Currents · by Frater Custos · 15-minute read

Taoism

It is not «a philosophy and not a religion». It does not begin with an old sage on a buffalo. And the black and white symbol everyone attributes to it is, in that form, more recent than movable type. The documented history of a tradition that reaches the West almost always upside down.

Let us begin with the name, because the problem is already there. In Chinese there is no single term covering what we call Taoism. There are two: 道家 daojia, «house of the Dao», and 道教 daojiao, «teaching of the Dao». The first is a bibliographical category: it arises as a label with which a Han court librarian arranges books, not as the self-description of a school. The second appears later, from the 5th century, to designate the organised religious tradition in opposition to fojiao, Buddhism.

From this pair the West has derived the distinction between «philosophical Taoism» — noble, poetic, fit for the drawing room — and «religious Taoism» — superstitious, popular, degenerate. The distinction is convenient, it is in all the popular handbooks, and scholars reject it. Kristofer Schipper, who edited the critical repertory of the Taoist canon, observes that in the canon itself the two terms behave as interchangeable synonyms. Nathan Sivin and Russell Kirkland have shown that the separation is a Western projection, constructed largely by nineteenth-century translators and missionaries who wanted to save the texts and dispose of the practices. No historical Taoist ever used those two terms to distinguish a philosophy from a religion.

The texts, and what archaeology has changed

The Daodejing is attributed to Laozi, «the old master». That he existed is doubtful: the oldest biography, that of Sima Qian in the Shiji, gives three different versions of him and admits to not knowing which is right — which is, in itself, the most honest source on the question. The text is not the work of a single author: it is a stratification of aphoristic materials, and its form settled over time.

Two finds have changed the picture. At Mawangdui, in 1973, two silk manuscripts of the 2nd century BC came to light which present the two parts of the text in reversed order with respect to the received version: first the De, then the Dao. At Guodian, in 1993, bamboo strips datable to around 300 BC came out which contain about a third of the known text, in a different arrangement again. Consequence: at 300 BC the Daodejing existed, but not in the form we know, and not as a closed book.

The Zhuangzi poses an analogous and sharper problem: of its thirty-three chapters, philology attributes to the historical author only the seven «inner» ones; the «outer» and the «mixed» ones are by different hands and from different periods. The Liezi, which popular accounts cite as the third classic, is in all probability a much later compilation, of Jin date.

Where it really begins: AD 142

Taoism as an organised religion has a foundation date and a person. In AD 142, on Mount Heming in Sichuan, Zhang Daoling declares that he has received a revelation from the divinised Laozi and founds the Way of the Celestial Masters, Tianshi dao. The movement asks its members for a contribution of five pecks of rice — whence the nickname — and builds in the Hanzhong region an autonomous theocratic state that lasts about thirty years, with an administrative structure, a system of confession of faults and of ritual healing, and hostels along the roads.

There follow two great cycles of revelations that give Taoism its literature: Shangqing, «Highest Purity», received by Yang Xi between 364 and 370, visionary and contemplative in cast; and Lingbao, «Sacred Treasure», shortly afterwards, which introduces communal liturgy and structures much of the later ritual. All this flows into the Daozang, the canon, whose surviving reference edition is the Ming one of 1445: nearly fifteen hundred texts.

Alchemy, and the deaths it caused

The distinction between waidan, external alchemy, and neidan, internal alchemy, is chronological before it is doctrinal. The first works on substances — cinnabar, mercury, lead, arsenic — and seeks the elixir; the second, which establishes itself from the Tang onwards, transfers the entire vocabulary of the laboratory inside the body, where crucible and furnace are organs and the «substance» is the breath.

The passage from the one to the other has a concrete and not very spiritual cause: the elixir killed. Cinnabar is mercury sulphide; the elixirs of long life regularly contained mercury, lead and arsenic, and chronic poisoning produced the symptoms — agitation, hallucinations, wasting — that were read as signs of imminent transformation. Several Tang emperors died from taking elixirs, and the Chinese historical sources say so. Neidan is, among other things, the rational answer to a toxicological problem.

The reference texts remain the Cantong qi, attributed to Wei Boyang, which is the most commented-upon Chinese alchemical treatise, and the Baopuzi of Ge Hong (c. 283-343), which is at once an operative manual and a philosophical defence of the possibility of physical immortality.

From 1949 to today

The People's Republic establishes in 1957 the Chinese Taoist Association, the only recognised channel. During the Cultural Revolution temples, statues and texts undergo destruction on a large scale and the clergy is dispersed. The recovery begins in the Eighties and is today substantial but entirely channelled: Taoism exists in China as a recognised and administered religion, while in Taiwan the ritual continuity, above all of the Celestial Masters, has never been broken, and that is why a good part of the serious liturgical ethnography has been done there.

The things that circulate and do not hold up

«Taoism is a philosophy, not a religion.» It is the most repeated formula and it has no correspondence in the sources: it separates two things that the texts and the practitioners held together, and it does so according to a hierarchy of value that is ours, not theirs.

The yin-yang symbol is not an ancient Taoist symbol. The black and white diagram with the two dots — the taijitu in the form everyone knows — spreads in this guise only at a late date; its fortune as an emblem of Taoism is largely modern and Western. The yin-yang polarity is extremely ancient and pan-Chinese; that design is not, and it is moreover shared with Neo-Confucianism, which used it for something else entirely.

Feng shui is not Taoism. It is an autonomous technical corpus, of geomancy and orientation, which shared vocabulary and cosmology with Taoism as it shared them with medicine and with astrology. The equation feng shui = Taoism is a product of the Western wellness market.

«The most translated book after the Bible.» An assertion repeated everywhere about the Daodejing and lacking a source that supports it with a verifiable count. That it is much translated is true and documentable; the primacy is not.

Wu wei is not «letting go». In the tradition it is non-action in the sense of unforced action, action not contrary to the nature of things — a principle that is also political, addressed to the sovereign who governs the better the less he intervenes. The contemporary self-help-manual version, «go with the flow», is a softening that removes precisely the uncomfortable part.

Fritjof Capra's Tao della fisica (1975) enjoyed an enormous success and a hostile academic reception, both from physicists, who dispute its analogical use of quantum mechanics, and from sinologists, who dispute its use of the texts. It should be read knowing what it is: an essay of the Seventies, not a source.

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