Taoism

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Taoism is the Chinese tradition — at once a school of philosophy and an organized religion — built around the Tao, the “way”: the nameless source and underlying pattern of all that exists, and the art of living in accord with it rather than against its grain. The word tao meant simply a road or a method before these texts gave it cosmic weight, and the tradition is often split, for convenience, into a philosophical strand (daojia, “the school of the Way”) and a religious one (daojiao, “the teaching of the Way”) — a division sharper in Western scholarship than in the practice itself. The two terms predate the modern partition and named, originally, a body of writings and a liturgical movement rather than two rival essences; reading them as “philosophical Taoism” versus “religious Taoism,” and ranking the first as pure and the second as decline, is a habit institutionalized by nineteenth-century sinology and dismantled, over the last half century, by Nathan Sivin, Michel Strickmann, Kristofer Schipper, and Russell Kirkland. The Tao runs through both.

The two foundational texts

The foundational texts are two. The Daodejing (Tao Teh King), traditionally ascribed to a sage called Laozi — “the Old Master” — is a terse book of some eighty-one brief chapters, dense, gnomic, and built of paradox: the soft overcomes the hard, the empty proves useful, the sage acts by not acting. Modern scholarship treats Laozi as a legendary or composite figure and the text as an accreted compilation rather than one author’s book. The earliest witness, a partial version on bamboo slips excavated in 1993 from a tomb at Guodian and dated to around the fourth century BCE, holds only about two-fifths of the received text and orders its sections differently; the silk manuscripts recovered at Mawangdui in 1973 give a near-complete Han-dynasty form with the two halves reversed. The book reached something like its standard shape by the third century BCE, and its standard reading was fixed by the brilliant young commentator Wang Bi (226–249 CE), dead at twenty-three, whose edition became the one the tradition has read ever since.

The Zhuangzi, named for the philosopher Zhuang Zhou (Zhuangzi, fl. fourth century BCE), is its companion and its opposite in temper: longer, wilder, a carnival of parable, fable, and logical mischief. A butterfly dreams it is a man, or a man dreams he is a butterfly, and Zhuangzi declines to say which; a cook carves an ox for nineteen years and never dulls his blade, because he follows the natural seams and cuts where there is space. The received thirty-three-chapter book is the recension of the commentator Guo Xiang (d. 312 CE), who pruned a larger text and whose xuanxue — “dark learning” — reading shaped how the work was understood. Together the two books teach wu wei — usually rendered “non-action,” though it means something closer to action without forcing: the unstrained efficacy of water, which yields and yet wears down stone, which seeks the low places everyone disdains and so comes nearest the Tao. The sage governs least and accomplishes most by not contending; the ruler who carves and orders the world only mars it, while the one who leaves the uncarved block whole lets each thing follow its own nature. This is the contemplative current, the literary Taoism that the West long meant by the word — close kin to the quietism of later mystical traditions, and a standing counter-voice within Chinese thought.

From philosophy to organized religion

From roughly the second century CE there arose an organized religion with priesthood, liturgy, scripture, and a vast pantheon. Its decisive origin is dated to 142 CE, when Zhang Daoling, on Mount Heming in Sichuan, received a revelation from the deified Laozi — now Lord Lao, Laojun, a cosmic deity rather than a mere sage — who appointed him Celestial Master and bound the faithful, their gods, and the cosmic order under a new covenant. The movement Zhang founded, the Way of the Celestial Masters (also called the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice, for the dues each household paid), organized its converts into parishes under officiants called libationers, rejected the blood sacrifices of the old local cults, and treated sickness as the somatic register of moral fault, healed through written confession and petition to the celestial bureaucracy. This is the institutional birth of Taoism as an ordained religion; its living descendant is the Zhengyi (“Orthodox Unity”) order of married, ritual-centered priests, whose central liturgy, the jiao offering of cosmic renewal, still structures much communal religion across southern China and Taiwan.

Over the following centuries the religion elaborated a layered heaven of pure deities — the Three Pure Ones at its summit — a canon of revealed scripture, and an imaginative anatomy in which the body itself is populated by gods and mapped as an inner landscape. Its great aim was longevity, and beyond it physical transcendence: to become an xian, an immortal, who sheds the mortal frame and ascends, or who quietly slips death by an exchange the uninitiated cannot detect. The means were many — regulated diet and the refusal of grain, the circulation and refinement of breath, meditation and visualization, gymnastic regimes, the gods of the body kept in their places, and at the austere extreme an asceticism of withdrawal and renunciation that the monastic orders would later institutionalize — and, above all, alchemy.

