Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Foreword Preface Acknowledgments PART ONE: TRADITIONS OF DIVINE TRANSCENDENTS AND ITS CONTEXT Opening Ge Hong and the Writing of Traditions of Divine Transcendents The Nature of the Religion Reflected in Ge Hong's Works Text-Critical Matters PART TWO: A CRITICAL, ANNOTATED TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY Group A: Earliest-Attested Hagiographies Group A: Earliest-Attested Fragments Group B: Early-Attested Hagiographies Group B: Early-Attested Fragments Group C: Later-Attested Hagiographies PART THREE: TEXT-CRITICAL NOTES On the Source Tests and the Temporal Differentiation of Passages Group A: Sources of Earliest-Attested Hagiographies Group A: Sources of Earliest-Attested Fragments Group B: Sources of Early-Attested Hagiographies Group B: Sources of Early-Attested Fragments Group C: Sources of Later-Attested Hagiographies Items Attributed to Shenxian zhuan Excluded from This Translation Bibliography Index

About the Author

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).

Reviews

"This book marks a new milestone in the study of Chinese religious history. Only a scholar as intelligent and dedicated as Campany would dare tackle and so eloquently translate one of the most important and difficult works of early Chinese religious history."-Paul Katz, author of Images of the Immortal: The Cult of Lu Dongbin at the Palace of Eternal Joy; "A pathbreaking work of lasting significance to the field of Chinese religious history. The scholarship is solid and current, drawing upon the best research from America, Europe, China, and Japan. The translation is accurate, clear, and elegant, based upon an innovative analysis of surviving sources."-Terry Kleeman, author of Great Perfection: Religion and Ethnicity in a Chinese Millennial Kingdom; "Campany's annotated translation of Ge Hong's (283-343) classic, the first in English, admirably captures the book's rich evocation of the religious culture of Southern China in the fourth century. Ge Hong here offers a series of case studies of what he regarded as the historical and exemplary evidence for the existence of immortals. This translation of Traditions of Divine Transcendents conveys a lively and multifaceted vision of the Taoist conception of physical immortality. The book's emphasis on practices related to the cult of the immortals and the hope for transcendence squarely places its subject in the religious life of traditional Chinese society."-Franciscus Verellen, co-editor of The Taoist Canon: A Historical Guide