Abstract
The study of chinese religions is a lively and growing field. Its major bibliographer in the West, Laurence G. Thompson, comments that in revising his bibliography of Western-language publications through 1980 to include those published in the following ten years, the index of various types of contributors increased by over 1,100 names, and the number of research categories grew from eighty-four to one hundred and three (Thompson 1985, 1993). Anna Seidel of the École Françhise d'Extrême-Orient, Section de Kyoto, published in 1990 a discussion and bibliography of Taoist studies in the West from 1950 to 1990 that for this topic alone is 124 pages long (Seidel 1989–90). New documents, from Shang oracle bones to twentieth-century spirit-writing texts, are being discovered, the Taoist canon has been systematically surveyed for the first time, and fresh interpretations
