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
Die ‘Risala fi l-Hawass’ des Ibn al-Gazzar
Die arabische Vorlage des Albertus Magnus zugeschriebenen Traktats 'De mirabilibus mundi'
Volume 79
Ernst Boerschmann
Pagoden in China: Das unveroffentlichte Werk 'Pagoden II'. Aus dem Nachlass herausgegeben und mit historischen Fotos illustriert und bearbeitet von Hartmut Walravens
Volume 102
The Way and Its Powers
An Ethnographic Account of Taoist Practice and Religious Authority in Northern Taiwan
Volume 119
The Morpho-Syntactic and Lexical Encoding of Tense and Aspect in Semitic
Proceedings of the Erlangen Workshop on April 26, 2014
Volume 104
Kaiserliches Theater – Theater ohne Kaiser?
Die Grundung der Han-Dynastie in zaju-Stucken der Ming-Dynastie
Volume 89
Die Schlangensprüche als älteste semitische Textbelege?
Analyse und kritische Betrachtung von Richard C. Steiners „Early Northwest Semitic Serpent Spells in the Pyramid Texts“
Volume 140
Strategies of Clause Linking in Semitic Languages
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Clause Linking in Semitic Languages, Kivik, Sweden, 5-7 August 2012
Volume 93
The Uppsala Manuscript of Muhammed Heva’i Uskufi Bosnevi’s Makbul-i ‘arif (1631) from a Turcological Perspective
Transliteration, Transcription, and an English Translation
Volume 105
Yuan Hongdao – Eine Geschichte der Vasen
Ein Beitrag zur Literatur der Kennerschaft der spaten Ming-Zeit
Volume 108
Studien zu ‘sabab’ in der arabischen Kunstprosa des 10.-15. Jahrhunderts
Ein Beitrag zur arabischen Lexik, Phraseologie und Stilgeschichte
Volume 126
The Beginning of the Subtle School of Taoism
An Official Perception of Taoism in the Early T'ang Period
Volume 94
Another Tract for the Buryats
including I. J. Schmidt's recentlly identified Kalmuck Originals
Volume 82
Bible Translations – Linguistic and Cultural Issues
Proceedings of the Erlangen Workshop on October 5 and 6, 2018
Volume 122
The morphological-to-analytic causative continuum in Hausa
New insights and analyses in a typological perspective
Volume 109
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