Fighting Feelings with Feelings: The Quanzhen Daoist Ordering of Emotional Life

CHINA HUMANITIES

SPEAKER: Ya Zuo, University of California, Santa Barbara

Quanzhen Daoism wielded a profound influence across eastern Eurasia, shaping the intellectual landscape of the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234) and leaving a lasting impact on the Mongol Yuan empire (1279–1368). In this talk, I delve into the focus on emotions in Quanzhen philosophy. The religion emphasized the qing (emotions/feelings) as a central concept and assigned its clergy with an active role in emotional stewardship. Highly critical of conventional feelings and desires, Quanzhen Daoists sought to convert followers to a new affective regime known as the “feelings of the dao.”

About the Speaker

Ya Zuo is an associate professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a cultural historian of middle and late imperial China, and the author of Shen Gua’s Empiricism (Harvard Asia Center, 2018), with the Chinese translation published by Zhonghua Book Company in 2024. Driven by interdisciplinary interests, she has written a range of articles on topics such as theory of knowledge, sensory history, medical history, book history, and the history of emotions. She is currently working on a book on crying and tears in middle-period China.