Studies of the ancient Chinese classics, medieval Chinese history, Buddhism, Daoism, poetry, and prose have all too often been constrained within traditional disciplinary silos, such as literature, politics, philosophy, art, and religion. As a consequence, historians have infrequently read religious texts, scholars of Tang poetry have rarely engaged with archeological and epigraphic materials, while scholars of Buddhism have not often explored Daoist materials. Authors and readers in medieval China were of course not constrained by such boundaries. On the contrary, government and military officials, historians, poets, Buddhists, Daoists, and authors of tomb epitaphs and of imperial inscriptions shared cultural interests, and medieval authors read and found inspiration in each other’s diverse works. Our contemporary disciplinary labels tend to simplify the identities of medieval Chinese people—as adherents to a particular religion, or writers of a specific literary form—and thereby occlude the reality of their intertwined, multiple cultural practices. Indeed, people were rarely restricted to a single social identity or narrow set of cultural interests. But the blind spots in our understanding of medieval Chinese culture are not merely a result of contemporary disciplinary views: they are also shaped by the contours and gaps in the textual archive as it was transmitted and refashioned by centuries of readers. The surviving textual record from early and medieval China represents only a minute portion of the cultural productions of this era. In order to create a richer understanding of lived medieval culture, including the intersections of religious and literary practices, we need to not only read across the grain of modern disciplinary categories but also to expand our source base to include epigraphic and artistic materials, among others that have survived outside orthodox compilations of literary and scriptural traditions.

The subtitle of this volume, “The Way and the Words,” points to a fundamental critique of our very project. The Dao, the Way, is formless and nameless; it is the “teaching without words.” However, as humans we are forced to use words to communicate, and we are constrained within specific language and script communities. People in medieval China sought to attain the Way, and they realized that their words were mere traces of the ineffable. And yet, as the poems, inscriptions, scriptures, and commentaries explored in this volume demonstrate, medieval people continually sought to use words to trace the ineffable, and their ceaseless efforts to do so require our careful, attentive reading.