|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
Covenant with the Powers 
—also alludes to the earlier tradition of making covenants, albeit with heavenly, as well as earthly, powers.
The system of ritual practice, generally known as Daoism, could very well be referred to as imperial. That the early Celestial Masters Daoist community in second century Sichuan province, and through extension, all subsequent movements tracing their origin back to it, derived their ritual practices from the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) politico-religious landscape, has been convincingly argued by Anna Seidel. Beginning in the latter part of the Western Han (ended in 9 A.D.) apocryphal manuscripts, divine charts, textual descriptions of the appearance of extraordinary beings and bizarre anomalies, talismanic script and seals, and following the collapse of the Han Dynasty, revealed “Daoist” scriptures and the priests who presented them, were all symbols of the emperor’s mandate bestowed on him by heaven above. The Yao documents collected by Shiratori, and discussed by Strickmann and Lemoine, are part of this very same tradition.
I conclude this book with a detailed analysis of the Passport, a document possessed only by Yao leaders, which Yao view as evidence of imperial and heavenly recognition.