Paulo
11-19-2006, 06:44 AM
History of the Taoist Canon
Throughout history the "Taoist Canon," or Dāozāng 道藏 "Vault of the Way," has suffered from:
lack of official status
lack of agreement about the contents across different Taoist sects
the tendency to include ever more works
much overlap among the works making it up, which copied constantly from each other
little coherence in content from one work to another
the inclusion of liturgical and meditational texts that make little sense without orally transmitted exegesis, rarely stable and often lost
lack of adequate indexing
a tradition that regarded the details of Taoist practice as secret, so that different families transmitted different collections of Taoist books, and none wanted to have their versions publishedIn the XXth century the last two issues were addressed, and Chinese and western scholars have rescued a fairly extensive canon, published it in multiple copies, and indexed it. Although there are several distinct themes, and some tend to be concentrated in certain sections, most themes are found in most sections, and the traditional organization of this vast library is both a blessing (because it represents a kind of standard) and a (somewhat greater) curse (because it inhibits understanding).
We can trace seven different attempts to make order from the chaos, of which the first is perhaps the most influential, even though it is lost:
for more info:
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/hbcanondaw-u.html
Throughout history the "Taoist Canon," or Dāozāng 道藏 "Vault of the Way," has suffered from:
lack of official status
lack of agreement about the contents across different Taoist sects
the tendency to include ever more works
much overlap among the works making it up, which copied constantly from each other
little coherence in content from one work to another
the inclusion of liturgical and meditational texts that make little sense without orally transmitted exegesis, rarely stable and often lost
lack of adequate indexing
a tradition that regarded the details of Taoist practice as secret, so that different families transmitted different collections of Taoist books, and none wanted to have their versions publishedIn the XXth century the last two issues were addressed, and Chinese and western scholars have rescued a fairly extensive canon, published it in multiple copies, and indexed it. Although there are several distinct themes, and some tend to be concentrated in certain sections, most themes are found in most sections, and the traditional organization of this vast library is both a blessing (because it represents a kind of standard) and a (somewhat greater) curse (because it inhibits understanding).
We can trace seven different attempts to make order from the chaos, of which the first is perhaps the most influential, even though it is lost:
for more info:
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/hbcanondaw-u.html