Conquerors of Death?: Approaching “Immortality” in Early Kabbalistic and Daoist Hagiographies

• In Event: Historical Interactions and Mutual Understandings: Jews and China

Abstract

This article investigates in the idea of “immortality,” namely the image of the saints as the “conquerors of death,” in early Lurianic and the Daoist hagiographies. The textual scope is the foundation stones of each hagiographical tradition: Sefer Shivchei Ha-Ar”i [In Praise of Isaac Luria], the legends on the innovative Safedian Jewish mystic Isaac Luria (1534-1572); and Shenxian Zhuan [Biographies of Divine Transcendents], a collection of legendary tales on divine transcendents compiled in the fourth century CE.
This study takes a phenomenological approach to compare the notion of immortality in these early hagiographies from the two traditions. Despite the notion’s diverse paths of philosophical development in each culture, it is in the hagiographical literature where one is able to find examples of extraordinary human beings achieving immortality, at least in a dimension of “meta-reality.” The primary research questions are semantic: How do these texts, despite cultural differences, present the notion of immortality, and what does it mean within each tradition? Additionally, the persuasiveness of these texts in conveying the concept of immortality to their audiences is also surveyed in this research.
Via the parallel reading of excerpts from these legendary compilations, I argue that in both contexts, by blurring the borders between the living and the dead, the physical and the nonphysical, the exoteric and the esoteric, immortality becomes “a liminal state of in-betweenness” where polarizing notions become fluid, and judgements suspended. Such deconstruction allows for the depiction of immortality as a state that transcends conventional understanding, featuring the protagonists as the conquerors of death. Consequently, a shared methodological substratum in the deconstruction of boundaries can be found, where both Jewish and Daoist hagiographers present a version of immortality that challenges and transcends empirical knowledge, offering a glimpse into an eternal life that exists beyond the limits of time and space, suggesting that the real "conquerors of death" are those who achieve a timeless legacy in the collective memory of humanity.

Author

• Jianyu Shen