Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Author: Robert Ford Campany -- Approaching Dreaming and Self-Cultivation / Author: Robert Ford Campany -- Purifying -- Author: Robert Ford Campany -- Diagnosing -- Author: Robert Ford Campany -- Spilling Over -- Author: Robert Ford Campany -- Not Dreaming, Waking Up, and Not Minding the Difference -- Author: Robert Ford Campany -- Fish Traps and Rabbit Snares -- Author: Robert Ford Campany -- The Initial List of Dream Signs in Explication of Dreams for Bodhisattvas (Pusa shuomeng jing 菩薩說夢經) -- Author: Robert Ford Campany -- A Close Comparison of Chinese Versions of the Chapter on the Diagnostic Use of Dreams in Perfection of Wisdom Texts -- Author: Robert Ford Campany -- A Collection of Incubatory Spells in Three Dongshen Registers of Red Writs of the Most High (Taishang chiwen dongshen sanlu 太上赤文洞神三籙) -- Author: Robert Ford Campany -- Notes -- Author: Robert Ford Campany -- Bibliography -- Author: Robert Ford Campany -- Index -- Author: Robert Ford Campany -- Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series -- Author: Robert Ford Campany.

Practitioners of any of the paths of self-cultivation available in ancient and medieval China engaged daily in practices meant to bring their bodies and minds under firm control. They took on regimens to discipline their comportment, speech, breathing, diet, senses, desires, sexuality, even their dreams. Yet, compared with waking life, dreams are incongruous, unpredictable—in a word, strange. How, then, did these regimes of self-fashioning grapple with dreaming, a lawless yet ubiquitous domain of individual experience? In Dreaming and Self-Cultivation in China, 300 BCE–800 CE , Robert Ford Campany examines how dreaming was addressed in texts produced and circulated by practitioners of Daoist, Buddhist, Confucian, and other self-cultivational disciplines. Working through a wide range of scriptures, essays, treatises, biographies, commentaries, fictive dialogues, diary records, interpretive keys, and ritual instructions, Campany uncovers a set of discrete paradigms by which dreams were viewed and responded to by practitioners. He shows how these paradigms underlay texts of diverse religious and ideological persuasions that are usually treated in mutual isolation. The result is a provocative meditation on the relationship between individuals’ nocturnal experiences and one culture’s persistent attempts to discipline, interpret, and incorporate them into waking practice. See Less

English

Description based on print version record.