Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai

Harvard East Asian Monographs #313

by Liu Xun

This book explores the Daoist encounter with modernity through the activities of Chen Yingning (1880–1969), a famous lay Daoist master, and his group in early twentieth-century Shanghai. In contrast to the usual narrative of Daoist decay, with its focus on monastic decline, clerical corruption, and popular superstitions, this study tells a story of Daoist resilience, reinvigoration, and revival.

Between the 1920s and 1940s, Chen led a group of urban lay followers in pursuing Daoist self-cultivation techniques as a way of ensuring health, promoting spirituality, forging cultural self-identity, building community, and strengthening the nation. In their efforts to renew and reform Daoism, Chen and his followers became deeply engaged with nationalism, science, the religious reform movements, the new urban print culture, and other forces of modernity.

Since Chen and his fellow practitioners conceived of the Daoist self-cultivation tradition as a public resource, they also transformed it from an “esoteric” pursuit into a public practice, offering a modernizing society a means of managing the body and the mind and of forging a new cultural, spiritual, and religious identity.

396 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2009

About the author

Xun Liu is a professor of history at Rutgers University.

Reviews

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Xun Liu is a fantastic scholar of early 20th Century Modern Daoism. This book helps break the confining molds about what Daoism is, what it was, and what it can be. First looking at the powerful changes in the conception of religion that took hold socially and politically in China during the early 20th Century, it traces the lives of important Daoists and how they saw, changed, and ultimately practiced Daoism.