Huainanzi Projects

Global reception of the classic zhuangzi

The classic Zhuangzi 莊子, a collection of sayings and anecdotes traditionally attributed to Zhuang Zhou 莊周 (trad. 369-286 BCE), has deeply influenced cultural life in East Asia and beyond. A key text in East Asian religious and literary history, it is still routinely cited in diverse discussions of ethics and philosophy, and informs practices from calligraphy to landscape painting. Despite its importance in East Asia, classrooms and journals around the world rarely engage the text’s influence over the last two millennia. Today, we tend to read the Zhuangzi as a literary expression or through the lens of the academic disciplines of philosophy or religious studies. In this international research project on the global reception of the Zhuangzi, we are bringing together experts on the classic’s reception history to talk about the multifarious responses the Zhuangzi has triggered throughout the last two millennia. In other words, we show that the text has been multivocal and mutable over history, resisting narrowly defined categories and academic disciplines.

Daoist Ritual Theory

The Chinese traditions known under the umbrella term of Daoism remain a rich resource for the study of ritual. Over the last two millennia, various Daoist communities developed not only a great variety of ritual practices, but also a vast corpus of scriptures that contain elaborate illustrations and reflections upon ritualistic performances. In this project, we explore some of these materials by introducing Daoist vocabulary related to discourses of ritual and the body.