This book explores the Daoist encounter with modernity through
the activities of Chen Yingning (1880 1969), a famous lay Daoist
master, and his group in early twentieth-century Shanghai. In
contrast to the usual narrative of Daoist decay, with its focus on
monastic decline, clerical corruption, and popular superstitions,
this study tells a story of Daoist resilience, reinvigoration, and
revival.
Between the 1920s and 1940s, Chen led a group of urban lay
followers in pursuing Daoist self-cultivation techniques as a way
of ensuring health, promoting spirituality, forging cultural
self-identity, building community, and strengthening the nation. In
their efforts to renew and reform Daoism, Chen and his followers
became deeply engaged with nationalism, science, the religious
reform movements, the new urban print culture, and other forces of
modernity.
Since Chen and his fellow practitioners conceived of the Daoist
self-cultivation tradition as a public resource, they also
transformed it from an esoteric pursuit into a public practice,
offering a modernizing society a means of managing the body and the
mind and of forging a new cultural, spiritual, and religious
identity.
General
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