Picturing The True Form

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Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China's primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries with references to earlier and later times. In this richly illustrated book, Susan Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images in various media, including Dunhuang manuscripts, funerary artifacts, paintings, and other charts, illustrations, and talismans preserved in the fifteenth-century Daoist Canon. True form (zhenxing), the key concept behind Daoist visuality, is not a static picture but entails an active journey of "seeing" underlying and secret phenomena through a series of metamorphoses. The book's structure mirrors the two-part Daoist journey from inner to outer. Part I focuses on inner images associated with meditation and visualization practices for self-cultivation and longevity. Part II investigates the visual and material dimensions of Daoist ritual. Interwoven through these discussions is the idea

75 GBP