practical about rituals and practice and how it's shaped rather than theological and philosophical debate. But I found this book very interesting nonetheless. Assandri discussed the way Taoism changed through the period of disunion through to the Song. How different branches of Taoism were not just in competition with Buddhism but also with each other trying to show how their school was the right one. One of the most interesting examples of this was higher clarity scriptures that had Zhen Daoling (the founder of Heavenly master Taoism) talk about how he'd now found the true scriptures that overrode what he said when he was on Earth. It was interesting to see how they were trying to discredit his teachings, but that he was still important enough that they had to use him to do so. Assandri also did a good job of showing how the influence between Taoism and Buddhism wasn't straight forward but an intricate dialogue which was quite interesting.

  I have to say while I'm not sure I grasped everything in this book I did still enjou the philosophical discussions. One thing that bothered me was that she kept referring to a particular Taoist technique of reasoning as Tetra Lemma instead of Sij, I'm guessing this is the typical way Western scholars have referred to this line of reasoning. But I found the use of Latin very distracting, annoying and unnecessary as everytime I had to remember what it was in Chinese. It just felt like a little bit of cultural imperialism, that to be a proper philosophical term it had to be translated into Latin. But the concept itself was lovely. (Which I'd write out but have just lost my language bar).

  The only other criticism was that there was no mention of women at all, even though there were quite a lot of women Taoists in this period, and several were quite active in the traditions being discussed. It was an interesting book and lovely to go back and read a new book that gave new insight into my specialist area of study.

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  Robot-mel said on Feb 19, 2012 | Add your feedback

Book Details

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• English Books
• Others 250 Pages
• ISBN-10: 1931483124
• ISBN-13: 9781931483124
• Publisher: Three Pines Pr
• Pub date: Aug 01, 2009

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