One of the most fascinating, enigmatic, and problematic text traditions of ancient China, the Taiping jing (Scripture on Great Peace) has spawned its own field of highly specialized scholarship in China, Japan, and the West. Barbara Hendrischke, who here presents the first translation of a substantive portion of the received core text into English, complete with a lengthy introduction and extensive critical apparatus, is to be congratulated for her outstanding achievement.

Hendrischke's introduction—addressed to general readers—first traces the rise of the cosmic-political ideal of Great Peace (taiping) in early imperial times, and then analyzes its peculiar inscription in the received Taiping jing, which, based on the same cosmological theories, offers a religiously motivated program of political and moral reforms, apparently to the rulers of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). The trend toward criticizing Han authority on the basis of the very “cosmo-political” structures originally used to support it characterized numerous politico-religious movements in the second century CE. This history raises a number of poorly understood issues: What was the place of the Taiping jing in the social milieu of protest against the Han? How did the text relate to the Yellow Turban rebellion, which itself resulted from a Great Peace movement? More importantly, how exactly did the Taiping jing influence the evolution of the Daoist religion, which later transmitted the tradition in its canon? Hendrischke's discussion of the practices and beliefs advocated in the received main text of the Taiping jing in comparison with the standard sources on the Yellow Turbans and the essentially peaceful but separatist Celestial Master organization—still widely acknowledged as the cradle of the Daoist religion—does not lead to new and definitive answers.

As Hendrischke affirms, questions about the origin of the Taiping jing are complicated by the fact that the transmitted text is a sixth-century Daoist redaction of fragmentary earlier material, about which, for lack of firsthand evidence, very little can be said (p. 31). But she agrees with the prevailing view that the sixth-century version transmits earlier material quite faithfully. She shows that the surprisingly coherent ideology of the Taiping jing unfolds entirely within an attested Han worldview. It obviously addresses its mission of reform and cosmic renewal to a government characterized by Han cosmological emblems (p. 39), although the specifics of its message and its stylistic and linguistic peculiarities set it apart from Han mainstream cultural production (p. 40).

Hendrischke's analysis of the language of the Taiping jing and comparisons with Eric Zürcher's linguistic findings concerning early Buddhist translations make a convincing case that the scripture reflects vernacular conventions at the time and place of its origin (pp. 43–47). More doubtful, however, is her inference that “the saga of [the Taiping jing's] origin points to the region of Langye and to the early second century” (p. 44). Her conclusion that the received text of the Taiping jing, with its long-winded, repetitive clumsiness, derived from unedited transcripts of real dialogues between a master and his disciples (p. 44), deserves note but might draw objections. Because the received text is undoubtedly the outcome of a large-scale editorial project in the sixth century (p. 37), based on whatever original material there might have been, one might see the dialogue style characterizing much of it just as easily as an editorial device. Kristofer Schipper, for example, explains this peculiarity as a result of the sixth-century editor's efforts at expanding fragmentary earlier material to make it agree with the number of juan (chapters) traditionally attributed to the original revelation (see The Taoist Canon [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004], 1:280). Moreover, the “transcript thesis” would seem to hold only for one of the textual layers (layer A), which experts such as Hendrischke herself distinguish in the Taiping jing and are still busy determining on account of stylistic, linguistic, and topical features. (Her own views concerning these layers are detailed in an appendix, pp. 343–62.)

But Hendrischke's superb, meticulously annotated, and contextualized translation of twenty-five sections of the received text uncovers important clues concerning such complexities. The text's internal unevenness, its idiosyncrasies of speech, and its occasional argumentative discrepancies strikingly accord with its self-understanding as a shared revelation in progress. There are repeated references to a primordial celestial revelation (e.g., pp. 155–60), destined to unfold through teaching sessions (e.g., p. 260), which must be transcribed, distributed, and again collected, revised, and edited to achieve its mission (e.g., p. 199). These features suggest that the Taiping jing evolved as an open scriptural tradition, in which ongoing editorial work was considered just as vital for the revelation's transmission (e.g., p. 181) as faithfulness to earlier revelatory stages and material. If the clues for a better understanding of the Taiping tradition lay hidden in its texts, Hendrischke's magnificent translation has made a decisive step toward their excavation. One can only hope that she will continue this important project.