Papers by Thomas Michael
Religions
Two long-standing and fiercely debated issues remain central to contemporary studies on Chinese p... more Two long-standing and fiercely debated issues remain central to contemporary studies on Chinese philosophy. The first concerns whether there was an early tradition of metaphysics, and the second concerns whether there was an early tradition of Daoism. This study engages with both issues simultaneously, since if there was a tradition of early Chinese metaphysics, then it is identifiable with Huang-Lao Daoism, and if Huang-Lao Daoism constituted an early Chinese tradition, then it is identifiable with the tradition of Chinese metaphysics. This study engages with these issues in two parts. The first part examines Western and Chinese perspectives concerning what is entailed by claims that there was or was not an early tradition of Chinese metaphysics and that there was or was not an early tradition identifiable as Huang-Lao Daoism. The second part is an analysis of contemporary Chinese scholarship that, deeply grounded in the growing collection of early Chinese excavated manuscripts, bo...
Religions, 2023
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution
Philosophical Enactment and Bodily Cultivation in Early Daoism: In the Matrix of the Daodejing, 2023
Book study of the Daodejing by Laozi
Philosophical Enactment and Bodily Cultivation in Early Daoism: In the Matrix of the Daodejing, 2022
Study of the two earliest surviving Han Dynasty commentaries to the Daodejing representative of H... more Study of the two earliest surviving Han Dynasty commentaries to the Daodejing representative of Huang-Lao Daoism.
Monumenta Serica, 2020
circumstances. They can complement and amend our historical knowledge. Some are even written in s... more circumstances. They can complement and amend our historical knowledge. Some are even written in such an interesting way that their literary composition alone attracts readers. The following are just some of the intriguing examples that are introduced in this volume. The epitaph for Han Chun 韓橁 (d. 1036), an envoy serving the Khitan Liao 遼, for example, covers almost ten pages, the epitaph for the famous Ming general Mao Wenlong 毛文龍 (1579-1629) even fifteen pages, or the epitaph for the Director of River Conservancy, Jin Wenxiang 靳文襄 (Jin Fu 靳輔, 1633-1692) twelve pagesand they are full of details about the lives and careers of the deceased. Jin Wenxiang's biography even includes long passages of memorials (as quotes) relating to river regulations and waterworks that Jin submitted to the Kangxi Emperor. Inscriptions from the Mongol Yuan period offer two reports, one on the official life of a clerk and his daily workfrom dealing with local unrest, to famine management, meeting the excessive demands of Mongol princes, to life in Karakorum and an attempt to prohibit the private making of wine (epitaph for Su Zhidao 蘇志道, 1261-1320; pp. 158-171)and one on the battles in which a Mongol Grand Guardian, Sayin Čidaqu 賽因赤答忽 (1317-1367; pp. 172-181), was involved. The latter's biography also sheds light on the contemporary multi-ethnic society in northern China. and on the interests of anti-Yuan rebels and pro-Yuan militants. Going along with their growing public use, funerary biographies also reflect the shift of audience away from the spirits of the deceased, and of the underworld, toward the living (p. 15). The shift becomes particularly evident after Song times (960-1279) and is also obvious in the biographies presented here. To sum up, this anthology of remembered lives presents fascinating stories that will reveal to any reader how vivid and interesting tomb biographies can be. The book also provides a good and concise general introduction to the topic of tomb inscriptions. At the end, a teaching guide with questions is included. Specialists will love the intriguing examples.
