For far too long, a vague but stubborn stereotype has imagined the Chinese people—or at least Chinese literati—as somehow essentially non-religious. And for far too long, Daoist religion in particular has remained relatively little known, so much so that it is impossible to imagine a book such as this one appearing even twenty years ago. The publication of such a well-researched, beautifully written, and magnificently produced book heralds a sea-change in both respects. A book that is “about the restoration of human destinies marred by retribution pending the settlement of accumulated debt” (3) can only drive another nail into the coffin of imagined premodern Chinese secularism, as it also establishes a clear, persuasive narrative of the development of Daoist ritual up until the end of the Tang period. Franciscus Verellen, a key figure in the international scholarly effort to chart the too-long-mysterious contents of the Daoist canon, an effort that culminated in The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang (3 volumes, University of Chicago Press, 2004, co-edited by Verellen and Kristofer M. Schipper), has here given us what may prove to be his masterpiece.
Verellen opens this refreshing work by sketching the root Chinese legal and financial metaphors for liability and subsequent redemption, suggestively likening them to the Judeo-Christian ones so cogently studied by Paul Ricoeur, Peter Brown, and others. From there he moves on to summarize four deep-level concepts underlying the Daoist redemptive project. “The debts and obligations that a sinner could expect to find recorded in his or her ledger of transgressions” (9) constituted his or her root liability, whose specific cause often remained obscure but whose effects were nevertheless disastrous, triggering retribution—with the “remarkable Chinese twist … that the administration of retribution, while inescapable, was prone to errors” (11). Acts of restitution aimed to remove root liability and thus improve individuals’ destinies in this life and the next. This restitution of the debt owed for root liabilities resulted in a release from the effects of retribution. In short, “release resolved the effects of retribution, once restitution cancelled root liability” (12). It is this scaffolding of root metaphors on which the entire edifice of Daoist ritual is built, whatever modifications it underwent over the centuries.
Throughout the work, Verellen explores three genres of primary sources: prayer texts, liturgical sermons, and experiential narratives. Two large collections of prayer texts—Master Redpine's Petition Almanac 赤松子章曆 (Six Dynasties and Tang periods) and the Green Memorials 青詞 of Du Guangting 杜光庭 (850–933)—are supplemented by two smaller collections, one of them a fascinating manuscript breviary of prayers 願文 from Dunhuang (mid-eighth to early tenth century). The liturgical sermons Verellen studies are those of Lu Xiujing 陸修靜 (406–477) now preserved in two collections, The Light of Ritual 法燭經 and Five Sentiments of Gratitude 五感文. Of all the materials utilized in this book, these sermons are probably the ones to have received the least scholarly attention until now. Du Guangting's Divine Manifestations of Daoism 道教靈驗記 furnishes the experiential narratives. “By laying bare the operative processes of deliverance, such narratives offer invaluable testimony of the religious imagination and experience of lay society” (15), as Glen Dudbridge and others have noted. It is Verellen's deft weaving of well-chosen passages from these very different sorts of texts around the core themes of liability, retribution, restitution, and release that gives the book its coherence and power.
As if this weren't enough, Verellen is also able to show with unprecedented clarity that Daoist ritual underwent a development in three broad phases. First there was the introduction by the early Heavenly Master community of the petition ritual, itself a reformation of the longstanding practice of sacrificial offerings to deities, as Terry Kleeman showed in his groundbreaking study of the early Tianshi tradition (Celestial Masters: History and Ritual in Early Daoist Communities, Harvard University Asia Center Publications, 2016). Second there was the interiorization of the drama of restitution and release in the form of the Lingbao retreat 齋 as instituted by Lu Xiujing. Third, there came the integration of clergy and lay society into a comprehensive liturgical system in the Tang, marked by official patronage and the establishment of a continuous new lineage of Heavenly Masters surnamed Zhang 張. Through his skillful balance of this big-picture story with translations of rich passages chosen as examples, Verellen at once manages both to explain the rationale and procedures of Daoist ritual and to chart its history across eight centuries.
Historians of religious traditions often fall into the trap of narrating their “origins and development” without fully considering the extent to which actors in religious and ritual paradigms were always aware of, and responding to, various religious alternatives. Verellen, although remaining focused squarely on the Daoist rituals and the people crafting and performing them, mostly succeeds in avoiding this trap thanks to his occasional nods to extra-Daoist precedents, parallels, influences, models, or contrasts. The discerning reader is able to make out ways in which Daoists self-consciously created and shaped their own ritual practices as substitutes for non-Daoist alternatives, although Verellen could have done a good deal more to highlight this aspect of things. Rather than opt to portray a Daoism that originated ex nihilo and unfolded according to its own internal logic in splendid isolation from everything else—a scholarly model that has recently taken the adjective “pristine” as its mantra—Verellen shows us a Daoism fully grounded in Chinese society and polity and operating in a crowded, multi-religious field of contenders for participation and patronage. Although the research presented here is philologically exacting, Verellen remains focused on the people who developed and performed these rituals and on the ubiquitous, very human existential problems the rituals were crafted to address. In this there is a realism, humility, and respect that is very welcome: “If despite its uneven and heterogeneous development, we can trace the history of the Daoist quest for deliverance with any confidence, then this is largely thanks to the testimony of Chinese ritual performers, transmitted down the ages through petitions, tracts, and narratives. The voices of the protagonists on that distant stage reach us distinctly” (328). We have Verellen to thank for crafting the witness of their voices into a beautifully wrought work of scholarship.
