Religious Experience and Lay Society in T'ang China
A Reading of Tai Fu's 'Kuang-i chi'

The remains of Tai Fu's lost collection Kuang-i chi preserve three hundred short tales of encounters with the other world. This study analyses these tales.

Glen Dudbridge (Author)

9780521893220, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 20 June 2002

272 pages, 2 maps
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.418 kg

"...we must also acknowledge the merits of Dudbridge's effort. Chief among these is the value of his book in sharpening our awareness of the inherently blurry line between the fictional and the documentary in medieval accounts of the strange." Don J. Wyatt, American Historical Review

The remains of Tai Fu's lost collection Kuang-i chi ('The Great Book of Marvels') preserve three hundred short tales of encounters with the other world. This study develops a style of close reading through which those tales give access to the lives of individuals in eighth-century China. Through the eyes of a mid-century county official the picture emerges of a complex lay society, served by a mixed priesthood of ritual practitioners, whose members' lives at all levels were profoundly shaped by their perceived experience of contact with the other world. It was a society embarking on fundamental change, and this book uses the sharp historical focus of Tai Fu's collection to study the dynamics of that change. The work gracefully reveals the transition from the beliefs and institutions of early mediaeval China towards those we now recognize as modern.

Acknowledgements
Note to the reader
Maps
1. A sequence of voices
2. A contemporary view
3. The dynamics of Tai Fu's world
4. The worshippers of Mount Hua
5. Yü-ch'ih Chiung at An-yang
6. Victims of the Yüan Ch'ao rebellion
7. Mating with spirits
Appendix: the stories of Kuang-i chi
List of works cited
Index.

Subject Areas: Asian history [HBJF]