Religions
The Daodejing is counted among the greatest works of world philosophy and literature, but it is a... more The Daodejing is counted among the greatest works of world philosophy and literature, but it is a short work that is exceedingly difficult to comprehend. Among several reasons for this is that no one knows the actual words and form of its original text. Assessing the differences between any two editions of it is a simple task when they are laid next to each other, but it is not possible to lay any edition of the Daodejing next to its original text to assess their differences, because no one has ever seen the original text of the Daodejing, and no one knows its actual words and form. Approaching the original text is only made possible through its representations and reflections in later editions that we do possess, some of them transmitted and others excavated. Any possible access to the original text, to any degree whatsoever, is dependent on how these later editions are managed. Sinology manages them with the recension category whereas Laozi Studies manages them with the version ca...
international Journal of China Studies, 2020
The ancient text known as the Laozi Daodejing is a treasure of Chinese culture and civilization, ... more The ancient text known as the Laozi Daodejing is a treasure of Chinese culture and civilization, and it also represents one of the world classics of religion and philosophy. However, it is also a notoriously difficult work to interpret, and modern scholars have exerted tremendous energy in attempting to make an overall sense of just what the text is all about: is it religious or philosophical? Is it a synthetically coherent work with a unified perspective, or an anthology of disparate ideas compiled from multiple sources? Is its main character, the anonymous sage, a master of bodily techniques living in mountain reclusion, or an enlightened ruler who manipulates the Dao from his royal throne to order an empire? The famous German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), himself dabbled in the thought of the Laozi, and in doing so he opened a novel phenomenological reading of the text that rejected the metaphysics traditionally read into it, but his approach had little impact until the discovery of several excavated versions of the ancient manuscript that appear to confirm his phenomenological interpretation. Since then, a growing number of contemporary scholars are accepting, absorbing, and furthering this phenomenological reading of the Laozi, allowing them to make great progress in exploring its religious and philosophical foundations that have deeply influenced Chinese culture and society for more than two thousand years. This paper examines this legacy bequeathed by Heidegger to Laozi studies as well as comparative philosophy more generally.
Religions, 2022
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Religions, 2019
Eroticism is an independent feature of human life that influences many areas of experience, inclu... more Eroticism is an independent feature of human life that influences many areas of experience, including death and religion. While eroticism has received a good deal of scholarly attention in religious studies, the present study takes the Nine Songs as the starting point for a discussion of eroticism as a frequent element in the world of shamanism. These songs provide the earliest linguistic corpus in East Asia that allows us a glimpse into the world of the shaman, and they constitute one of the earliest sources of this type preserved anywhere in the world by giving depictions of eroticized gender relations between shamans and spirits. This study comparatively situates the ritual structures expressed in the Nine Songs to uncover deeper affinities between shamanism, eroticism, violence, and death.
The article examines various options that scholars have explored in their efforts to construct a ... more The article examines various options that scholars have explored in their efforts to construct a history of shamanism. Recognizing Eliade's promise that such a history lies in the near future, the article then explores the important ways in which this has been undertaken. It specifies four such ways: with prehistoric rock art, the origins of cultural myths, memory studies, and movements of cultural resistance. Ultimately resisting each of these four options while paying particular attention to the case of early Chinese shamanism, its concluding sections recognize the work of Mircea Eliade and Roberte Hamayon as providing two alternative pathways that might lead into possible constructions of this history, and it then attempts to locate a third way between them. Keywords shamanism – history of shamanism – Mircea Eliade – Roberte Hamayon – Chinese shamanism The question of shamanism is a vexed one in the modern academy, and hard to ignore. If it does not haunt our groping explorations into the archaic past of the origins of human civilization, then it certainly impinges on how we understand certain local forms of resistance against the expansionistic urges of hegemonic powers. For a short period following the publication of Mircea Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, the phenomenon of shamanism was almost (but not quite) containable: he characterized it
This article presents an analysis of certain erotic strategies employed by shamans of the early C... more This article presents an analysis of certain erotic strategies employed by shamans of the early Chinese state of Chu that were intended to attract and seduce an array of spirits thought to inhabit the world of nature. These strategies are analyzed from a collection of songs gathered together under the title of the Jiu ge from the Chuci anthology, and they provide some of the clearest evidences for a tradition of early Chinese southern Chu shamanism. After setting forth certain elements of the religious, historical, and theoretical background of this shamanism, this article approaches and analyzes it in terms of the eroticized gender relations between humans and spirits upon which this shamanism is centrally based. Because the present author understands shamanism in terms of face to face communication between human beings and bodiless beings in a séance event, and because these communications are represented as taking place by way of either the shaman journeying to the spirit or the spirit coming to take possession of the shaman, the final sections of this article analyze each type of séance event separately.
