Chapter 2

What Is Taoism?

In This Chapter

arrow Encountering Taoism for the first time

arrow Getting familiar with some Taoist terminology

In some ways, the answer to the question, “What is Taoism?” is quite simple. Taoism is a religious tradition that is native to China. It’s about 2,000 years old (though many of the sources that inspired and influenced it go back at least several hundred years before that, so it’s also okay to think of Taoism as about 2,500 years old). Taoism has spread to other parts of Asia, including Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam. In recent years, it has found its way into European and North American countries as well.

And yet, Taoism is probably the most poorly understood of all the world’s major religions. This doesn’t mean that you can’t easily find out a lot about Taoism through books, videos, and websites. It means that most of what you can find in those places is, unfortunately, confusing, misleading, or just not presented with the necessary background information. This can be incredibly frustrating — you may not always know what sources you can trust for reliable information, you may find different accounts of Taoism that seem to contradict each other, or you may discover that things you already knew about Taoism actually paint a somewhat distorted picture of the tradition.

remember.eps There is a lot of inaccurate or contradictory information out there about Taoism. Part of the challenge is getting a handle on what information is reliable and figuring out how to make sense of what you learn.

Your first exposure to Taoism may seem a little intimidating, so in this chapter, I offer some pointers to help you navigate the tradition a lot more smoothly. Here, you discover exactly why Taoist resources can initially come off as misleading or confusing, and you pick up some important vocabulary and categories for keeping track of things.

Your First Encounter with Taoism

You may have already had your first encounter with Taoism. Maybe you read the Tao Te Ching in a world religion class or came across it while browsing in a bookstore. Or perhaps you’ve heard someone spin fortune-cookie aphorisms like “He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know.” Maybe you’ve taken a few t’ai-chi lessons or you have a friend who redecorated after practicing the Chinese art of feng-shui. Or maybe you’ve seen some Hong Kong martial arts movies or read The Tao of Pooh or any of the dozens of other books that talk about the Tao of one thing or another.

But you may also have seen videos online of hundreds of Taoist priests participating in a ritual of “cosmic renewal,” or seen pictures of Taoist deities in a book of Chinese art, or heard somewhere that Taoism has something to do with alchemy, acupuncture, the search for immortality, or even quantum physics, whatever that is. And you may be wondering how these all fit together, how these could all be different parts of one religion. Or do they even fit together at all? Could it be that Taoism is one chaotic hodgepodge of beliefs and practices that all just “go with their own flow”?

Part of the problem is simply that a lot of what people say and write about Taoism contains overgeneralizations, personal impressions, and preformed assumptions about the tradition, Chinese religion, and religion in general. But believe it or not, you can blame a huge chunk of the apparent chaos on the term Taoism, which is itself ambiguous and which people tend not to use very carefully, even in China.

In this section, I run through an exercise to help you become more attentive to difficulties with the word Taoism and illustrate what can go wrong when people aren’t attentive to those difficulties. You learn to recognize overgeneralizations and ambiguous language, and maybe even develop some healthy skepticism about things you hear about Taoism.

Seeing how Taoists are like Yankees

You’ll probably be happy to know that I don’t really want to convince you that Taoists are anything like Yankees, but I do want to show you how the terms Taoist and Taoism are an awful lot like the term Yankee.

If someone were to ask you what a Yankee is or what the word Yankee means, your answer would probably depend on a few things, including where you live and whether you like sports:

check.png If you live in the southeastern part of the United States, a Yankee is a “northerner,” but you almost certainly wouldn’t mean people from Oregon or Montana. More likely, you’d mean people who live in or come from the northeastern part of the country, especially people in or originally from states north of the Mason–Dixon Line, or states that aligned with the Union during the Civil War.

check.png If you’re Mexican or European, or you live in any country that has an unwelcome U.S. military presence, a Yankee is someone from anywhere in the United States. You can be sure there are plenty of people in Georgia and Alabama who aren’t crazy about being called Yankees!

check.png If you live in New England, the term Yankee may be reserved for people who come from old, established, northeastern families, especially those descended from colonial English settlers. This is the origin of the term Connecticut Yankees.

check.png If you live anywhere in the United States (except probably the southeast), you can use Yankee as an adjective to describe a way to prepare food (“Yankee pot roast”), to solve problems (“Yankee ingenuity”), or even to manage money (“Yankee frugality”).

check.png If you’re a sports fan, the term Yankee can really only mean those guys who play baseball and make a lot of money doing so! Babe Ruth was one real Yankee who probably ate a lot of Yankee pot roast but didn’t practice Yankee frugality.

