The body, the world, and soteriology in early Daoism (China)

Modern scholars regularly depict early Daoism as a mystical philosophy heavy with political implications and argue that it was constituted almost exclusively by two texts, the Laozi and the Zhuangzi . Because modern scholars have interpreted these two texts by reading them against the intellectual background of the philosophical traditions of early China, early Daoism has rarely been analyzed as a religious discourse examined from the perspective of early Chinese religious thought. Early Daoist discourse does not employ vocabulary entirely different from the Confucian and other early Chinese discourses, but it frequently depends upon the same vocabulary that these other discourses were actively contesting. Early Daoist discourse is infused with a distinct, textually constituted coherence and a religious intelligibility that is best analyzed by examining it together with the wider corpus of texts that can be shown to participate in this textual tradition.; The examination of all extant writings that constitute the early Chinese body of writings properly called Daoist, in either discrete form or fragmentary incorporation, demonstrates that they possess a coherence and systematicity in internal referential connections. I introduce certain working categories taken from the general discourse of the study of religion, e.g., mythology, cosmology, and soteriology, to the analysis of the early Daoist writings. This work does not provide a systematic theology of Daoism, and these categories that structure my dissertation are not used to argue for the de facto existence of an institutionalized Daoist community. I do not apply them to the analysis of a Daoist discourse that pre-dates Confucius but, with the period of the Jixia academy and the on-going discoveries of textual materials from, for example, the Guodian site, the point of beginning for this early Daoist discourse is pushed back closer and closer to the historical dates of the life of Confucius. I argue that early Daoism represents a distinct discourse that is already developed by the first half of the fourth century BCE or the last half of the fifth century BCE, and that it stands as the foundation for the later tradition of institutionalized Daoism.