As China is rapidly reemerging as the world's dominant economic powerhouse that it had been until the mid-eighteenth century, interest in its religions and philosophies is on the rise. Just as the history and culture of Western civilizations can hardly be grasped without a measure of knowledge about Christianity, an understanding of Chinese civilization and its history seems impossible without some comprehension of Daoism. Though it has long been clear that modern Daoism has its roots in Daoist movements of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), research on premodern Daoism had been largely neglected. Published in six languages (Italian, French, English, German, Chinese, and Japanese), the pioneering studies by Monica Esposito (1962-2011) on Qing Daoism have been instrumental in kindling keen scholarly interest both in the West and in China and Japan. This book presents corrected and augmented versions of three of Dr Esposito's seminal articles that had originally been published in English ("Daoism in the Qing," "The Longmen School and its Controversial History," and "Longmen Daoism in Qing China: Doctrinal Ideal and Local Reality") along with English versions of two articles that had hitherto only been available in Japanese and Chinese: "Beheading the Red Dragon: The Heart of Feminine Alchemy" and "An Example of Daoist and Tantric Interaction during the Qing Dynasty: The Longmen xinzong." In addition, this volume contains a bibliography of all her publications and a detailed index.

Just as Christianity has its Vatican in Rome, modern Daoism boasts of a unique center of religious authority and administration: the Temple of the White Clouds (Baiyun guan) in Beijing, seat of the general headquarters of the Chinese Daoist Association. This temple complex in Beijing, called by Dr Esposito "modern Daoism's Vatican," houses the grave of the mythical founder of Daoism's Quanzhen tradition and celebrates the patriarchs of its Longmen ("Dragon Gate") branch as his legitimate heirs. Monica Esposito describes in this book how Daoist masters and historiographers in China, much like their Catholic counterparts in Europe, invented a glorious patriarchal lineage as well as a system of ordination designed to perpetuate orthodox transmission and central control. They also created a kind of New Testament: a new canonical collection of scriptures entitled "The Gist of the Daoist Canon" (Daozang jiyao). It contains hundreds of texts including the Daoist classic The Secret of the Golden Flower which achieved fame through the commentary by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. A classic study on the invention of religious traditions, the four parts of Creative Daoism describe in detail the construction of the Daoist Vatican's lineage of patriarchs, system of ordination, canon of sacred scriptures, and doctrine of universal salvation.

After the Zen boom of the 1960s and 1970s, Tibetan Buddhism increasingly captured the West's imagination. Today, entire stadiums fill when the Dalai Lama speaks, training centers mushroom, and books proliferate. Even the most esoteric form of Tibetan Buddhism, rDzogs chen or Great Perfection, has found numerous followers in the West. But the West stands not alone: in communist China, too, this form of Buddhism experienced a kind of camouflaged boom from the 1980s. Monica Esposito (1962-2011), one of Europe's foremost scholars of Chinese religions, observed this process up close. After her discovery in 1988 of a Buddhist nunnery on Mt. Tianmu in China's Zhejiang province, she lived and practiced under the monastery's founder, a Chinese Zen (Chan) and Tibetan rDzogs chen (Great Perfection) master called Fahai Lama (1920-1991). Dr Esposito's book offers a fascinating glimpse into the daily life and practices of a Chinese Buddhist monastery and into the teachings of a man who not only survived the Cultural revolution as an acupuncturist, Qigong master and recluse in a Daoist cave, but managed to found and build a Chan monastery to promote Tibetan Tantra in a still thoroughly communist environment.