Taming the Wild Horse: An Annotated Translation and Study of the Daoist Horse Taming Pictures by Louis Komjathy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Taming the Wild Horse: An Annotated Translation and Study of the Daoist Horse Taming Pictures by Louis Komjathy Joshua Capitanio Louis Komjathy. Taming the Wild Horse: An Annotated Translation and Study of the Daoist Horse Taming Pictures. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Pp. 264. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0231181266. In Taming the Wild Horse: An Annotated Translation and Study of the Daoist Horse Taming Pictures, his most recent work, Louis Komjathy brings together two topics that he has been researching and writing about for over a decade now: meditative practice within the late imperial Daoist tradition of Complete Perfection (Quanzhen 全) and contemplative approaches to the study of religion. Those who are more familiar with his work on Daoist studies may not be aware of Komjathy's prominent role in the development of the field of contemplative studies: he was a founding member of the Contemplative Studies Unit within the American Academy of Religion, serving also as co-chair from its inception in 2010 until 2016, and has published several important works in the field, including the edited volume Contemplative Literature: A Comparative Sourcebook on Meditation and Contemplative Prayer1 and the more recent monograph Introducing Contemplative Studies.2 Taming the Wild Horse represents an attempt to bring the methodology of contemplative studies to bear on a pre-modern Daoist text, an untitled composition (referred to throughout the book as the "Horse Taming Pictures") that portrays the path of meditation in Complete Perfection Daoism allegorically through images depicting the process of taming a wild horse. Komjathy's "contemplative reading" of this text goes beyond translation and exegesis to document his own subjective engagement with the Horse Taming Pictures, guiding readers to "engage the contemplative dimensions of the text and the implications for human-animal relationships and equine being … [as] a form of contemplative practice" (x). The result is a unique work, which offers an engaging perspective on the text of the Horse Taming Pictures and a fresh approach to the study of Daoism and other religious traditions. [End Page 477] The book is divided into three main parts, comprising a historical and topical introduction, the translation of the Horse Taming Pictures text along with its verse commentary, and the author's own exegesis of the text. In "In Search of the Wild Horse," the first chapter in Part I, Komjathy introduces the Horse Taming Pictures and their author, Gao Daokuan 高道寬 (1195–1277). Situating both the text and its author within the Complete Perfection tradition, Komjathy provides a basic overview of the principles of internal alchemy and graded meditative cultivation that inform Complete Perfection practice as presented within the Horse Taming Pictures, outlining the structure of the text and the progression depicted within. This section is useful, but I would have liked to see more discussion of the relationship between the Horse Taming Pictures and the Chan Buddhist oxherding pictures on which they are clearly based. Komjathy does provide a general overview of the similarities between the Horse Taming Pictures and the two contemporaneous editions of the oxherding pictures that remain extant, the eleventh-century composition by Puming 普明 and the twelfth-century work by Kuo'an 廓庵. The discussion is brief, however, and focuses more on the dissimilarities between the Horse Taming Pictures and the Chan oxherding genre than on their similarities. However, Gao's composition of a text based directly upon the Buddhist oxherding pictures suggests a deep interest and engagement with Chan Buddhist literature. Arguably, Gao's interest in Chan influenced the structure and contents of the Horse Taming Pictures as much as, if not more than, any interest that he had in horses and the particulars of their training, yet the latter topic is the subject of an entire chapter of Taming the Wild Horse while the former is given only a brief four-page treatment. Gao's Horse Taming Pictures could in fact be read as a sort of "contemplative criticism" of the corresponding Chan text(s) and the practices that it advocates, and thus a deeper engagement with Chan Buddhist literature in general and the oxherding pictures in particular would provide important context for Gao's work, and might reveal additional aspects of his...