........ , . . ... ," ..... BRILL Abstract NAN NO Nan Nii 10 (2008) 86-120 www.brill.nUnannil The Way of the Yellow and the Red: Re-examining the Sexual Initiation Rite of Celestial Master Daoism 1 GilRaz (Dartmouth College) That Daoists engaged in sexual practices is well known. But what precisely were these practices, and what was their significance? This paper examines the initiation ritual of Celestial Master Daoism as found in the text entitled Shangqing Huangshu guodu yi. I argue that this practice has been misunderstood by earlier scholars who focused on the sexual aspect of the rite and interpreted it through the cosmological model of yin and yang. I suggest that the ritual procedure described in this text should not be read as a sexual manual but must be placed in the context of Celestial Master ritual and mythology as found in contemporaneous texts. Such a reading reveals that this ritual is based on a cosmogony in which the procreative function of yin and yang is a secondary, and not a primary, stage of cosmogony. Rather than a hierogamy, the real significance of this ritual is, in fact, to transcend the mundane realm, symbolized by the sexual act, and to attain the primordial undifferentiated oneness, beyond sexual division. Keywords Daoism, Celestial Master, ritual, sexual practice 11 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Nineteenth Barnard Medieval and Renaissance Conference, Barnard College, December 2004; ar the Seminar on Chinese Religions, Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University, February 2005; and at the Symposium in Celebration of 1he Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang, University of Chicago, Ocrober 2005. I thank the panicipanrs in these meetings for their comments. Particular thanks are due to Donald Harper, Gregoire Espesset, Maruyama Hiroshi, and the anonymous readers for this journal for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions on earlier versions of the paper. © Koninklijke Brill Leidcn, 2008 DOl: IO.IJ63/J38768008X273728