As several essays in this volume demonstrate, the intertwined relationship of medieval literary writing and religious practice can be perceived throughout the textual archive of the early medieval and Tang eras. But thanks largely to post-medieval habits of preservation, codification, and transmission that tended to separate writing deemed as “religious” from “literary” corpora, our view of that relationship has long been obscured. Scholars of medieval religion and literature have significantly expanded our understanding of Buddhism’s influence on elite belletristic writing (wenzhang 文章) in recent decades, spurred by evidence in the Dunhuang manuscript corpus as well as by new questions of transmitted texts, but much remains to be understood about the role of Daoist topics and themes in medieval literature that survived in individual literary collections (wenji 文集) and anthologies. Scholars such as Edward Schafer, Stephen Bokenkamp, Paul Kroll, and Franciscus Verellen have challenged traditional literary critical views and historical narratives that tend to ignore Daoism’s impact on Tang poetry and prose. Much of this scholarship has been recuperative, intended to reveal the footprint of Daoist concepts and practices in the corpora of specific writers such as Li Bai 李白, Cao Tang 曹唐, and Wu Yun 吳筠.

Beyond rediscovering Daoism in individual collections, however, we must also investigate the structural forces that necessitate this recuperative work: how did post-Tang literary collection and transmission practices occlude or marginalize writing concerned with Daoism? What kinds of formal or topical categories did Song and later readers use to define, contain, or otherwise explicate Tang writers’ interest in Daoism? Considering anthologies, for example, allows us to step away from the thorny—and often undecidable—question of Tang authors’ religious convictions and move towards more precise questions of representation and hermeneutics.