Alchemy, outer and inner

Alchemy entered the pursuit of immortality along two roads. Outer alchemy, waidan, compounded mineral elixirs — cinnabar above all, the red sulfide of mercury — in graded heating cycles, on the cosmological theory that a substance cycled through the right transformations would confer the deathlessness of gold. It was a prestige practice patronized at the Tang court, and it killed: standard historiography counts at least five Tang emperors among its dead, Wuzong’s slow decline (irritability, lost speech, failing motor control) the textbook clinical signature of chronic mercury poisoning. By the late Tang and into the Song the entire alchemical lexicon — furnace and cauldron, lead and mercury, dragon and tiger, the timed phases of the fire — was reinterpreted inward. The cauldron became the body, the ingredients the three treasures of Chinese physiology (jing, generative essence; qi, vital breath; shen, spirit), the fire the directed attention of the adept. This is neidan, internal alchemy: a structured contemplative-physiological program that runs the cycle of generation in reverse, gathering rather than spending, returning the dispersed postnatal forces toward the prenatal integrity that precedes the world’s differentiation, until an “immortal embryo” is gestated within and nourished to the point where it can outlast the death of the flesh. The literature is deliberately encoded — a single image of the mating of lead and mercury carries an instruction legible only to the initiated — and the tradition itself never quite agreed whether the immortality it promised was a literal escape from death or a transformation of the spirit. The same word, xian, hovered between the readings.

Confucianism, Buddhism, and the two orders

Taoism developed alongside Confucianism, often as its counterweight. Where the Confucian looked to ritual, hierarchy, and the duties of public life, the Taoist looked to spontaneity, withdrawal, and the natural order; the scholar served at court by day and read the Zhuangzi in retirement, and Chinese culture held the two in a long, productive tension rather than choosing between them. The arrival of Buddhism from India in the first centuries CE reshaped both. Taoism borrowed Buddhism’s monastic forms, its meditative vocabulary, and its scriptural architecture even as it disputed Buddhism’s foreign origin — the polemical Huahu jing claimed that Laozi had traveled west and become the Buddha, converting the barbarians with a teaching pitched to their grossness, a claim the Buddhists fought bitterly and the Mongol court eventually condemned to the fire. For most of Chinese history the three teachings — Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism — interwove without one wholly displacing the others, and a single life might draw on all three.

Out of this matrix the religion settled into two great surviving orders. The Zhengyi tradition carried the Celestial Masters’ talismanic and liturgical line: married priests, transmitting office and texts within families, commanding the spirit-generals listed in their ordination registers and issuing talismans into the unseen administration of the cosmos. Against it stands Quanzhen, “Complete Perfection,” founded in twelfth-century northern China by Wang Chongyang (1113–1170) — a celibate, monastic order built on a pattern visibly borrowed from Buddhism, devoted to inner alchemy and the joint cultivation of “nature and life,” xing and ming, mind and bodily vitality together. Quanzhen’s Seven Perfected spread the order across the conquered north; the most consequential of them, Qiu Chuji, traveled in old age across Central Asia to meet Genghis Khan near the Hindu Kush in 1222, counseling the conqueror against bloodshed and returning with a charter that exempted Daoist establishments from taxation and placed them under Quanzhen authority. Its Beijing seat, the White Cloud Temple (Baiyun Guan), remains the order’s principal monastery and the seat of the Chinese Daoist Association. Between them the two orders divide Taoist ordination to this day: the householder priest at the village rite, and the monk at the mountain cloister.

The disputed seam

The relation between the early philosophy and the later religion is genuinely disputed, and the dispute is not idle. In one reading the two are a single continuous development — the Daodejing’s nameless Tao, its sage who returns to the uncarved simplicity of the infant, its cosmology of yielding and reversal all feeding directly into the religion’s cosmos, its body-gods, and its alchemical reversal of generation. In another they are distinct phenomena that happen to share a vocabulary: a current of fourth-century-BCE contemplative philosophy on one side, a second-century-CE revealed and liturgical religion on the other, joined less by doctrine than by the prestige of a common name. The texts themselves do not settle it. What is clear is that the religion read the classics as its own — the deified Laozi is the author of the book and the lord of the heaven both — and that the partition into a pure philosophy and a degraded religion was imposed from outside, by translators for whom the contemplative Tao was congenial and the temple Tao was superstition.

