Deborah A. Sommer

This volume includes nineteen articles by scholars from Asia, North America, and Europe on Chinese thinkers from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries. Included here are intellectual biographies of literati such as Zhou Dunyi, the Cheng brothers, Zhu Xi, Zhang Shi, Hu Hong, Wang Yangming, and Dai Zhen. Essays are arranged chronologically, and most begin with a biographical sketch of their subject. They provide variety rather than uniformity of approach, but all in all these essays are remarkably rich and offer much new material on both familiar and lesser-known thinkers.

The ji 己self is a site, storehouse, or depot of individuated allotment associated with the possession of things and qualities: wholesome and unwholesome desires (yu 欲) and aversions, emotions such as anxiety, and positive values such as humaneness and reverence. Each person's allotment is unique, and its "contents" are collected, measured, reflected on, and then distributed to others. The Analects, Mencius, Xunzi, Daodejing, and Zhuangzi each have their own vision for negotiating the space between self and other. Works as seemingly dissimilar as the Analects and Daodejing both agree that positive qualities located within the self should be shared with others, and that the self can be optimized rather than maximized through sharing, emptying, or clearing. Sommer compares the ji self with other terms for body and person current in classical times. This self is strongly individuated, but it exists primarily in relation to other human beings (ren 人 ). These "others" are almost never one's own kind and are usually people who fall outside one's ascribed familial and social relationships. Negotiations between self and other often reflect apprehension regarding degrees of distance, intimacy, worth, recognition, or understanding (zhi 知) between people.

For centuries, westerners have referred to China's numerous traditions of spiritual expression as "religious"--a word born of western thought that cannot completely characterize the passionate writing that fills the pages of this pathbreaking anthology. The first of its kind in well over thirty years, this text offers the student of Chinese ritual and cosmology the broadest range of primary sources from antiquity to the modern era. Readings are arranged chronologically and cover such concepts as Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and even communism. A large number of the selections concern the role of the female in Chinese religion, and are either by or about women. Through invocations, poetry, drama, philosophical texts, religious treatises, and modern fiction, students hear the voices of numerous Chinese masters expounding on the movements and traditions that inspired them: the mysterious Tao-te ching of Lao Tzu, cloaked in the mists of deepest antiquity; the Analects of stately, reverent Confucius; "Nailing a Stick into Empty Space," from The Recorded Conversations of Ch'an Master I-hsuan, and many others, including the work of Mencius, Pan Chao, Han Shan, Chang Tsai, Wang Yang-ming, Lu Hsun, and Mao Tse-tung. Fully one third of the translations are new, and each reading is preceded by an introduction that explains its importance and salient features. Complete with a helpful chronology of dynasties and list of possible video sources, this remarkable volume collects under one cover the most significant and influential works of China's dynamic spiritual tradition, making a fundamental contribution to courses in Chinese religion, literature, and history.

The Zhuangzi is one of the richest early Chinese sources for exploring conceptualizations of the visceral human form. Zhuangzi presents the human frame as a corpus of flesh, organs, limbs, and bone; he dissects it before the reader's eyes, turning it inside out and joyfully displaying its fragmented joints, sundered limbs, and beautifully monstrous mutations. This body is a site of immolation and fragmentation that ultimately evokes a larger wholeness and completeness. Drawing and quartering the body, Zhuangzi paradoxically frees it from ordinary mortality. Sommer explores the fields of meaning of different terms for the human body found in the Zhuangzi: the body might appear there as a gong body 躬, a sanctimonious ritualized body; as a shen body 身, a site of familial and social personhood; or as a ti body 體, a complex, multilayered corpus of multiple parts, each of which is consubstantial with the whole. Most commonly, however, the body in the Zhuangzi is the xing 形, an elemental or structural form. Zhuangzi enlivens and develops the xing form in ways that are not seen in other early Chinese texts. He mutilates and mutates it such that boundaries between form and formlessness disappear, and the physical frame becomes incorporated into a larger common body that includes all of life and death.