Taoism

A living religion with priests, liturgy and a canon of fifteen hundred texts — read in the West almost entirely through two books, in translations often made by people who cannot read Chinese.

What it is

Daoism — the tradition of the Dao, the way — is both a body of philosophy and an organised religion with clergy, temples, liturgy and a canon.

Western accounts have generally divided it into daojia, philosophical Daoism, and daojiao, religious Daoism, treating the first as the real thing and the second as later superstition. Sinologists now regard that split as largely a Western imposition: the same texts, concepts and practitioners appear on both sides of it, and the distinction says more about what Western readers wanted than about Chinese religious history.

Its central ideas:

Dao — the way, the source and pattern of everything, which cannot be named. The Daodejing opens by saying so.

De — virtue in the sense of inherent power or integrity, the way the Dao expresses itself in a particular thing.

Wu wei — often translated "non-action", better understood as non-forcing: acting without strain, in accordance with the grain of a situation, so that effort disappears. The stock images are water wearing stone and a cook whose knife never dulls because it follows the joints.

Ziran — self-so, spontaneity, things being as they are of themselves.

Where it came from

The Daodejing, attributed to Laozi, was probably composed and compiled between the fourth and third centuries BCE and is almost certainly composite rather than the work of one author. The Laozi of legend — an archivist who met Confucius and rode west on an ox, writing the book at a border guard's request — is not a historical figure in any usable sense.

The Zhuangzi, from around the same period, is the tradition's other founding text and is a very different kind of book: funny, digressive, philosophically radical, full of skilled butchers, useless trees, and a man who dreams he is a butterfly and cannot afterwards be sure which he is.

Religious Daoism begins conventionally in 142 CE, when Zhang Daoling received a revelation and founded the Way of the Celestial Masters — an organised movement with priesthood, registers, confession and healing. Later movements include Shangqing, Lingbao, and from the twelfth century Quanzhen, a monastic order that remains one of the two main lineages alongside Zhengyi.

The Daozang, the Daoist canon, contains roughly fifteen hundred texts. Most have never been translated into any Western language.

How it is practised

By ordained priests, through liturgy: ritual for the community, offerings, petitions submitted to the celestial bureaucracy in written form, exorcism, and rites for the dead. This is what most Daoist practice has consisted of for two thousand years.

Alongside it: internal alchemy (neidan), the refinement of jīng, qì and shén through meditation and breath, which developed after external alchemy (waidan) — the pursuit of elixirs from mercury, cinnabar and lead — had killed a number of its practitioners, including several Tang emperors.

And the broad cultural inheritance: qi and the meridians, feng shui, martial arts, landscape painting, and a considerable influence on Chan Buddhism.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the Western reception has been extraordinarily narrow. Daoism reaches most English-speaking readers through the Daodejing alone, and the Daodejing reaches them through a particular kind of translation.

It is among the most translated books in the world — well over two hundred English versions — and a substantial proportion are not translations. They are rewritings based on earlier English versions, produced by authors who do not read classical Chinese. Stephen Mitchell's popular rendering is the best-known example and is explicit that it is a version rather than a translation.

The effect is the same one documented for Rūmī: a specific religious text becomes a generalised spiritual poem, with the cosmology, the political argument — the Daodejing is substantially a manual for rulers — and the ritual context removed.

We can say the priesthood, the liturgy and the canon are simply absent from the Western picture. A tradition that most readers think of as a book of aphorisms about going with the flow is in fact a functioning religion with ordained clergy, and it is peculiar that this is not general knowledge.

We can say the tradition suffered severely under the People's Republic, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, and has revived substantially since.

We cannot say what the Daodejing means, and that is not evasion. It is a compressed, allusive, deliberately paradoxical text in an ancient language, transmitted in variant versions — the Mawangdui and Guodian manuscripts differ from the received text in order and content — and the translations disagree with each other on the first line.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is practised

What we can and cannot say

Further reading