Resources for Textual Research on Premodern Taoism: The Taoist Canon and the State of the Field in the Early 21st Century

Abstract

© 2008 by University ofHawaVi Press A quarter-century ago, when I began research on Taoists of the Tang period (618-906), any such researcher faced formidable hurdles. Not only had the texts of that era never been analyzed by any modern scholar (much less translated into any modern language), but there were not even many helpful research tools by which one could determine which texts might even be pertinent. There was an old Harvard-Yenching index to names and titles in the Daozang (Tao-tsang 道 藏),but it gave no indication of any texts contents and little reliable information regarding any texts authorship or date. In my own case, efforts to identify materi als suitable for my research depended, in the first instance, on a pioneering 1949 study in Chinese by Chen Guofu, Daozang yuanliu kao. In Western languages, little was available at all, save for contributions by the Australian scholar Liu Tsun-yan.1 Otherwise, researchers had to hunt for whatever scattered studies may have appeared, in whatever languages they could read. In the final analysis, most of the texts in the Daozang remained wholly uncharted, so all researchers had to start from scratch, doing their own analysis of every text. That state of affairs (along with various other factors) caused Taoist studies” to develop slowly, and it provided some sinologists—virtually all of whom had been trained according to a Confucio centric template that ignored or even ridiculed all Taoism subsequent to Zhuangzi—a ready excuse to pronounce serious research into the history and texts of Taoism impracticable, hence unworthy of scholarly effort.2 That state of affairs has now been radically changed. Over the last two or three decades, scholars from around the world have analyzed and translated a growing number of texts from many periods.3 Yet, truly useful new refer ence tools began to appear only at the turn of the millennium. One is the Daoism Handbook, edited by Livia Kohn, in which thirty scholars from around the globe methodically examine various periods and topics in premodern and modern Tao ism.4 A more detailed Encyclopedia of Taoism, edited by Fabrizio Pregadio, has been in production for a decade, finally appearing in late 2007. The slowness of such projects is a natural corollary of the immensity of the tasks involved in assid uously sorting through a vast array of textual materials that were, for the most