the Three". The Baopuzi mentions a Neijing "Inner Classic" by Wei Boyang, but curiously does not mention Wei's Cantong ji. Modern scholarship has taken another look at the Baopuzi. Sivin demeans the text's significance. The Inner Chapters are anything but the writings of a Taoist man of wisdom or organizer for his disciples or for other initiates. This book is a vast trove of commonplaces and hearsay about popular beliefs in which Ko's few incontestably Taoist texts play an essential but small part. Its goal is not to catalog, synthesize, or provide a handbook of techniques. It is rather a dialog in which Ko hurls scattershot against a skeptical anonymous interlocutor. The Inner Chapters are a one-issue book. Ko seeks to convince his questioner, and thereby his readers, that immortality is a proper object of study and is attainable – not only by the ancients but in his own time, not only by a destined few but by anyone with enough faith to undertake arduous and dangerous disciplines. The devotion that Ko calls for implies wholesale acceptance of legends, myths, tales of prodigies, magical beliefs, religious faiths – practically every belief current in the popular imagination of Ko's time and the inverse in almost every sense of what "fundamentalist Confucian" humanists considered worthy of thought (but then they were no longer setting the intellectual style). Sivin sarcastically compares Ge Hong, "an obsessed bookman and indiscriminate lore-collector", with Alan Watts. "Ko's style was rather than of a pedantic purveyor of occultism to the upper class. I can only think of him as the Alan Watts of his time." However, James Benn observes, "This judgement is perhaps not as damning as Professor Sivin intended. Certainly, one would not now go to Watts in the hope of learning much about Taoism, but a close study of his work would tell us a great deal about perceptions and presuppositions concerning Asian religions in mid-twentieth century America. Like Watts and others of his generation it is true that Ge Hong did see religion as a personal matter, and he seems to have approached it from the point of view of a fan or enthusiast more than as an initiate." Chi-Tim Lai interprets the Inner Chapters as a "new discourse" on hsien"-immortality through personal salvation and perfection, contrasting with the traditional "imperial discourse" that only the rich could afford to achieve a state of hsien." For