The Great Peace Scripture Digest (Taiping jing chao 太平經鈔) is still widely confused with the Great Peace Scripture (Taiping jing 太平經) proper, which follows it in the Ming-era Taoist Canon. This paper constitutes the first full analysis and reassessment of the Great Peace Scripture Digest. It reviews the textual morphology of its various editi…[Read more]

Focused on the beliefs expressed in the early medieval Great Peace Scripture (Taiping jing 太平經), the paper surveys bureaucratic representations of the superhuman realm, the ceaseless divine surveillance of humans, the impact of misconduct on individual lifespan duration and on cosmic equilibrium, the penal fate of the dead underground, and prosp…[Read more]

This research article focuses on the early medieval Chinese work known as the Great Peace Scripture (Taiping jing 太平經). It examines views expressed therein in relation to the superhuman versus human origin of knowledge, the media of knowledge storage, processes of knowledge denaturation through successive transmission, and the nature of the main…[Read more]

Still neglected by European-language research, the ‘Weft’ or ‘Apocrypha’ contain a wealth of unexploited data relevant to Chinese history in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Sometimes ascribed to Confucius, these texts, whose Chinese name (wei 緯) denotes the crosswise threads of woven fabric, have long been perceived as arcane s…[Read more]

An extensive review of Zhao Lu’s IN PURSUIT OF THE GREAT PEACE: HAN DYNASTY CLASSICISM AND THE MAKING OF EARLY MEDIEVAL LITERATI CULTURE (2019) as an example of early-career PhD-thesis-turned-into-book, this essay raises a number of problems related to historiography, historical research, textual analysis, translation, and the distorting effect of…[Read more]