In other words, the term Yankee can mean very different things, sometimes because of specific political or social concerns — things that may end up being only slightly related to each other. And if you hear someone use the term one way when you don’t know that usage or think he means something else, you’re sure to stumble into a comedy of errors. Imagine what would happen if you heard someone say that the Yankees walked a dozen Tigers, when you thought that person was talking about the Civil War! Or if you were in a baseball frame of mind and heard someone say that the Yankees attacked and burned the city of Atlanta!

As you may expect from this exercise, Taoist and Taoism can also mean a lot of different things, depending on who’s using the words. And just as with Yankees, you’ll want to be careful not to mix up the various things that get called “Taoist” for one reason or another, which may not even be very good reasons. One person may be practicing Taoism by moving to the country, spending more time with nature, and making art out of stones and unfinished wood. Another person may be practicing Taoism by joining a monastery, wearing his hair tied up in a bun, and abstaining from sex. They’re both Taoism all right, but they’re not the same Taoism.

At this point, you’ve probably figured out that you’ll be getting much less of a headache if you start resisting any temptation to try to find any “essence” of Taoism, or to look for things that all Taoists have in common. In fact, there’s probably not a whole lot that everything called Taoist has in common (just like New York baseball players don’t have a lot in common with pot roast), and things they do have in common may just be coincidental rather than meaningful.

warning_bomb.eps The words Taoism and Taoist may sometimes refer to very different things. There are, in fact, many different “Taoisms.” Be careful not to assume that something true of one type of Taoism is true of every other type of Taoism. In fact, try not even to think of all these different Taoisms as variations of one Taoism. There really is no one Taoism.

Playing fast and loose with Taoism

Just because the word Taoism is ambiguous doesn’t guarantee that people will use the term more carefully. When you’re tuned in to how books and websites make generalizations about Taoism without specifying which way they’re using the term or what kind (or kinds) of Taoism they’re addressing, you’ll start to notice that many of these claims just come off like little slogans or sound bites. Some of the following descriptions may sound familiar to you, and they may actually sound very appealing when you first hear them, but when you listen closely, you’ll notice that they don’t really say a whole lot:

check.png Taoism is a religion that teaches the natural way.

check.png Taoism is all about being spontaneous and going with the flow.

check.png Taoism imparts an experience that is beyond words.

check.png Taoism conveys a universal wisdom.

check.png Taoism emphasizes the balance of yin and yang.

check.png Taoists avoid religious dogma and organizations.

check.png Taoists are peaceful, calm, and in harmony with the universe.

check.png Taoists try to live simple, uncomplicated lives.

Every one of these jingles contains at least a grain of truth and reflects genuine familiarity with some Taoist texts, historical figures, or practices. But they also don’t take into account all the ways they distort Taoism, the ways they may not apply at all to certain types of Taoism. Yes, one Taoist text cautions that we should avoid government and military affairs, but how does that explain Taoist-led rebellions or Taoist-run states? Yes, Chuang Tzu seems to turn up his nose at institutions of any kind, but then how do we square that with organized Taoist temples that have hierarchies of priests and structured daily rituals? Now that you know there are many different Taoisms, you can bring a much more critical eye to these types of clichés.



tip.eps Whenever you hear or read anything about Taoism, try to get in the habit of asking yourself, “Which Taoism?” That will help you recognize if something is oversimplified or presented out of context, and it will keep you from making overgeneralizations yourself.

Making Sense of the Chaos: Some Important Distinctions

It’s time to start looking at some of the different Taoisms, and at some of the most important ways that people use the term Taoism, but this is actually a little more complicated than just listing different Taoist denominations. One big reason for that is that more than one Chinese term routinely translates into the English word Taoism, and those original Chinese terms came about for different reasons and had completely different frames of reference. To muddy things even further, the Chinese have sometimes mixed up these terms or used them interchangeably or applied them to people or situations where they really didn’t belong. Add to that all the Western translators who made careless use of language or misinterpreted the Chinese background, and you’ve got a real mess.

In this section, I introduce you to the most important categories you’ll need in order to sort out the different types of Taoism, explain where those categories came from, and offer tips for recognizing how to employ them wisely. Here, you’ll get your first exposure to so-called Taoist philosophy and Taoist religion, learn about the distinction between Taoism and folk religion, and become familiar with one of the extended uses of the term Taoist.

From library classification to school of philosophy

When people talk about different kinds of Taoism, a term you’ll hear often is philosophical Taoism or Taoist philosophy. What does it mean to say that there is a Taoist philosophy? You may be tempted to imagine that this term refers to the underlying philosophy behind Taoist practices, or to a systematic and coherent school of Taoist wisdom, or even just to a general way of thinking about life “Taoistically.” And why shouldn’t we think of Taoist philosophy this way? It certainly makes sense to picture that the great Taoist thinkers developed a consistent intellectual system, which gave rise to a set of religious practices and which any one of us can adopt in our own lives.

