A Fourth-Century Daoist Family

This volume is the first in a series of full-length English translations from one of the foremost classics in Daoist religious literature, the Zhen gao or Declarations of the Perfected. The Declarations is a collection of poems, accounts of the dead, instructions, and meditation methods received by the Daoist Yang Xi (330–ca. 386 BCE) from celestial beings and shared by him with his patrons and students. These fragments of revealed material were collected and annotated by the eminent scholar and Daoist Tao Hongjing (456–536), allowing us access to these distant worlds and unfamiliar strategies of self-perfection. Bokenkamp's full translation highlights the literary nature of Daoist revelation and the place of the Declarations in the development of Chinese letters. It further details interactions with the Chinese throne and the aristocracy and demonstrates ways that Buddhist borrowings helped shape Daoism much earlier than has been assumed. This first volume also contains heretofore unrecognized reconfigurations of Buddhist myth and practice that Yang Xi introduced to his Daoist audience.
 

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Contents and Background of the Work
Women and Goddesses
Mediumism in the Declarations
Buddhism in the Declarations
Prior Translations
Conventions of the Translation
Abbreviations

1) Tao Hongjing's Postface (DZ 1016, Chapters 19–20) 
Translation: Introducing the Declarations of the Perfected
Translation: Account of the Perfected Scriptures from Beginning to End
Translation: Genealogy of the Perfected Forebears

2) The Poems of Elu¨hua
Translation: The Poems of Elu¨hua (DZ 1016, 1.1a–2a)

3) The Sons of Sima Yu 
Introduction
Translation: The Sons of Sima Yu

4) "Eight Pages of Lined Text"
a) Introduction to the "Eight Pages of Lined Text"
b) Introduction and Translation: Poems on Dependence and Independence
c) Introduction and Translation: Han Mingdi's Dream
d) Introduction and Translation of On Fangzhu 
e) Introduction and Translation of the Teachings and Admonitions of the Assembled Numinous Powers (= The Scripture in Forty-Two Sections)
f) Related Fragments

Works in the Daoist Canon
Works Cited 
Index