One of the most fascinating, enigmatic, and problematic text traditions of ancient China, the Taiping jing (Scripture on Great Peace) has spawned its own field of highly specialized scholarship in China, Japan, and the West. Barbara Hendrischke, who here presents the first translation of a substantive portion of the received core text into English, complete with a lengthy introduction and extensive critical apparatus, is to be congratulated for her outstanding achievement.
Hendrischke's introduction—addressed to general readers—first traces the rise of the cosmic-political ideal of Great Peace (taiping) in early imperial times, and then analyzes its peculiar inscription in the received Taiping jing, which, based on the same cosmological theories, offers a religiously motivated program of political and moral reforms, apparently to the rulers of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE). The trend toward criticizing Han authority on the basis of the very “cosmo-political” structures originally used to...