Daoist perspectives on knowing the future
Selections from the Scripture on Great Peace (Taiping jing)
by Barbara Hendrischke
In China, in the first centuries of the Common Era, prognostication was a widely used tool of political decision making, of cultural and ideological expression and, increasingly, also of popular resistance. The Scripture on Great Peace originated in this environment. It contains warnings of a universal cataclysm and suggests a radical social and religious reorientation as means of salvation. Thereby, it connects insights and ideas of the empire’s academic establishment to experiences and concerns of the population at large. It belongs to the earliest textual sources for Daoism, that is, for China’s indigenous religion that took shape when the imperial government and with it the empire fell apart in the second century CE. The present volume documents the Scripture’s doctrinal and stylistic diversity. The selected materials stem from different parts of the long text. Some focus on eschatological scenarios, others, in contrast, on utopian hopes for the reform of humankind and its future under the auspices of “Great Peace”. Still others design schemes for personal immortality. In this study, these materials are translated into a Western language for the first time. The translations are accompanied by extensive explanatory annotations.
- By (author) Barbara Hendrischke
Other Titles in this Series
Verbal Festivity in Arabic and Other Semitic Languages
Proceedings of the Workshop at the Universitatsclub Bonn on January 16, 2009
Volume 72
Ahmad ibn Yusuf at-Tifasis ‘Buch der koniglichen Steine’
Eine Mineralienkunde fur die arabischen Herrscher des 7./13. Jahrhunderts Eingeleitet, ubersetzt und mit Anmerkungen versehen von Armin Schopen und Karl W. Strauss Mit 38 Abbildungen von Alfred K. Schuster
Volume 92
The Lexical Field of the Substantives of ‘Word’ in Ancient Hebrew
From the Bible to the Mishnah
Volume 124
Hochsprache und Dialekt im Arabischen
Untersuchungen zur heutigen arabischen Zweisprachigkeit
Volume 41.1
Case and Mood Endings in Semitic Languages – Myth or Reality? / Desinences casuelles et modales dans les langues semitiques – mythe ou realite ?
Volume 113
Arabische Kerzendichtung des 10.-15. Jahrhunderts
Eine Studie zur arabischen ekphrastischen Poesie
Volume 131
The Rhetorical Fabric of the Traditional Arabic Qasida in Its Formative Stages
A Comparative Study of the Rhetoric in Two Traditional Poems by 'Alqama l-Fahl and Bashshar b. Burd
Volume 98
Islamic Art and Architecture in the European Periphery
Crimea, Caucasus, and the Volga-Ural Region
Volume 63
Founders of Western Indology
August Wilhelm von Schlegel and Henry Thomas Colebrooke in Correspondence 1820-1837
Volume 84
Poetae docti. Grammatische Verse in der arabischen Poesie des 9.-14. Jahrhunderts
Eine poetische Grammatik
Volume 135
Early Ibadi Literature
Abu l-Mundhir Bashir b. Muhammad b. Mahbub. Kitab al-Rasf fi l-Tawhid, Kitab al-Muharaba and Sira. Introduced and edited by Abdulrahman al-Salimi and Wilferd Madelung
Volume 75
Spirit-Writing Cults in the Chaozhou Region between 1860 and 1949
Local Religion and Translocal Religious Movements
Volume 125
Schriftliche mandschurische Quellen zur Geschichte und Kultur des Qing-Reiches des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts
Aus dem Russischen ubersetzt, bearbeitet und herausgegeben von Giovanni Stary und Hartmut Walravens
Volume 100
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