Page 5 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

viii THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TAOISM VOL. I

This is all the more regrettable since by the time that Couling's handbook
appeared a certain amount of progress had been made in investigating the
canon by scholars writing in French. The gradual emergence of the field
of Taoist Studies during the twentieth century in fact affected the English-
speaking world at a remarkably late point: amongst pioneers we may find
Chinese (though not that many, given the anti-religious spirit abroad in the
Republican and early Communist eras), Japanese, French, Germans and other
Europeans, but with the exception of researchers in the History of Science
scarcely a soul from Great Britain, the English-speaking Commonwealth, or
the United States. Nor has the rectification of this anomaly seen anything like
a smooth progress. Too many engaged in the task of building up and spreading
the knowledge originally available only in French were lost to us before their
time, from Henri Maspero, who died in Buchenwald in 1945, to Anna Seidel,
Michel Strickmann and Isabelle Robinet, whose more recent deaths have dealt
successive blows to the field. The first named had scarcely any students, and
was only able to exert a posthumous but utterly crucial inspiration through his
writings, but we owe a particular debt to the others, whose teaching activities
in the late twentieth century (together with those of one or two less unfor-
tunate scholars, such as K. M. Schipper) finally established the small corps of
researchers without whom the production of this encyclopedia would not
have been remotely possible.
Even so the unprecedented large-scale collaborative effort required, calling
on expertise right across the globe, would probably have been expended in
vain were it not for the Herculean labours of the editor. When I was first ap-
proached to suggest the name of someone who could undertake this task, I
realized that only a scholar with broad international contacts and the highest
academic standards would be capable of bringing such a project to comple-
tion. Little did I realise that persistence, too, would be a quality that Fabrizio
Pregadio would have to call upon in full measure, and that an undertaking
conceived on one continent and based on the religious traditions of another
would after a more than elephantine period of gestation eventually see the
light of day in the New World of an entirely different hemisphere. For all
the minor shortcomings that may be discovered in this compilation, and for
all the scholarship it may contain that may one day appear outdated and in
need of revision, he at least should be absolved from any blame and indeed
allowed a full measure of self-congratulation, for he has worked as hard and
as meticulously as anyone possibly could.
The publishers, too, should surely allow themselves a measure of self-
congratulation, and especially those individuals who have helped sustain the
project throughout the institutional changes on their side that have been almost
as dramatic as those witnessed by the editor in his academic travels. Given that