Page 474 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

GANZHI 435

Wang Zhe and his six male disciples; j. 3 to 8 contain thirty-nine memorial
inscriptions for the subsequent generations of Quanzhen masters; andj. 9 and
10 are devoted to seventeen monastery inscriptions. Also scattered among the
ten juan are various prose texts (short biographical notices, prefaces, and so
forth), and at the end of j. 10 is a collection of poems written at the monastery
in Ganhe. These texts, chosen to illustrate the history of Quanzhen, are by
nature of their genre in open circulation, and in this regard it is remarkable
that Quanzhen masters wrote only ten of the sixty-five inscriptions. The
remaining authors include several eminent scholars of this period.
The attention paid to the setting of stelae and the transmission of inscrip-
tions is peculiar to Quanzhen. Some famous inscriptions were separately
edited in the Daozang, but the present text is, along with the contemporary
and much smaller Gongguan beizhi '§ft~~ (Epigraphic Memorials of Palaces
and Abbeys; CT 972), the only anthology of this genre in Taoist literature.
Li Oaoqian's efforts to compile a large collection are therefore a valuable
contribution to the 50o-odd strong corpus of extant Quanzhen inscriptions.
Although some of its sixty-five texts were also transmitted in other sources,
most are unique to the Ganshui xianyuan lu.

Vincent GOOSSAERT
m BoltzJ. M. 1987a, 123-24; Chen Guofu 1963,244-46; Qing Xitai 1994, 2: 198

* Li Oaoqian; Quanzhen; EPIGRAPHY

ganzhi

[Celestial] Stems and [Earthly] Branches

In the West, the artificial seven-day cycle of the week has long played an
important role in structuring civil and religious time. In ancient China, a ten-
day period, the xun 1'0, played an analogous role from at least as far back as
the Shang dynasty. Each day was named using one of ten characters known
as the tiangan 7. T or Celestial Stems (see table 8). There is no consensus
among scholars as to the original significance of these characters, though
many hypotheses have been proposed.
By systematic pairing of the ten Stems with another set of twelve cyclical
characters, the dizhi :Jmst or Earthly Branches (see table 9), a longer cycle of
sixty day-names was generated (see table IQ). The first decade of the sexag-
esirnal cycle beginS with the Stem-Branch pair jiazi ft3 r as no. I , and ends