The Second Annual Robert Morrell Memorial Lecture in Asian Religions: "Dreaming Religious Identity: Master Zhou's Communications with the Unseen World"

Professor Rob Campany is writing a book that probes ideas and practices involving dreaming in China in late classical and medieval times. The book is a map of sorts, a map of what he likes to think of as the Chinese dreamscape: the range of ways in which dreams were conceived and responded to, as reflected in various genres of texts. In this talk, Professor Campany presents and compares five notable examples. First, texts prescribing exorcistic ways to prevent the recurrence of nightmares; second, “dreambooks,” lists of dream elements paired with what they portended in the dreamer’s future; third, a Buddhist dream key that “reads” dream contents not as predicting the future but as revealing things about the dreamer’s karmic past that are responsible for his present progress on the bodhisattva path; fourth, a young Daoist practitioner’s record of his revelatory dreams of tutelary gods; and finally, an early medieval “philosophical” text that makes rhetorical use of the phenomenon of dreaming to argue about what is real and what is knowable.

Dreaming is a private experience, and an inherently rather strange one. But the processes by which meaning is spun from dreams are social. Many approaches to dreams in China involved attempts to map them somehow, bring them into some sort of order, fix them into grids and read them as signs from a chartable cosmos. Some approaches saw them as something more akin to butterflies, flying free of all maps, signifying nothing but the folly of map-making. 

Professor Robert Campany’s research focuses on late classical and early medieval China (ca. 300 B.C.E.-650 C.E.). These were religiously formative centuries in which Buddhist texts and teachings were first introduced to China and in which new Daoist religions also arose. Campany has developed ways of reading religious narratives and ways of thinking about what religions are and how they work that allow us to see this exciting period from new perspectives. In Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (State University of New York Press, 1996) he offered a revisionist account of texts known as “accounts of anomalies,” arguing that they are best seen as vehicles for cosmological and religious argumentation. To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth: A Translation and Study of Ge Hong’s Traditions of Divine Transcendents (University of California Press, 2002) made available the first complete English translation and detailed interpretation of the most important early medieval hagiographic collection concerning a type of Daoist holy person known as “transcendents” while also providing a systematic account of the religion that underlay the hagiographies. Making Transcendents: Ascetics and Social Memory in Early Medieval China (University of Hawai'i Press, 2009) painted a revisionist portrait of these same figures based on an eclectic set of questions and guiding principles he developed for reading hagiographic narratives as evidence for religious history. This book won the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion (Historical Studies category) in 2010, and won Honorable Mention in the Association for Asian Studies’ Joseph Levenson Prize competition in 2011.