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Celestial Masters: History and Ritual in Early Daoist Communities . By Terry F. Kleeman . Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press , 2016. 446 pages. $49.95, £39.95 (cloth).
With Celestial Masters, Terry Kleeman provides a much-needed, comprehensive study of the earliest communal organization of Daoism. The work is based on a careful, exhaustive reading of all currently available primary sources. Although many of these are beset with difficulties of historiographic bias, undocumented transmission, and obscure terminology, they present a rare and invaluable window into the beginnings of organized religion in China. Scholars have grappled with the identification and interpretation of this corpus for more than half a century. Building and expanding upon their work, Kleeman offers an admirably clear and complete account of the foundation, early development, and ritual organization of Celestial Master communities from the Eastern Han to the end of the Six Dynasties.
The Way of the Celestial Masters (tianshi dao [...])--translated "Heavenly Masters" by some authors--originated in the second century CE in Yizhou [...](Sichuan). The organization of the early Celestial Masters community seemingly replicated the administrative functions of local government, earning it a reputation for fomenting rebellion. The historiographic bias of the early official records stems from that association. They were written as the declining authority of the Han was increasingly challenged by regional governments slipping into autonomy. Terry Kleeman addresses this issue by separately considering the movement's foundation narrative based on "external evidence" and on "internal documents."
The main external sources are found in 1) Sanguo zhi [...], 2) Dianlüe [...], 3) Huayang guo zhi [...], and 4) Shenxian zhuan [...], dating from the third and fourth centuries. The first of these is an account of the activities of Zhang Lu [...](d. 215), grandson and heir to the first Celestial Master, Zhang Ling [...], as a minor local official and warlord in Hanzhong [...]on the border between Sichuan and Shaanxi. Zhang Lu occupied this region for nearly thirty years up to 215, duly paying tribute to the central government, and precariously maintaining an alliance with two successive governors of Yizhou, Liu Yan [...](d. 194) and his son. For Liu Yan, having set his sights on independence, a relatively...