Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE-800 CE

Robert Campany is one of the best modern scholars of premodern Chinese religious texts, and his new book is great. As one might expect from his impressive oeuvre, the titular “self-cultivation” is almost exclusively religious self-cultivation, and most of the primary sources are from the latter two-thirds of the titular time frame. It can be read, as it was written, as a continuation of his The Chinese Dreamscape, 300 BCE–800 CE (2020), but it also works just fine as a stand-alone monograph. It is an interesting, thorough, and well-documented sociocultural analysis of a vast corpus of texts, with just the right balance of textual analysis and scholarly theory.Sinologists and historians of premodern China have long been in the interesting position of working with a salient blessing and an equally salient curse. The blessing is that China has a lot of textual evidence, and the curse is that its religious landscape contains many ostensibly disparate theoretical elements that are nevertheless profoundly intermixed in practice. Campany is, of course, well aware of both of these points, and he deals with them skillfully. His analysis of dreaming in this volume includes more than 150 primary sources, and he briefly articulates his reasons for not trying to untangle the profoundly intermixed textual corpus on the basis of religious traditions on page 5 (with endnote 11 specifying where he has dealt at greater length with “these methodological quagmires”). This is why he states his thesis thus: “The fundamental question this book asks is not when certain ideas or practices originated, how they changed through time, which tradition they belonged to, or how they expressed the essence or doctrines of this or that ism, but how they worked—what we might call their practical logic. What I mean is this: Given any particular notion of what sort of event a dream is, only certain responses to it make sense” (5–6).The main analytical structure that Campany has created consists of five paradigms of dreaming in the texts and time frame under consideration, detailed on pages 9–10. They are the Prospective, Visitation, Purification, Diagnostic, and Spillover paradigms. The Prospective type contains “a code . . . that must be interpreted by someone . . . [and] yields a prediction of future events”; the Visitation consists of “face-to-face encounters with other beings”; the Purification is in response to dreams that leave “the dreamer in a state of pollution”; the Diagnostic is “a coded message . . . concern[ing] the self-cultivator's progress”; and the Spillover is “a continuation of the dreamer's waking self-cultivational activity” whereby the “dreamer is not a passive witness to the dream but an agent interacting with the other beings encountered within its frame.” The Chinese Dreamscape deals with the first two of these paradigms, while this book deals with the latter three. Thus, the first three chapters are titled “Purifying,” “Diagnosing,” and “Spilling Over,” with a fourth and final chapter dealing with earlier accounts that present “at least three other positions” (170).Chapter 1, “Purifying,” addresses ideas of ritual purity, ways of expunging dream pollution, ways of preventing such dreams from occurring in the first place, and the kinds of entities that might taint one in such dreams. Chapter 2, “Diagnosing,” while also textually wide-ranging, spends a fair amount of time on the Pusa shuomeng jing 菩薩說夢經 (Explication of Dreams for Bodhisattvas) (84–103). In appendix A, Campany helpfully translates part of this text: 108 sentences describing 108 dream scenarios, some banal (no. 71: “You dream of climbing a tree” 自夢上樹), some quite interesting (no. 9: “In a dream you see the Tathāgata exercising his divine powers by walking in midair” 夢見如來神通虛空中行) (187–93). Given the putative value of diagnostic dreams, this chapter goes on to examine different avenues for when and how to elicit them. Chapter 3, “Spilling Over,” similarly, is wide-ranging yet focuses particularly on one text, Zhoushi mingtong ji 周氏冥通記 (Records of Master Zhou's Communications with the Unseen World) (140–66). Chapter 4, “Not Dreaming, Waking Up, and Not Minding the Difference,” casts its gaze back at some earlier works, primarily the Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Huainanzi, and Liezi. In them we see dream narratives that do not fit into the five dominant paradigms, which Campany then analyzes into three types: “First, we find not dreaming tagged as a mark of self-cultivational attainment, a limit-attribute of sages. . . . Second, we find the contrast between dreaming and waking used in certain arguments. . . . Third, we find the idea that wise persons attach no importance to the difference between waking and dreaming—that the distinction between these states is relative, trivial, or meaningless” (170).While Campany rightly spends most of his time analyzing his sources and making his case for how they fit into his five paradigms, he nevertheless fully engages with relevant and current scholarly work, sometimes on theory and sometimes on translation and interpretation issues. The breadth of his textual sources and the fact that, as he says, “in a book of this size, it is impossible to discuss at length any of the self-cultivational paths that will be referred to throughout, and I must presume that my readers are at least broadly familiar with them” (17), means that this is a mature work, primarily for scholars and graduate students. I am confident that anyone whose interest is piqued by the title will be very happy with Campany's herculean efforts.There are three claims in the introduction that gave me pause. First, it says that “practitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in the Chinese cultural repertoire during these centuries engaged daily in practices meant to bring most aspects of their experience and comportment under control” (1). I'm not sure how Yan Hui's “sitting and forgetting” practice of self-cultivation in Zhuangzi chapter 6 fits this description of “control,” a practice that Campany assesses thus: “Yan Hui arrives at the ability to let go of his attachment to bodily form and to what passes for ‘knowledge,’ instead ‘just going along with the Great Thoroughfare’ (tong yu datong 同於大通), submitting fully to the unceasing process that is life-and-death-and-life in this world” (181). Second, the analysis of e meng 惡夢 seemed to settle on “foul dreams” as the best translation (33), but in the following pages e 惡 is more often translated as “polluted/polluting” (which also translates several other words, like wu 污/汙, hui 穢, and jian 姦). I thus found chiding Eric Hutton for translating e yan 惡言 as “foul doctrines” slightly puzzling (50n113). Maybe the semantic overlap among these Chinese words renders disambiguation hopeless. Third, while the “purity/pollution” analysis is a salient one, the translation of yin 淫 as “pollution” and liu 流 as “corrupt” seems tentative to me. Building on work by Robin Yates,1 Campany translates a phrase from Lüshi chunqiu, chapter 17.5, as “learning that pollutes, and theories that corrupt” (淫學流說) (39), but the plainer understanding in John Knoblock and Jeffrey Riegel's “wayward learning, and heterodox theories”2 makes more sense to me. Thus, while I agree with reading the metaphorical function of a “dike” (fang 防/坊) as “restraining human behavior from overflowing proper bounds” (39), this would entail reading Xunzi chapter 9 as saying “dike against excess” (防淫) rather than “dike against pollution” (39), since dikes typically hold back “excessive” or “overflowing” water, not necessarily “polluted” water. These are perhaps but minor questions in a sea of erudition. Campany has again enriched the field with his well-written scholarship, and readers of this journal will rightly look forward to reading it

Ancient history · Archaeology · China · Chinese history and philosophy · History