UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the many meanings and changing functions of the figure of the shi 師 in early and medieval China. Focusing on the first through fourth centuries of the Common Era, it traces the evolving use of this category (in its relevant meanings of teacher, master, and model) across a variety of texts and contexts. In doing so, it examines implicated questions about sectarian identity and the transmission of religious texts and practices. It begins with a survey of discussions of the figure of the shi in Warring States and early imperial philosophical discourse, in depictions of various governmental hierarchies, and in the history of Han-era classicism, contextualizing claims made in the secondary literature about why leaders of religious movements during the Eastern Han tended to incorporate shi into their titles.

Against that background the dissertation takes up texts associated with different religious movements of the early Common Era for close analysis. It first scrutinizes a section of the Scripture of Great Peace (Taiping jing 太平經) which previous scholarship has characterized as the earliest documented “nativist” response to Buddhism in China. The Scripture uses the category of shi and the related concept of shifa (師法) in a new abstract sense that (1) invokes a normative relationship between transcendent entities and humanity and (2) valorizes the structure and history of communities that uphold Heaven’s approved standard for behavior. Collaterally, this same language is deployed invidiously against communities whose behavior violates that standard.

The dissertation then studies two textual corpora that document religious practices in the Jiangnan region during the fourth century. Taking up the The Master Embracing the Unhewn (Baopuzi 抱朴子), it reconstructs the depiction therein of the ideal shi as a mediator of texts and teachings that may be rooted in revelation from divine figures. A reconfigured ideal of the master-disciple relationship again provides a conceptual baseline against which the text measures and criticizes rival practices and practitioners. Next, “Transmissions of the Dao” (Dao shou 道授), which forms part of the Declarations of the Perfected (Zhen’gao 真誥), elevates the figure of the shi even further. The text suggests that the master-disciple relationship known on earth is also operative in the divine realm; it further gives the teacher a more crucial, sometimes exclusive, role in the earthly adept’s religious undertakings. This quality of “Transmissions,” the dissertation suggests, can help us better understand the focus on transmission, lineage, and the figure of the shi elsewhere in the Declarations, and for thus the history and collateral contents of the Shangqing revelations.

In tracing the way that the figure of the shi came to be seen as a mediator of divinely sanctioned and revealed teachings, the dissertation proposes an alternative approach to Medieval Chinese religious texts, one supplementary to and revelatory for other ways of analyzing religious literature of this period. With this figure so highly elevated and lines of transmission connected to it so valorized, a shi-centric reading also suggests a significant way in which the religious self and other came to be defined on the Medieval Chinese landscape.