THOMAS E. SMITH, Declarations of the Perfected. Part One: Setting Scripts and Images into Motion. St. Petersburg, FL: Three Pines Press, 2013. 350 pp. US$35.95 (pb). ISBN 978-1-931483-81-0 The Shangqing 上清 revelations refer to a collection of scriptures, hagiographies, and liturgical texts composed by the spiritual advisors of Xu Mi 許謐 (303–376 CE), a southern aristocrat living southeast of present-day Nanjing 南京. Most of these texts were written by Yang Xi 楊羲 (330–386 CE), who was hired by Xu Mi in the mid-360s as a private advisor on certain personal and financial troubles— the sudden passing of his wife, the sickness of his grandchildren, and the failure, due to a massive drought, of a farm he had recently built west of Maoshan 茅山. In this capacity, Yang entered into trancelike states of consciousness on behalf of Xu Mi to contact a band of exalted deities called the Perfected (zhenren 真人). Many of Yang’s revelations detailed solutions aimed at altering Xu’s psychological processes. The Perfected revealed that Xu was destined for rebirth as a Perfected official, and was entitled to marry a Perfected goddess by immediately entering into a spiritual union, albeit one void of carnal relations. In his recent book, Thomas Smith focuses on the nature of this imagined relationship between adepts and their Perfected partners through an annotated translation and commentary of a collection of Yang’s revelations known as Yun ti xiang 運題象. As Smith notes, the revelations comprising Yun ti xiang were all written by Xu’s advisors, but the order and overall thematic content of these texts were the design of Tao Hongjing 陶弘景 (456–536), who featured Yun ti xiang as the first chapter in his Zhen’gao 真誥. Smith’s translation of Yun ti xiang is not the first attempt to translate this difficult text into a modern language. A little over a decade ago, a team of translators led by Yoshikawa Tadao 吉川忠夫 and Mugitani Kunio 麥谷邦夫 published a complete translation of the Zhen’gao in Japanese.1 Although Smith’s book only contains a partial translation of Tao’s compendium, it represents a significant advance over its predecessor. First, Smith provides readers with copious footnotes helping readers decipher the recondite terminology of the text. Unlike the Japanese translation, in which footnotes often cite passages verbatim from earlier classical Chinese sources, Smith excels at explaining the relationship between Yang’s revelations and earlier texts. Second, the organization of Smith’s book makes it an outstanding reference for students wishing to delve deeper into Yang’s revelations. Smith includes an exhaustive dramatis personae of the various deities appearing in Yang’s revelations (pp. 28–39). He also separates revelations by their date of composition, a feature making it much easier to follow the ideas and course of events contained in these texts. For these reasons, Smith’s book is an indispensible addition to the libraries of scholars working with Daoist texts. The commentary that Smith appends at the end of each string of revelations illustrates the third major contribution of this book. His commentarial layers draw 1 Shink o kenky u: yakuch u hen 「真誥」研究—譯注篇 (Kyoto: Ky oto daigaku Jinbun kagaku kenky ujo, 2000). This Japanese translation was subsequently translated by Zhu Yueli 朱 越利 as Zhen’gao jiaozhu 真誥校注 (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue yuan, 2006). 128 BOOK REVIEWS attention to historical and conceptual resonances between revelations and other passages from Yun ti xiang. These parts of the book also consistently address the methodological questions Smith raises in the introduction of the book. Smith understands Yang’s revelations not just as a historical curiosity, but rather as a cultural product reflecting key (and hitherto understudied) perspectives on sexuality in fourth-century China. As Smith notes, much of the terminology describing this spiritual union was derived from the sexual lexicon of human intercourse, but the Perfected stressed that Xu’s Perfected marriage was an ethereal unification of two minds, not a relationship involving physical intercourse. Even though Yang did not conceive of his Perfected union as a relationship that involved coitus, Smith demonstrates that the human actors at Maoshan envisioned their connection with the Perfected by means of an explicitly erotic language. Smith’s interest in the mechanics...