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book: To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth
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To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth

A Translation and Study of Ge Hong's Traditions of Divine Transcendents
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2002

About this book

In late classical and early medieval China, ascetics strove to become transcendents--deathless beings with supernormal powers. Practitioners developed dietetic, alchemical, meditative, gymnastic, sexual, and medicinal disciplines (some of which are still practiced today) to perfect themselves and thus transcend death. Narratives of their achievements circulated widely. Ge Hong (283-343 c.e.) collected and preserved many of their stories in his Traditions of Divine Transcendents, affording us a window onto this extraordinary response to human mortality.

Robert Ford Campany's groundbreaking and carefully researched text offers the first complete, critical translation and commentary for this important Chinese religious work, at the same time establishing a method for reconstructing lost texts from medieval China. Clear, exacting, and annotated, the translation comprises over a hundred lively, engaging narratives of individuals deemed to have fought death and won. Additionally, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth systematically introduces the Chinese quest for transcendence, illuminating a poorly understood tradition that was an important source of Daoist religion and a major social, cultural, and religious phenomenon in its own right.

Author / Editor information

Contributor: Robert F. Campany Robert Ford Campany is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is coeditor of the Journal of Chinese Religions and author of Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (1996).

Topics

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    CONTENTS

    xi
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    ILLUSTRATIONS

    xix
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    FOREWORD

    xxi
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    PREFACE

    xxv
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    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    xxvii
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  • PART ONE. Traditions of Divine Transcendents and Its Context
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    Opening

    3
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    Ge Hong and the Writing of Traditions of Divine Transcendents

    13
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    The Nature of the Religion Reflected in Ge Hong’s Works

    18
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    Traditions as Hagiography

    98
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    Text-Critical Matters

    118
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  • PART TWO. A Critical, Annotated Translation and Commentary
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    Conventions

    131
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    GROUP A: Earliest-Attested Hagiographies

    133
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    Group A: Earliest-Attested Fragments

    287
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    Group B: Early-Attested Hagiographies

    292
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    Group B: Early-Attested Fragments

    358
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    Group C: Later-Attested Hagiographies

    360
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  • PART THREE. Text-Critical Notes
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    On the Source Texts and the Temporal Di erentiation of Passages

    375
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    Group A: Sources of Earliest-Attested Hagiographies

    387
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    Group A: Sources of Earliest-Attested Fragments

    479
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    Group B: Sources of Early-Attested Hagiographies

    482
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    Group B: Sources of Early-Attested Hagiographies

    534
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    Group C: Sources of Later-Attested Hagiographies

    536
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    Items Attributed to Shenxian zhuan Excluded from This Translation

    547
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    BIBLIOGRAPHY

    553
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    INDEX

    581
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
August 5, 2019
eBook ISBN:
9780520927605
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
633
View content
https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520927605
eBook ISBN: 9780520927605
Keywords for this book
ancient china; classicism; ascetics; supernatural; paranormal; supernatural powers; meditation; gymnastics; alchemy; discipline; medicine; sexual practices; sexual discipline; divinity; supernatural being; mortality; nonfiction; philosophy; traditions of the divine transcendents; to live as long as heaven and earth; lost texts; chinese texts; archival work; daoism; china; buddhism; taoism; transfiguration; eastern philosophy; medieval china; spirituality; transcendents; immortals; religion; chinese history; transcend death
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