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Part front matter for Part One Textual Studies
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Published:November 2011
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Ge Hong’s religious philosophy is a converging point of three intellectual streams. First, from the early philosophical stream derived from Laozi and Zhuangzi, Ge Hong inherited cosmogony as the general worldview. He then reinterpreted the cosmogony into the genealogical one and many. Unlike a fixed being, the Dao is not an idea, but an act. “From nothing into being” is an act of creativity; it therefore defines what Dao is by articulating what Dao does. This core of reality was articulated as an ongoing genealogical process in which the creative One and its unfolding expressions in progenies constituted the relationship between the one and the many.
The second stream was fed by many traditions related to the belief of attainable physical immortality. Ge Hong systematized the belief by inserting ethics into the collective hope for health, longevity, and immortality. His writings on the hagiographic tradition marked a crucial move to transform folk beliefs into a coherent system of soteriology. Unlike Christian saints and imperishable gods in Greek mythology, Daoist immortals are personified Dao, miniatures of the cosmos with distinctive personalities. They are the visible images of the invisible One because they have attained the highest form of health, the perpetual unity of the body and the spirit. In a Confucian society that was formed on the principle of collective harmony, Ge Hong’s religious anthropology celebrated individuality and held high the value of bodily health, yet at the same time envisioned that all lives were inwardly connected.
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