To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth
eBook - PDF

To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth

A Translation and Study of Ge Hong's Traditions of Divine Transcendents

  1. 633 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth

A Translation and Study of Ge Hong's Traditions of Divine Transcendents

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.

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Yes, you can access To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth by Robert F. Campany in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Theology & Religion & Asian Religions. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. List of Illustrations
  6. Foreword
  7. Preface
  8. Acknowledgments
  9. PART ONE: Traditions of Divine Transcendents and its context
  10. PART TWO: A critical, annotated translation and commentary
  11. PART THREE: Text-Critical Notes
  12. Bibliography
  13. Index