Description: Catherine Despeux's book Taoism and Self Knowledge is a study of the Internal Alchemical text "Chart for the Cultivation of Perfection." It begins with an analysis of pictographic and symbolic representation of the body in early Taoism after which the author examines different extant versions of the "Chart" as it was transmitted among Quanzhen groups in the Qing dynasty. The book is comprised of four main parts: the principal parts of the body and their nomenclature in Internal Alchemy, the spirits in the human body, and the alchemical processes and procedures used in thunder rituals and self-cultivation. This is a revised, expanded edition of the original French edition Taoïsme et connaissance de soi. La carte de la culture de la perfection (Xiuzhen tu) Paris, 2012.
Review Quotes: "Stuckrad's book is a useful reference guide for twentieth-century notions of the soul and related themes such as nature, animism, consciousness, energy, and vitalism."
- Dominic Zoehrer, University of Vienna, in Religious Studies Review 45.4 (December 2019).
"The volume at hand--a good translation of an expanded version of the French title published in 2012--directly opens the gate to an impressive image of the religion that thoroughly explains its fundamental and timeless impact on Chinese life and thought. The book is a thorough, reliable, and all considered, well-readable presentation of an eighteenth-century text and its history."
- Barbara Hendrischke, University of Sydney, in Religious Studies Review 45.4 (2019).