Well-timed to catch the converging waves of interest in Daoist art among China scholars of art history and religious studies, Shih-shan Susan Huang's comprehensive and profusely illustrated book offers a systematic survey of Daoist visuality as it evolved during the tenth through thirteenth centuries. She identifies this period as a “renaissance” of Daoism, a time when the majority of its visual and textual sources were produced or compiled, sometimes based on earlier versions, continuing styles, and cosmologies that had evolved between 200 and 900 (pp. 15–16). Huang's analytical discussion gives equal attention to images of various kinds, to Daoist cosmology, and to Daoist religious practices, addressing these topics holistically and in relation to each other. Her book creatively synthesizes her own original research as an art historian (some previously published in journal articles) with judiciously integrated scholarship by others on Daoist (and Buddhist) religious doctrines and practices. Many of her thorough endnotes are mini-essays summarizing the latest research on a wealth of relevant subjects, taking account of scholarship in Chinese, English, French, and Japanese.
Huang's fundamental premise, reflected in the book's title, is that the concept of “true form” (zhenxing 真形) underlies all Daoist religious cultivation and imaging practices. “True form” is the original yet ever-changing nature of an entity, whether a deity, icon, mountain, perfected individual, etc. Through meditation and visualization practices, the Daoist adept can perceive true forms and access their efficacy. Because true form “multiplies itself in myriad forms, media, time and space” (p. 342), it encompasses the plethora of diverse imagery that Huang discusses, from “mental images, visualization pictures, bodily and cosmic charts, to ritual materials, ritual space and performance” (p. 342).
The book is artfully structured to suggest a progression from the inner to the outer, realms that are separate yet interconnected and mutually reflecting. Following a summary introduction, the first three chapters survey inner “esoteric” images associated with Daoist meditation, visualization, and breathing practices to promote spiritual self-cultivation and physical preservation. The last three chapters explore outer “exoteric” forms of Daoist material culture, such as liturgical paintings and objects used to create (often ephemeral) ritual space, and the performance of rituals themselves. Drawing on recent advances in the study of Daoist religion to inform her visual analysis, she establishes a framework for interpreting and contextualizing the large body of visual materials that were created to guide Daoist adepts to an otherworldly realm through meditation or ritual. Their charts, diagrams, talismans, and symbols were deliberately uninformative to outsiders, even highly literate laymen in traditional China (not to mention modern scholars). Sorting these disparate forms into coherent categories and explaining them in relation to numerous specific Daoist cultivation practices and rituals, Huang presents the visual materials in an accessible way and illuminates important underlying principles. She also points out many connections with Chinese science, medicine, and cartography in elucidating fundamental Daoist concepts concerning the body and the cosmos. Although at times somewhat schematic, the book is a major contribution to scholarship.
Chapter 1, “Imagery of Body and Cosmos,” treats various means of visualizing and mobilizing the gods that were believed to reside inside the body and interact with those associated with stars and planets. A section on “inner alchemy” (neidan 內丹) explains how bodily processes were conceptualized through the circulation of vital energy (qi 氣) and its changing proportions of yin and yang. Chapter 2, “Mapping the World,” explores new visual idioms created in the Song to depict the tripartite Daoist universe (heaven, earthly paradises, and the underworld) and divergent accounts of its creation. Chapter 3, “True Form Charts,” discusses several categories of “the most innovative symbols in Daoist visual culture … combining semi-abstract images and texts” (p. 136). Huang borrows W. J. T. Mitchell's term “imagetext” to designate ritually powerful designs composed of pictorial and textual elements, which activate as well as symbolize Daoist concepts. Chapter 4, “Materiality of Daoist Sacred Space,” focuses on Song prescriptions for constructing environments in which to communicate with the gods, and the diverse materials used in rituals. Chapter 5, “Performing the Salvation Ritual,” examines the elaborate Yellow Register Purgation (Huanglu zhai 黃籙齋), a major new rite to rescue and purify deceased souls from the underworld, comparable to the Buddhist Water-and-Land ritual. Chapter 6, “Paintings of Mobile Deities,” focuses on devotional pictures that combine narrative and iconic elements to evoke gods coming to the ritual space. A brief epilogue points toward future efforts to define Daoist image theory, with a list of questions adapted from material religion scholar S. Brent Plate. Huang proposes that the Daoist emphasis on writing, diagrammatic charts, and aniconic imagetexts distinguishes its visual culture from all other religious visualities.
Huang's primary sources are surviving paintings and other artifacts used in Daoist rituals, and the heterogeneous materials preserved in the massive Ming Daozang 道藏, the imperially printed Daoist canon of 1445. Although the latter postdates her target period, it incorporates the early twelfth-century Song imperial canon (which in turn included earlier works from the Six Dynasties through the Tang period). She rightly asserts that visual materials are primary sources for the study of religions, not “illustrations” of doctrines or practices. However, it seems likely that Ming printers changed details in the pictorial representations, so they should be used with caution.
Through purposeful reading of a wide range of scholarship on European religious art and text-image studies, Huang intermittently attempts to situate her inquiry into a wider comparative framework. Her methodical exposition and lucid prose should make her book accessible to a wide academic audience, including advanced undergraduates and scholars outside the China field.
