To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong's Traditions of Divine Transcendents (Taoist Classics, 2)

In late classical and early medieval China, ascetics strove to become transcendents--deathless beings with supernormal powers. Practitioners developed dietetic, alchemical, meditative, gymnastic, sexual, and medicinal disciplines (some of which are still practiced today) to perfect themselves and thus transcend death. Narratives of their achievements circulated widely. Ge Hong (283-343 c.e.) collected and preserved many of their stories in his Traditions of Divine Transcendents, affording us a window onto this extraordinary response to human mortality. Robert Ford Campany's groundbreaking and carefully researched text offers the first complete, critical translation and commentary for this important Chinese religious work, at the same time establishing a method for reconstructing lost texts from medieval China. Clear, exacting, and annotated, the translation comprises over a hundred lively, engaging narratives of individuals deemed to have fought death and won. Additionally, To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth systematically introduces the Chinese quest for transcendence, illuminating a poorly understood tradition that was an important source of Daoist religion and a major social, cultural, and religious phenomenon in its own right. ILLUSTRATIONS......Page 20 FOREWORD......Page 22 PREFACE......Page 26 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......Page 28 Opening......Page 32 Ge Hong and the Writing of Traditions of Divine Transcendents......Page 42 Traditions as Hagiography......Page 127 Text-Critical Matters......Page 147 Conventions......Page 160 Group A: Earliest-Attested Fragments......Page 316 Group B: Early-Attested Hagiographies......Page 321 Group B: Early-Attested Fragments......Page 387 Group C: Later-Attested Hagiographies......Page 389 On the Source Texts and the Temporal Differentiation of Passages......Page 404 Items Attributed to Shenxian zhuan Excluded from This Translation......Page 576 BIBLIOGRAPHY......Page 582 INDEX......Page 610 We die, we humans, like all other forms of the mysterious phenomenon known as life.