The Versatility of the Home in Mists – Oversea Edition

The database Home In Mists – Oversea edition 白雲深處人家海外站 is an edition based outside of China of a database by the same name. The purpose of the collection as stated on the homepage is to promote Daoist culture by making available a series of digitized editions of Daoist texts. Under “Collection of Daoist Canon 道藏匯編” you will find a wealth of sources to download. They are all in .rar, so Apple users will have to get the proper app to open them. The files are then .djvu, which are a bit of a headache too in terms of accessibility, although most of the time a converter like Calibre can do the trick. The website also has a handy page on tools to operate with these files. 

The Dan Dao scriptures 丹道經書, named after an Daoist alchemy tradition, is a collection of editions and scholarship on the most important texts for the Daoist tradition, such as the Laozi, Zhuangzi and Huainanzi. Some again are downloadable as .rar; others, like the biographies of masters from the Zizang 子藏 project (a 120 volume edition of pre-imperial Daoist philosophers), are described in detail. 

Fig. 1

But what made me land on this website has nothing to do with the Daoist canon, which is really not my forte. Under “announcements” there is a section “online search 在線檢索” that has tools useful for anyone working with premodern Chinese texts. 

Fig. 2

It includes: 

1. Search platforms for the Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Analects (nos. 3, 4 and 5) that allow you to compare different editions of each text. For example, if I search Analects 15.7, I am returned the edition in the Kaicheng stele 開成石徑 (completed in 837CE, a most important material and historically interesting witness to the transmission of the 13 classics); the edition in Zhu Xi’s Four Books, which pretty much set the version of the Analects that we read today, and Cheng Shude’s study of the Analects, the most comprehensive modern edition of this text. Clicking on “Instructions 使用說明” will return the information for the editions used by the database, with links to download the source, or be readdressed to its website. 
2. A series of dictionaries, inducing those not specific to Daoism and useful to anyone:
   1. The Hanyu da zi dian 漢語大字典 (no. 14) is the starting point for any reading of Chinese texts; 
   2. The Kangxi zi dian 康熙字典 (no. 13)has been superseded by more modern works but is still an important reference work;
   3. The Gu hanyu – Yinyu zidian 古漢語-英語字典 (np. 17), aka A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese by Paul Kroll, now in some cases slightly outdated given the new discoveries of ancient texts, but still an excellent starting point and reference work;
   4. A dictionary for variants that draws from an online version based in Taiwan, https://dict.variants.moe.edu.tw/, the Yitizi zidian 異體字字典. Admittedly, the Home In Mists website is not as good at reporting all the data, but if you click on the number next to your research result (e.g., #16365 in my example below), you are taken to the relevant page in dict.variants 

Fig. 3

3. There are then 4 versions of the Shuowen jiezi dictionary，no. 19, 20, 21, 22. Each has a slightly different search interface. For example, the 說文通訊定聲 (no. 20), being a reorganization of the Shuowen according to rhyming patterns, allows you to search by rhyme (ancient, guyun 古韻 or modern jinyun 今韻); whereas the 說文解字義證 (no. 21), which is a version of the Shuowen that added textual evidence to support the definitions given for each word, does not have this option. For this section, it’s crucial to first understand the nature of each edition. 
4. The Jingdian shi wen 經典釋文 (no. 25), one of the most important resources from the Tang Dynasty. Compiled by Lu Deming  陸德明 (556?–630 CE) on the basis of previous works, it records the changes in pronunciations of words in what will eventually become the 13 classics plus the Laozi and the Zhuangzi. A nice part of this section is that the search function/feature/bar has many options: if you want to search a word as used in the fanqie 反切 spelling method, you search in 被切之字; if you want to search a word as used in the primary source, to see what this dictionary has to say about it, you search in 經典原文. You can then also use the page # of the Song edition of this text, if you know it (suppose you are using a PDF but it’s not great quality… or the page is missing!); you can also search by pinyin 拼音; or, if you’re up for it, you can also search by title of the primary source in 經名 / 卷名 / 篇章名, in case you want to see all the entries by Lu Deming for the Analects, for example, you can do so here! 

As fig 2. shows, there are many more resources available on Home in Mists. I touched here on the few that are useful to anyone working in the field of premodern textual studies within Sinology, because sometimes the name of a website can deter us from exploring it. The first time I landed on Home In Mists I did not spend too much time with it, because I don’t really research Daoism nor the Daoist canon. Later, I landed on the “online search” page by other means and realized all the useful resources it included – it would be a shame for these not to get the attention they deserve.