Philosophical Enactment and Bodily Cultivation in Early Daoism

In <i>Philosophical Enactment and Bodily Cultivation in Early Daoism</i> Thomas Michael illuminates the formative early history of the <i>Daodejing</i> and the social political religious and philosophical trends that indelibly marked it. <br/>This book centers on the matrix of the <i>Daodejing</i> that harbors a penetrating phenomenology of the Dao together with a rigorous system of bodily cultivation. It traces the historical journey of the text from its earliest oral circulations to its later transcriptions seen in a growing collection of ancient Chinese excavated manuscripts. It examines the ways in which Huang-Lao thinkers from the Han Dynasty transformed the original phenomenology of the <i>Daodejing</i> into a metaphysics that reconfigured its original matrix and it explores the success of the Wei-Jin Daoist Ge Hong in bringing the matrix back into its original alignment. <br/>This book is an important contribution to cross-cultural studies bringing contemporary Chinese scholarship on Daoism into direct conversation with Western scholarship on Daoism. The book also concludes with a discussion of Martin Heidegger's recognition of the position and value of the <i>Daodejing</i> for the future of comparative philosophy.