3: Pivot of the Gods: Book-Making and Scriptural Authority in Early Medieval China
Sunday, March 15, 2026
9:00 AM - 10:30 AM PDT
Location: VCC, Room 303
Presenting Author(s)
JP
Jonathan Pettit
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, United States
This paper argues that Tao Hongjing’s editorial work on the Shangqing (Supreme Purity) manuscripts should not be understood as a neutral transmission of Daoist tradition, but rather as a performative and transformative act within what Michel de Certeau calls a “scriptural economy.” Tao’s compilations reorganized lived religious experience into textual order, transforming fluid and contested revelations into legible, stable forms of knowledge. Drawing on de Certeau’s insights into how writing shapes memory and inscribes authority, the paper examines how Tao’s editorial practices restructured Shangqing revelations—through orthographic choices, formatting, and paratextual commentary—as curated “quotations of voices.” These voices, whether attributed to gods, sages, or earlier editors, were not merely preserved but selectively framed, authorized, or silenced, revealing Tao’s role not simply as a collector, but as a strategic organizer of sacred discourse. Through a close reading of the *Zhen’gao* and related works, the paper shows how Tao inscribed spatial and ideological order into his manuscripts, converting divine utterance into a fixed textual “place” while simultaneously inviting new interpretive “spaces” through the act of reading. Far from passive replication, Tao’s editorial labor functioned as a spatial practice that recast religious tradition as something materially navigable and socially legible.
