早期天师道经典研究.doc

 The Texts of Early Heavenly Master Taoism 早期天師道經典研究 By Franciscus Verellen An international conference, held at the ChineseUniversity of Hong Kong, November 3-4, 2001, with the financial support of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, Chung Chi College (CUHK), and the French Consulate General in Hong Kong. The meeting was organized by the Department of Religion, CUHK (Lai Chi Tim) and the Ecole Fran?aise dExtrême-Orient, Hong Kong (Franciscus Verellen). It brought together a group of scholars from China, Japan, France, and the US to explore the formation of the Heavenly Master canon and discuss some of its key texts for the light they shed on the history, belief system, and liturgical organization of the movement. “Early Heavenly Master Taoism” here refers to the formative phase of the Tianshi dao 天師道, the first large-scale social movement in the history of Taoism, between the Later Han and the Tang. Texts occupied an important place in this community, whether for recitation, transmission, healing, or other ritual uses. A handful of scriptures, doctrinal works, and sets of precepts are commonly associated with the movement and cited for the information they contain on its early beliefs and practices. However, available studies offer only partial glimpses of the extant source material and do not always identify the nature of the texts association with the movement—e.g., did a given work originate within the following of the Heavenly Masters, was it inherited and transmitted through its liturgical system, or does it represent an outsiders view? The present initiative and its planned future sequels aim to place the study of early Heavenly Master Taoism on a broader and sounder historical footing through new research into the surviving corpus of primary sources. An analytic and descriptive catalog of early Heavenly Master scriptures in The Taoist Canon: A historical companion to the Daozang, edited by Kristofer Schipper and Franciscus Verellen (forthcoming, Univers