HIST 3531 - Daoist Traditions

(crosslisted)
(also ASIAN 3332, RELST 3531) @ # (HA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits.

TJ. Hinrichs.

This course will examine the modes of philosophical and spiritual inquiry, varieties of spiritual/bodily cultivation and practice, and religious organizations and movements in China that we know as Daoist (or “Taoist”). We will review debates around the labeling of these ideas and practices. We will examine the ways in which Daoism was used to contest or legitimate imperial political power, and how the procedures and ideologies of the imperial state in turn informed Daoist theory and practice. Throughout, we will consider the ways in which standard modern western dichotomies, such as sacred/secular, spiritual/physical, and mind/body, break down when we try to apply them to the study of Daoism.