This thesis also examines sacred space of the Song period, theorizing that an important spatial synergy took place between physical representations and the religions of medieval China: images had become intertwined with how different groups of people visualized their bodies, as well as how these groups represented a human relationship at work with the natural world. As the dissertation will show, the interaction between the non-material activity of visualization, or how people create images in their minds, and representation, or how people create material objects to reify the images in their minds, is often pivotal, as opposed to accessory, to some of the later ideological developments of the Chinese people. So powerful were these material representations, in fact, that in certain cases they may have acted as a primary conduit through which the religion was experienced. This thesis asserts that Song Chinese people used art and other material objects not only for the purpose of representing the world in which they lived, but also as a means of expressing, developing and empowering their religions and ideologies. When found within the context of religion, art objects are in this same vein often described as representational as opposed to foundational of religious experience or its aspects. Traditionally, scholarship within the field of religious studies relies heavily upon textual sources, and material objects are often seen as accessory to the findings related to these sources. This fusion of natural and human worlds in representation appears in a variety of contexts, including paintings of famous Song landscape artists, writings of literati thinkers, architectural developments of Neo- Confucian scholars, body charts recorded in the Daoist Canon, and artwork connected to Chinese Buddhism. "In this dissertation, interdisciplinary research demonstrates how Chinese people affiliated with different religions and ideologies of the Song period (960- 1279 CE) utilized artistic, literary and visual representations to merge the natural world with the human body. Given increasing environmental devastation and the dominance of views, practices, and institutions reducing nature to a background and/or raw material for human activity, this "ethics of encounter" discloses the life of things as inexhaustibly more than human projects and constructs, extending ethical recognition and responsibility beyond social relations and the social self. Early Daoism potentially corrects both anthropocentrism and biocentrism in environmental ethics by disclosing the things themselves in the context of the self-cultivation of life. "'Dao'" is not a substantial immanent or transcendent entity but the lived enactment of the intrinsic worth of the "myriad things" and the natural world occurring through 'how' humans address and are addressed by them. It is better understood as one between normative claims and those which describe an “other” kind of reality, better translated as “transcendence.”Įarly Daoism, as articulated in the 'Daodejing' and the 'Zhuangzi', indirectly addresses environmental issues by intimating a nonreductive naturalistic ethics calling on humans to be open and responsive to the specificities and interconnections of the world and environment to which they belong. This thesis also contains reflections on the distinction in modern scholarly literature between yangsheng and xian 仙 as one between “longevity” and “immortality.” Although there is a loose and general sense of difference between the two (which is rarely made explicit in the literature), it is not made along lines of “never dying” as the immortality translation implies. Cosmological and spiritual mappings of inner nature and the body found in all three genres give rise to the fluidity of yangsheng 養生(cultivating life) practices across these categorical boundaries. It suggest phenomenology and embodiment studies as better critical tools for explaining their interrelations. It also problematizes the modern distinctions between Chinese medicine, philosophy and religion as discrete genres both in modern scholarship and imperial histories. The diversity of these sources provides a bird’s eye view into a broad array of earlier material, mainly from the Han to the Eastern Jin periods, enabling readers to get a sense of its scope and relationship to the larger fields of Daoist and medical literature. This thesis contains a critical addition and annotated translation of an eighth century Chinese health manual, as well as a philological history of all materials cited in it.
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