The Way of Highest Clarity was a Daoist religious movement that flourished for a thousand years in medieval China. This book explains its chief religious ideas and practices through three key texts, translated into English for the first time.

The "Esoteric Biography of Perfected Purple Yang" documents the life of a Daoist saint who travels through China encountering a wealth of immortals and gods who aid him in his quest for transcendence. They transmit esoteric scriptures to him, including the "Central Scripture of the Nine Perfected," also translated here.

This text explains a meditation technique that involves visualizing gods descending into the organs of the body at certain times of the year. This alone makes it interesting for adepts of One Cloud’s 7 Alchemy Formulas for Attaining Immortality, which work with similar principles.

The book also translates the preface to the "Perfect Scripture of the Great Grotto," a theological reflection on the practices of Highest Clarity, which connects the tradition back to the fundamental principles of the Dao.

There are profound essays on the concepts of nature, vision and revelation. The book provides an overview of a unique and fascinating alchemical imagination, and is of interest to anyone who seeks a deeper understanding of China's cultural heritage.

From James Miller’s Introduction:

"Highest Clarity Daoism, originating in the 4th century C.E., represents one of the earliest and most successful attempts to synthesize the foundational religious elements that had already appeared on China’s religious scene. These included shamanism, mystical experiences, astrology, the quest for immortality, meditation practices, court ritual and Buddhist concepts of death and rebirth.

The synthesis brought these various elements into a single complex system, the highest goal of which was the trans?guration of the body and its pre-mortem ascension into heaven. Should this goal not be attainable other, lesser, forms of salvation were also available to practitioners so that even if they were to die, they could safely pass through the underworld and be reborn, intact, in the heavens.

This religious system deserves careful study because of its focus on the body and the relations of bodies to the heavens and the afterlife. This is,of course, a major focus of many religious traditions. The preservation of the body into the afterlife has been the goal of pharaohs, emperors and all those who have built elaborate tombs in which carefully embalmed corpses have been preserved for millennia.

Though this form of religion is not particularly in vogue in the modern world, where religions place their emphasis on “spirituality” rather than “materiality,” the widespread modern practices of embalming and viewing the bodies of the deceased and a hesitation about donating organs for transplant both indicate the continuing cultural and psychological importance of the material preservation of corpses. By studying this tradition we can obtain important material for the comparative investigation of widespread human impulses that cut across a variety of cultures and traditions.

Yet Highest Clarity Daoists were not principally interested in the preservation of corpses but rather the transformation of bodies into a form suitable for a life in paradise. In this regard their ideas bear something of a resemblance to the orthodox Christian belief in the resurrection of the body. But unlike the Christian saints who did all they could on earth to ?t their bodies for a resurrected, post-mortem life that would take place after the ?nal judgment, Highest Clarity Daoists saw the afterlife as a worst-case scenario.

Better still was to avoid death itself by ascending directly to a higher paradise, conceived not as a realm for the grateful dead but for the deserving living. Heaven, the celestial web of cosmic powers shifting in an eternal cycle of light and dark, day and night, yang and yin, was the place for the living, not the dead."

This book thus investigates Highest Clarity Daoist theology as a unique and original set of religious ideas about life and death that will be of profound interest to any student of comparative religion and theology.

ORDER NOW    260 pages. $29.95	BACK TO TOP