Franciscus Verellen

Medieval Daoism

Spanning eight centuries, this book traces the evolution of Daoist beliefs about human liability and redemption and narrates how Daoists envisaged rescuing an ill-starred destiny. Medieval sources portray a world engulfed by evil, where human existence was mortgaged from birth and burdened by increasing debts and obligations in this world and the next. From the second through the tenth century CE, Daoism emerged as a liturgical organization that vigorously engaged with Buddhism, transforming Chinese thinking about the causes of suffering, the nature of evil, and the aims of liberation. In the fifth century, elements of classical Daoism combined with Indian yoga to interiorize the quest for deliverance. The integrated liturgical order of the Tang encompassed monastic communities, lay society, and rituals on behalf of the state. Daoist sacraments acted on the unseen world, providing therapeutic relief and ecstatic deliverance from the fear of death, disease, and loss. Drawing on prayer texts, liturgical sermons, and experiential narratives, Franciscus Verellen pays close attention to the Daoist metaphors for guilt, redemption, and the meaning of sacrifice.

Franciscus Verellen, Imperiled Destinies: The Daoist Quest for Deliverance in Medieval China. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2019.

Gao Pian and the Fall of the Tang

Military governor, architect, alchemist and poet, Gao Pian (821-87) was one of the most intriguing characters to shape events in ninth-century China. His trajectory provides a step-by-step record of the late Tang empire's military, fiscal, and administrative unravelling. Utilising exceptionally rich sources, including documents from Gao Pian's secretariat, inscriptions, narrative and religious literature, and Gao Pian's own poetry, Franciscus Verellen challenges the official historians' portrait of Gao as an 'insubordinate minister' and Daoist zealot. In an innovative analysis, he argues that the life of this extraordinary general casts much-needed light on ideas of allegiance and disobedience, provincial governance, military affairs and religious life in the waning years of the Tang.

Franciscus Verellen, The Fall of the Tang: Gao Pian's Trials of Allegiance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in February 2026.

In preparation:

Du Guangting's Vision of Renewal

After years of war, epidemics, and famine, the breakup of the Tang empire (618-907) and the emergence of a polycentric structure of power confronted a society in disarray with an uncertain new political order. Daoism, the previous ruling family's ancestral cult, came unmoored from its temporal anchorage. The life of medieval China's preeminent Daoist scholar and author, Du Guangting (850-933), straddled the Tang-Five Dynasties divide. An attentive observer of contemporary society and a prolific writer, Du offers arresting testimonies of the period's upheavals. Franciscus Verellen, who contributed the first historical biography of this singular figure (Du Guangting, Collège de France, 1989), here examines Du's intellectual trajectory across the abyss the fall of the Tang opened before the faithful, his evolving conceptions of sacred history and geography, and his vision for a Daoist revival in Shu (Sichuan), the ancient cradle of the religion. At the head of the Daoist community there, Du salvaged the remains of the scriptural canon and initiated ground-breaking printing enterprises to ensure their transmission. Serving the rulers of the emerging Kingdom of Shu, he contributed to making Sichuan a regional hub of cultural, economic, and technological renewal, prefiguring China's renaissance under the reunited Song (960-1127).

Du Guangting's Writings for Lay Daoists

Besides extensive exegetical and liturgical compendia intended for the clergy, Du Guangting's oeuvre includes large collections of narratives written for propagating the faith among lay society, as well as tracts and memorials addressed to his political patrons. Du's narrative writings chronicle contemporary turmoil through a lively tableau depicting a dislocated society on the move - the government in exile, refugees on the road, traveling monks, merchants, market porters, uprooted farmers, armies on campaign, and roving bandits, swept pell-mell into the descent of the disintegrating empire. The narratives include testimonies of religious experience, prodigies, revelatory encounters, and lives of transcendents, that bring to light the invisible realms of gods, demons, and the netherworld. The memorials discuss political prognostication and the ritual foundations of Shu as a holy land. Du's liturgical memorials preserve a large body of commissioned prayer orations that reflect the predicaments and preoccupations of Daoists at all levels of society. An annex provides synopses of the ten main collections of Du's narrative writings.