Mountains hold an important place in the religious imagination of humankind. They reach up into t... more Mountains hold an important place in the religious imagination of humankind. They reach up into the heavens, and ascending them brings one closer to the celestial deities whose presence is usually more desired than the infernal deities, even though Mircea Eliade writes that mountains, representative of the axis mundi, have their roots in the underworld. 1 He specifies mountains as privileged places for experiencing the sacred, either as "hierophanies" (manifestations of the sacred) or "kratophanies" (manifestations of power). 2
This article undertakes a reexamination of shamanism in early China, an issue that centers on a r... more This article undertakes a reexamination of shamanism in early China, an issue that centers on a religious title (wu) that is consistently mentioned in virtually every major text from the period. For roughly the last fifty years, sinologists have vigorously argued the appropriateness of identifying these wu as shamans. In an effort to bring a deeper degree of clarity to this issue, Parts 1 and 2 of the article explore certain findings from the field of modern shaman studies that can open up new ways of thinking about the wu. Part 3 examines the ways in which sinologists have approached the wu and attempts to show how modern shaman theory can allow us to better situate our thinking on this issue. Part 4 offers a brief case study of one early Chinese text and considers how modern shaman theory can shed new light on our interpretation of the wu.
Book Reviews by Thomas Michael
China Review International, 2019
In the late s, David Hall and Roger Ames first began to champion what they saw as the radical... more In the late s, David Hall and Roger Ames first began to champion what they saw as the radical differences between Western and Chinese thought, which they presented with the provocative claim that Chinese philosophy was a tradition without transcendence. Their claim established an enduring framework within which professional research in the field has largely been directed. Regardless of whether their claim is right or wrong, one of its major consequences was to depict Chinese philosophy as, among other things, profoundly nonreligious in the common understanding of the term. This view is also in keeping with more longstanding cultural claims, often coming from the West, that China is a godless civilization, at least with respect to a transcendent creator god, and Chinese philosophy is currently treated as a tradition of respectable naturalism. Not only has this interpretive framework been adopted and absorbed by the greater part of recent scholarship, but there is also a steady stream of academic writings explicitly devoted to considerations of the absence of transcendence in China, sometimes discussed in terms of Chinese metaphysics. The new work, Transcendence and Non-Naturalism in Early Chinese Thought, co-authored by Joshua Brown and Alexus McLeod, is a recent addition to this growing body of literature. However, it is systematically directed at dismantling the claim that China is without transcendence, and it does so by primary reliance on a comparative methodology that seeks to overcome this othering of Chinese civilization as fundamentally different from that of the West; they write, "Our argument, then, is against the dismissal of non-naturalism and transcendence as adequate and helpful ways of understanding early Chinese philosophy" (p. ). Early Chinese philosophical texts are relentlessly practical and typically written in a comparatively minimalist style that relies more on terse historical or natural allusion than prolix speculative reason. The theological thrusts embedded in their arguments are rarely given free expression and must be deduced indirectly. The outstanding feature of Transcendence and Non-Naturalism is its success in bringing depth and clarity to these sorts of indirectly articulated and semitheological claims concerning transcendence in early Chinese thought that scholars who deny its existence normally disregard or overlook. The book Reviews © by University of Hawai'i Press contribution to those who are willing to reconsider several of the staple Western assumptions about early and traditional Chinese philosophy. Although the authors hardly consider how their findings can impact wider cross-cultural considerations about the interplay of philosophy, theology, and religion, it is here that their work will make its fullest impact.
Journal of Chinese Studies, 2019
Philosophy East and West, 2019
Religious Studies Review, 2017
Uploads
Papers by Thomas Michael
Book Reviews by Thomas Michael