Guodian: The Newly Discovered Seeds of Chinese Religious and Political Philosophy by Kenneth W. Holloway (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Book Reviews 93 the chapters. Specifically, chapter four on the issue of unity and diversity of Chinese popular religion could have been reworked as the concluding chapter; while chapter five, on spiritwriting , could come earlier in the book to introduce this important religious practice of the De Jiao movement. In sum, this fascinating book is recommended for both specialists and advanced students of Chinese religions, and for those who wish to understand religious globalization and the processes through which a particular religion is transformed and localized in response to specific national contexts. FRANCIS KHEK GEE LIM, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Guodian: The Newly Discovered Seeds of Chinese Religious and Political Philosophy KENNETH W. HOLLOWAY. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. viii, 198 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-537145-1. £29.99, US$55.00 hardcover. In this monograph Kenneth Holloway offers a new reading of “The Five Aspects of Conduct” Wu Xing Pian 五行篇, arguably one of the more important texts excavated from the Guodian 郭店 site. Following on the heels of Mark Csikszentmihalyi’s Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China,3 in which he situated “The Five Aspects of Conduct” squarely within the developing tradition of early Confucian thought and offered a reading of the text as a type of moral psychology, Holloway attempts to resituate our reading of the text as a religious document that is best taken as emblematic of an independent religious tendency separate from traditional Confucian thought. In Holloway’s hands, this religious tendency, which he culls out of the text especially through his reading of it in tandem with another Guodian text, “Tang Yu zhidao” 唐虞之道, is reduced to an argument between the merits of humanity (ren 仁 ), identified with emphasizing family and lineage, and righteousness (yi 義), identified with emphasizing individual merit. In the “Introduction” and chapter 1, “The Religious Characteristics of Guodian Texts,” Holloway attempts to establish the ways in which “The Five Aspects of Conduct” and “Tang Yu zhidao” express a religious standpoint. Essentially, “The Five Aspects” extols the practitioner to cultivate one basic set of virtues common in the Confucian tradition, namely 3 Leiden: Brill, 2004. 94 Journal of Chinese Religions humanity, righteousness, ritual (li 禮), wisdom (zhi 智), and sagacity (sheng 聖). Holloway claims that this is “a religious treatise (because) a leap of faith is involved in believing that humanity exists, is a physical presence in the body, that the presence is the result of being converted by another, and that embodying humanity will alter the moral impact of one’s actions” (p. 5). Having morally and physically transformed oneself in accord with the five virtues, Holloway argues, one can then enter into the matters treated in the “Tang Yu zhidao,” and thereby come to know the best way to balance the exercise of humanity and righteousness in society, thereby leading to a transformation of society into a religious community. Holloway devotes the first sections of chapter 2, “Guodian and Traditional Views of China,” to demonstrating that the understanding of humanity and righteousness in “The Five Aspects” is not identical to that of the Analects (Lunyu 論語) and the Mencius (Mengzi 孟子), and in the rest of the chapter Holloway explores a range of scholarship dealing with the authorship of the text and its relationship to a slightly different version of “The Five Aspects” excavated from Mawangdui 馬王堆. In chapter 3, “Rhetoric as Self-Cultivation: A Question of Language,” arguably the best chapter in this small monograph, Holloway focuses on the actual content of “The Five Aspects.” Despite his confusing language of the role of faith and religion that he lays over his reading, he does a very good job of exposing the nature of the arguments concerning selfcultivation , and he provides an insightful analysis of the discursive structure of the text, namely the sorite or “chain argument.” Through his analysis, he is able to shed light on the total progressive movement of self-cultivation at the heart of the text, and of particular interest is his examination of the hierarchy of sagacity and wisdom. He also has a very insightful study of the text’s uses of verse from the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經). In chapter 4, “Attaining Unity in Guodian Texts,” Holloway reverts back to...