Arguably one of the biggest developments in Chinese history writing of the past decade is the “discovery” of the core of modernity in areas that the modern was previously taken to exclude. Xun Liu's Daoist Modern is one key work that seeks to repair a rift in twentieth century Chinese history that seems counterintuitive to those working on earlier periods—the separation of religious from social, political, and cultural life. His detailed examination of an influential community of lay Daoist intellectuals in 1930s Shanghai shows how religious innovation was thoroughly interwoven with urban society and communications and the rise of bioscience, cultural competition, and nationalism.
The most important contribution of Liu's book for a broad audience is that it describes a mode of personal engagement with the Chinese nation and body politic that lies outside not only the conventional political formulations of the Republican period, but also the social gospel and philanthropic models that tended to dominate discussions of religious engagement with the public. Liu's key figure Chen Yingning (1880–1969) embarked on a reform of inner alchemy with the ultimate aim of countering the challenges of the environment in which he lived with the perfection of body and spirit. These not only included the painful dislocation of urban living, but also the fate of the nation in a state of military and cultural emergency. Chen's arguments for Daoism as the cultural foundation of the Chinese nation shared elements with but went beyond the historical essentialism of the Confucian revivalists, and it purposefully eschewed the spiritual universalism of Buddhist modernists:
We need to understand that to believe in Daoism is to conserve the body, and to propagate Daoism is to save the country… A military invasion can at best break up the land of a people and destroy their bodies. The damage is relatively superficial. But a religious and cultural invasion can deprive the people of their thought and enslave their soul (p. 244).
Unlike for many of the other cultural critics and political figures of the 1930s who propagated mass physical culture as part of a program of national revival, however, to Chen and his cohort conserving the body came first. National survival was merely a natural outgrowth of Daoist practice.
Liu's study covers the context of late Qing and Republican Daoism, the early life of Chen Yingning and his developments in inner alchemic theory and practice, and the formulation of a community of inner alchemic practitioners via halls, monasteries, and publications in Shanghai and beyond. Non-specialists will be most interested in the latter three chapters, on practice, community, and print culture. The chapter on Chen's alchemic theory, though denser going, is important for students of modern Buddhism, medicine, and body culture. The depth of research in Daoist materials is impressive, focusing on Chen's two house journals, Xiandao yuebao (Immortals’ way monthly) and Yangshan ban yue kan (Promulgate the good semimonthly), as well as interviews with several key movement figures. Liu supplements these with a thorough background in Daoist cultivation and communities in the premodern and modern periods.
Liu convincingly argues that Chen Yingning and his colleagues offered several important innovations in inner alchemical practice and Daoist community formation. Foremost among these was bringing to public light techniques that had previously been reserved for oral transmission between adept and student. Chen's circle promoted this through its journals, which published lengthy correspondences and essays about practice, and through its lay communities, which drew in not only the Shanghai middle and upper classes but occasionally workers as well. Women played key personal and theoretical roles. Liu writes of Chen's encounters at pivotal moments with female practitioners from diverse ends of the social spectrum, and his all-encompassing partnership with wife Dr. Wu Yizhu (1882–1945), which influenced the shape of the community and his engagement with female inner alchemy.
Yet the female practitioners constitute one of the cases that demonstrate a conceptual weakness of the book: “modern” is under-theorized. Thus its meaning shifts throughout the book, and opportunities to examine its implications are not always explored to their fullest. For example, one of Chen's women interlocutors is, circa 1916, simultaneously socially feminist, politically conservative, and struggling with a conventional teacher-student relationship. The nuances of the situation cry out for a deeper examination of the simple label of “modern” that Liu applies to her. In fact the very value of Xun Liu's study is that in their simultaneous engagement with and superiority over au courant theories of cell biology; insertion into and withdrawal from Shanghai society and the broader world; and concern about and ultimate disregard for national politics, this group of inner alchemy practitioners demonstrate a much more complex mix of old and new than we are used to reading about for the Republican period. For such complications alone, Daoist Modern is to be recommended.
