Yielding History and Others (Research on the Intellectual History of Taoism in the Six Dynasties and Tang-Song Dynasties)

Author: Ge Zhaoguang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-08-01
Features: Using the term "Submission" as the book title aims to position the historical narrator from the perspective of Taoism. It examines how a religion was forced to "accommodate," "respond," and "enter" within the context of ancient China's dominant cultural discourse. Intellectual history often focuses on the emergence of new knowledge, ideas, and beliefs, but rarely employs the "subtraction" method to discuss the gradual disappearance of knowledge, ideas, and beliefs, including those labeled as barbaric, backward, absurd, or licentious, which were gradually "marginalized" and "secretized." In fact, it is precisely in these processes of decline and disappearance that we can uncover the history obscured by the past, as well as how ancient China's secular imperial power and mainstream ideology could, without conscious effort, force other dissenting groups to "submit." It is this kind of "submission" in the history of religion that explains why China has never had a religious authority capable of opposing the secular state. Moreover, China's "universal imperial authority," which unites the symbolism of deities, the cosmos, ethical morality, political power, and military power, was also stronger. In ancient China, imperial power monopolized all claims to legitimacy and rationality, forcing all religious beliefs that aligned with the mainstream to be labeled as "demonical," "licentious," or "disruptive," pushing them out of the elite intellectual world and leaving them confined to the margins of secular, folk, and popular religious, cultural, and even literary traditions, from antiquity to the present day.