Kristofer Schipper施舟人

Style & Daoist names

Kristofer Marinus Schipper, Schipper, Daoist name Dingqing

Period

Modern

Dates

1934 — 2021

School

Zhengyi (Orthodox Unity) Daoism

Role

SinologistDaoist ScholarsRegister-Ordained Daoist Priest

Birthplace

Stockholm, Sweden (Dutch national)

Life

Kristofer Schipper, a Dutch sinologist, was the most important scholar of international Daoist studies in the second half of the twentieth century. A student of Max Kaltenmark, he carried out fieldwork in Tainan, Taiwan from 1962 to 1970, studying ritual under Zhengyi Daoist masters there (including Chen Rongsheng), and in 1966 received the conferral of registers to become an ordained Daoist priest — the first Western scholar to study Daoist ritual from within the tradition. On returning to France he became a professor at the EPHE, and in 1979 initiated and directed the European Science Foundation's Daozang research project, which ran for more than twenty years; together with Franciscus Verellen he co-edited The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang (2004), which provides descriptive notes and dating for every text in the Daozang and stands as a milestone of Daozang scholarship. His book Le corps taoïste (1982; English translation The Taoist Body) expounds Daoist conceptions of the body and ritual. Later in life he was a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands; after 2001 he settled in Fuzhou, China, where he founded the Xiguan Library and served as a professor at Fuzhou University. He died in Amsterdam in 2021.

Contributions & Influence

• Directed the Daozang research project and co-edited The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang
• Studied Daoist ritual from within the tradition as an ordained Daoist priest, pioneering fieldwork-based Daoist studies
• Wrote The Taoist Body, expounding Daoist conceptions of the body
• Trained a generation of European Daoist scholars and promoted exchange between Chinese and Western Daoist studies

Works

• The Taoist Canon (A Historical Companion to the Daozang, co-edited with Franciscus Verellen)
• The Taoist Body (Daoti lun)
• Concordance du Tao-tsang
• L'empereur Wou des Han dans la légende taoïste