ABSTRACT
The Way of Highest Clarity was a Daoist religious movement that flourished for a thousand years in medieval China from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries. Although the Way of Highest Clarity no longer exists as a religious movement, it remains important because of the provocative and counterintuitive views it held regarding the relationship between humans and the cosmos. The way of thinking that emerges from this contemporary ecocritical analysis of the Way of Highest Clarity opens the door to a radical and transgressive ecospirituality founded on an inversion of the conventional perception of the world outside the body. Instead, Highest Clarity Daoism invited its adherents to imagine that there is no ultimate difference between the natural spaces of nature and the inner spaces of the body. Through the powers of imagination, humans had the possibility to visualize the true form of emptiness inside their bodies and achieve a spiritual transfiguration. In this way cosmos, nature and body achieved a mutual interpenetration that was denoted as the achievement of perfect nature.