It holds the ultimate to be impersonal and beyond naming, yet present in everything — a double instinct that has long invited comparison with the apophatic theology of the via negativa, which approaches the divine only by saying what it is not, and with the pantheism of a single substance immanent in the world. Within the Taoist frame the point is neither a denial nor an identification but a discipline of attention, placing Taoism among the world’s great mysticisms on its own terms: the Tao is not a thing among things to be grasped, and the work of the sage and the adept alike is to stop grasping.

The texts, the canon, and the scholarship

The two classics survive in a long line of editions and translations. The Daodejing is hosted here in James Legge’s careful, woodenly literal 1891 rendering, The Tao Teh King — a complete public-domain text at /library/daoism/tao-teh-king/ — and the same translator’s two-volume The Texts of Tâoism (Sacred Books of the East 39–40), at /library/daoism/legge-texts-of-taoism/, remains the largest single public-domain bundle of Daoist material in English: complete Daodejing, complete Zhuangzi, and a cluster of devotional scriptures including the Qingjing jing and the Yinfu jing. For the Zhuangzi proper, Herbert Giles’s fluent 1889 Chuang Tzŭ, Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer, at /library/daoism/chuang-tzu/, is the most readable public-domain complete version, grounded in the Song commentary of Lin Xiyi; Frederic Balfour’s 1884 Taoist Texts, at /library/daoism/balfour-taoist-texts/, preserves the earliest English renderings of several minor scriptures, and Anton Forke’s 1912 Yang Chu’s Garden of Pleasure, at /library/daoism/forke-yang-chu/, supplies the hedonist seventh chapter of the Liezi. These Victorian and Edwardian versions are historically indispensable and philologically dated in equal measure; their Tao is half-Christianized, their Zhuangzi tamed, and the manuscript and commentarial revolutions of the last sixty years have moved well past them.

The scholarly literature that frames them is substantial. Angus C. Graham’s Disputers of the Tao (Open Court, 1989) is the standard account of the classical philosophical milieu and the stratification of the Zhuangzi; Isabelle Robinet’s Taoism: Growth of a Religion (Stanford University Press, 1997) narrates the religion’s development as a coherent whole rather than a decline. Livia Kohn’s Daoism Handbook (Brill, 2000) collects the field’s specialists, and her Introducing Daoism (Routledge, 2009) is the standard survey; Louis Komjathy’s The Daoist Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2013) is the major recent introduction. The reference standards are Fabrizio Pregadio’s two-volume Encyclopedia of Taoism (Routledge, 2008), whose article on the Celestial Masters is freely readable at goldenelixir.com, and Kristofer Schipper and Franciscus Verellen’s The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang (University of Chicago Press, 2004), the indispensable index to the Ming Daoist canon of 1444–1445. For the religion’s inner-alchemical core the standard translations are Pregadio’s of the Cantong qi and the Wuzhen pian; for a concise scholarly overview of the whole, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry “Religious Daoism,” at plato.stanford.edu, is the reliable starting point.

The nameless

The oldest book opens by refusing its own subject. The Tao that can be told is not the constant Tao; the name that can be named is not the constant name. This is not a riddle to be solved but the discipline the whole tradition turns on — that the source of the ten thousand things lies on the far side of speech and of the carving distinctions speech makes, and that the sage approaches it by emptying, by yielding, by returning to the uncarved block before the chisel. The libationer’s petition, the monk’s reversed alchemy of breath and essence, the recluse with his copy of the Zhuangzi are not three answers to a question the Daodejing asks; they are three ways of living near a center that none of them claims to have reached. The constant Tao keeps its silence, and the tradition has spent two millennia learning to keep it well.

→ In the library: Legge — The Tao Teh King (1891) · Legge — The Texts of Tâoism (1891) · Giles — Chuang Tzŭ (1889) · Balfour — Taoist Texts (1884) · Forke — Yang Chu's Garden of Pleasure (1912)

→ Related: Confucianism · Buddhism · Quanzhen · Zhengyi · Daoist Neidan · Alchemy · Quietism · Pantheism · China · Mysticism · Meditation · Asceticism · Apophatic Theology