Unfortunately, the term Taoist philosophy is something of a misnomer, which lends itself to a bunch of misinterpretations. You could even say that it’s a translator’s invention. In this section, I explain the origin and meaning of the term, introduce you to some of the key figures from this type of Taoism, and give you a brief look at some of the important themes you’ll run into when you look at Taoist philosophical texts.

The place of philosophical Taoism

The terms Taoist philosophy and philosophical Taoism are somewhat awkward approximations of the Chinese term Tao-chia, which actually has a narrow, fairly technical meaning. Tao-chia translates literally as “family of Tao,” but it means something more along the lines of “school of Tao” or “lineage of Tao.” When an astrologer and librarian hired by the emperor first used that expression a little more than 2,100 years ago, he was marking out one category for classifying earlier authors and texts in terms of how they approached the question of governing the country. These authors may never have considered that they were participating in a single “school of thought,” and their texts often contradicted one another. But they sounded enough alike that people who made lists of such things began to think of them as all on the same philosophical page. And so, the Chinese had themselves a retroactive “school of Tao.

What’s more, for all the talk of a “school of Tao,” there doesn’t seem to have ever been any self-conscious “school” that continued after this first round of writings. Yes, the Chinese studied and took inspiration from the main texts for centuries, but they never continued any sustained philosophical tradition in the same vein. When you look at the history of Chinese philosophy and religion across 2,000 years, you really won’t find any “philosophical Taoists” or people creating “Taoist philosophy.”

technicalstuff.eps The invented Western terms Taoist philosophy and philosophical Taoism pretty much refer to a cluster of thinkers and texts from what we know as China’s “Classical Period,” the stretch from the late 6th century b.c.e. until the end of the 3rd century b.c.e. It’s probably more accurate to think of the writings from this period simply as “Classical Taoism.”

Important names in Classical Taoism

Classical Taoist thought has exerted a tremendous influence on Chinese culture and education, and it has so fascinated Western audiences that you may get the idea that it’s the be all and end all of Taoism, but only a handful of thinkers actually seem to fall into this category. Here are the names that you’ll hear most often, in roughly descending order of importance:

check.png Lao Tzu: The legendary founder of Taoism who was the supposed author of the Tao Te Ching, the best known and most widely translated Taoist text. Most classical Chinese texts are simply named after their author, so the Tao Te Ching is also known as the Lao Tzu.

check.png Chuang Tzu: The author of the most important chapters of the Chuang Tzu, a funny and often brilliant text that contains allegorical stories, poems, imagined dialogues, and essays about logic and language. Chinese have often referred to Classical Taoism as “the Lao-Chuang Tradition,” because of the importance of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu.

check.png Lieh Tzu: An author who may have written in a style similar to that of Chuang Tzu, but whose writings did not survive. There is an existing book called the Lieh Tzu, but it’s most likely a much later forgery (though still a fun read).

check.png Yang Chu: A mysterious figure who is sometimes described as a “hedonist.” He’s the focus of one chapter of the Lieh Tzu, and a few chapters by his followers are tucked into the Chuang Tzu. The Confucians gave him a pretty bad reputation for his emphasis on physical pleasure.

check.png Shen Tao, T’ien P’ien , and P’eng Meng: Thinkers who get mentioned in other texts but whose writings are either lost or survive only in fragments that are quoted elsewhere. It’s hard to tell how many others there were like them whose names were simply lost to history.

remember.eps Classical Taoism, philosophical Taoism, Taoist philosophy, and the Lao-Chuang tradition, as well as a few other terms you might bump into every once in a while (for example, Hundred Schools Period Taoism, Warring States Taoism, and Pre-Han Taoism), all refer to more or less the same thing.

Important themes in Classical Taoism

Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and the other Classical Taoists may not always put forth the same philosophy, but they do all address a number of recurring themes. Here are some of the topics you’ll find most often:

check.png Tao: Tao translates literally as “the Way,” the empty, timeless principle underlying all of existence. Classical Taoists talk about experiencing the Way, harmonizing with the Way, becoming one with the Way, and so forth.

check.png Skepticism: The Classical Taoists do a lot of questioning, and they can sometimes get pretty snarky about it. They question the value and purpose of language, they question learning and knowledge, and they question moral categories. They even question their own questioning. This can start to make your head hurt.

check.png Returning: Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu are convinced that our conventional intellectual and moral habits have dragged us down to a state in which we’re distant from and out of touch with the original Way. They chide us to return to that original state of perfection.

check.png Unlearning: If everything we’ve learned has distanced us from the original Way, the only method for getting back to it is to unlearn everything we already know. Classical Taoists talk about abandoning knowledge and intentionally striving to forget.

