A Poetry Debate of the Perfected of Highest Clarity

摘要

The past thirty years have witnessed the publication of an ever increasing amount of scholarship dealing with the Daoist revelations from the heaven of Highest Clarity (Shangqing 上清), bestowed on and recorded by Yang Xi 楊曦 during the years 364 to 370. The story of the midnight visits by the Shangqing divinities to Yang Xi, their manifold communications to him in both prose and verse, the dispersal of their message at first to a small circle of aristocratic southern families and later to a wider audience, and the collection, editing, and codification of Yang Xi's original manuscripts over a century later by Tao Hongjing 陶 弘景 (456-536) has fostered its own sub-field of study. There is no need to give again the details of this new celestial dispensation, so momentous in its influence over the following four centuries on medieval Chinese social, literary, political, and religious history.1 But it is disappointing that the field of Daoist studies has shown a tendency to close around itself, much as the field of Buddhist studies did previously, and that few of its important findings have been integrated into the larger context of studies on medieval China. This has meant that scholars of medieval literature in particular still show scant awareness of Daoist texts that could both deepen and broaden their own work, much as they have for long avoided personal engagement with Buddhist texts, regarding them as the delimited province of Buddhologists. In what follows I hope to make a small contribution to bridging this disciplinary gap, by presenting a group of poems from a key Shangqing text, which can and should be seen in the light of literary and intellectual-as well as religious-history.