Occulting the Dao

Daoist Inner Alchemy, French Spiritism, and Vietnamese Colonial Modernity in Caodai Translingual Practice

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3620161
AutoresJ Jammes (0000-0001-7684-3803), David A Palmer (0000-0003-0884-995X, Palmer Community Hospital)
Ano2018
Volume77
Fascículo2
Páginas405-428
Data de publicação2018-05-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoThe Journal of Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0021-9118 • E-ISSN: 1752-0401
EditoraDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/s0021911817001425
OpenAlexW2790317375
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas5
Referências citadas35

This article takes the case of the Vietnamese Cao Dai religion to examine how Asian religious leaders and translators, in a context of colonial modernity, invested a European language with their own cosmologies and discourses, building both a national identity and an alternative spiritual universalism. Studies of translation in colonial contexts have tended to focus on the processes and impact of translating European texts and ideas into the languages of the colonized. This article discusses the inverse process, examining how Caodai textual production used French spiritist language and tropes to occult its Chinese roots, translating Daoist cosmology into a universalist and anti-colonial spiritual discourse rooted in Vietnamese nationalism. These shifts are examined through a close examination of translingual practices in the production and translation of the core esoteric scripture of Caodaism, theĐại Thừa Chơn Giáo 大乘真教(The True Teachings of the Great Vehicle), rendered in its 1950 Vietnamese-French edition asThe Bible of the Great Cycle of Esotericism.This study demonstrates how colonial religious institutions and networks of circulation in Asia stimulate the emergence of new movements and textual practices that mimic, invert, jumble, and transcend the cosmologies of both the Chinese imperium and the European colonial regime

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Modernity · Nationalism · Political science · Postcolonialism (international relations) · Sociology · Vietnamese · Anthropology · Chinese history and philosophy · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies