New Visions of the Zhuangzi - Softcover

9781931483292: New Visions of the Zhuangzi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1931483299 ISBN 13: 9781931483292

Publisher: Three Pines Press, 2015

New Visions of the Zhuangzi is a collection of thirteen essays on the ancient Daoist philosophical work, presenting new angles and approaches. It overcomes the traditional division of schools in favor of topics, sheds new light on key philosophical notions, examines Zhuangzi's use of language, and explores issues of his use of language. In addition, it also applies modern neuroscience to its instructions, explores its vision of the ideal mind, and connects Zhuangzi's teachings to issues of education and community relevant in contemporary society.

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About the Author:

Livia Kohn, Ph.D., is professor emerita of Religion and East Asian Studies at Boston University. The author or editor of over 40 books, she now lives in Florida, serves as the executive editor of the Journal of Daoist Studies, and runs various workshops and conferences. Her specialty is medieval Daoism and the study of Chinese longevity practices. She has written and edited numerous books and is a long-term practitioner of taiji quan, qigong, yoga, and meditation.

Review:

This anthology is just what the doctor ordered: It is a prescribed antidote to the hardening of the categories that is the unfortunate consequence of much scholarship. Distinguished Daoism scholar Livia Kohn has recruited a cadre of authors who bring to life what the Zhuangzi itself announces as the highest wisdom of the ancients. That is, the shared theme among these very different essays is their sustained challenge to familiar deracinating boundaries the application of severe ontological, existential, doctrinal, linguistic, spatial, temporal, normative, and logical distinctions that would dirempt, fragment, and compartmentalize the unrelenting fluidity and recursiveness of the human experience. --Roger T. Ames, University of Hawaii

The excellent papers collected here represent state-of-the art scholarship. They include: philologically acute historical studies on how to rethink Zhuangzi in the light of newly discovered texts; philosophical exegeses in relation to Laozi, Confucians, and Western philosophers; literary analyses of Zhuangzi's rhetoric; a neurophysiological analysis of Daoist meditation as based on Zhuangzi; and even a critical analysis of a Paris fashion show, whose dress designer made clothes to look like Zhuangzi's misfits and uglies. The sheer brilliance and diversity of these essays goes a long way toward bringing Zhuangzi to light in his own terms, or at least in such a diversity of terms that traditional Western bias can hardly get off the ground. The book is a definite must for scholars and a delight for anybody else with a potential interest in Zhuangzi, Daoism, and Chinese thought. --Robert C. Neville, Boston University

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