check.png Spontaneity: Once we’ve gotten back in touch with the Way, and letting our bad mental or moral habits dictate our lives, we can act in a way that harmonizes naturally and effortlessly with the flux and flow of the cosmos. Lao Tzu especially introduces the ideas of “doing nothing” or “actionless action,” which he paradoxically understands as an effective way to rule a country.

check.png Simplicity: The spontaneous life brings us back to our original, simple natures, free of scheming, calculating, and conniving. Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu usually portray this as living an unambitious and uncluttered life, not bothered by fame, rules, or social obligations. Sometimes, they suggest this might look like a kind of primitive utopia.

The fuzzy line between philosophy and religion

Another important term you hear a lot is religious Taoism or the Taoist religion. If the word religion brings to mind things like deities, priests, rituals, sacred scriptures, organized institutions, and places of worship, you wouldn’t be too far off. Religious Taoism refers to actual religious stuff, not just ideas in old texts — the historical and living practices and communities that you can see, visit, and maybe even join. It only gets tricky when you assume certain things about it just because we call it “religion,” or try to put together the relationship between Classical Taoism and religious Taoism. In this section, I’ll talk about the term religious Taoism, how it relates to Classical Taoism and other types of Chinese religion, and some of its most significant types and characteristics.

The development of the Taoist religion

Just as philosophical Taoism is an imperfect translation of a Chinese phrase, so, too, religious Taoism and the Taoist religion are also approximations of specific Chinese terminology. The original expression Tao-chiao literally means “the teachings of the Tao,” which over time came to refer to a range of organizations and practice groups that traced their origins back to one specific social and religious movement that began almost 2,000 years ago. And to some extent, almost everything Taoist that occurs after the Classical Period now falls under the heading of “religious Taoism.”

But don’t be fooled into thinking the Chinese came up with this term to distinguish religious Taoism from philosophical Taoism. They were actually differentiating the teachings of the Tao from the teachings of the Buddha, the missionary Buddhism that had been coming into China during much the same period. Eventually, the Chinese would think of “three teachings” — the “teachings of the Tao,” “the teachings of the Buddha,” and “the teachings of the Confucian scholars.” You may recognize these as what people today sometimes call the “three religions” of China: Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism.

So, what’s the relationship between Classical Taoism and religious Taoism? There isn’t really a clear answer, though there are plenty of people fighting about it, and some Chinese have even used the terms Tao-chia (see “The place of philosophical Taoism,” earlier in this chapter) and Tao-chiao more or less interchangeably! Sometimes, it seems that there are really obvious connections, like when you see images of Lao Tzu in Taoist temples, or Taoist monks studying the Tao Te Ching. But other times, it’s much harder to put them together, like when Taoist practice focuses so much attention on healing, longevity exercises, and the search for immortality, which doesn’t square with Chuang Tzu’s argument that we should be indifferent to matters of life and death.

tip.eps Try not to think of religious Taoism as the outward expression of Taoist philosophy, or of philosophical Taoism as the intellectual basis of the Taoist religion. They really aren’t just two versions of the same thing. Taoist philosophy refers to classical texts from a specific period; Taoist religion refers to a complicated and diverse set of practices and organizations spanning a much longer period.

Important subdivisions of religious Taoism

So, Taoist philosophy is a misnomer, but is it okay to use the terms Taoist religion or religious Taoism? Mostly yes, but because this category covers such a huge range of Taoist religious practices, communities, and lineages, it’s usually more helpful to think of these terms as just umbrella terms for the many different flavors of Taoism, which people sometimes sort out by historical period (for example, “Six Dynasties Taoism”), region (“Mao-shan Taoism”), and social structures (“monastic Taoism”). But even with all this diversity, you really only need to keep track of a manageable number of specific sects and denominations. Here’s a sampling of the most important ones, listed in roughly chronological order of their formation:

check.png The Way of the Celestial Masters: The first organized movement that can really be called Taoist. It formed in about 142 c.e., and almost all subsequent Taoist organizations are in some way descended from it.

check.png Highest Purity and Numinous Treasure: Self-cultivation groups that began in the 4th and 5th centuries and produced a large number of revealed texts and practiced meditation or alchemy. They imported many ideas and practices from the Celestial Masters tradition.

check.png Celestial heart, Spiritual Firmament, and Perfect Great Way Taoism: Some of the short-lived sects that arose from the 11th through 13th centuries. They didn’t last long, but they provided important links between the earlier sects and the two lineages that still exist today.

check.png Orthodox Unity Taoism: One of the two Taoist denominations that survive in China today. This branch is primarily liturgical, which means that its members conduct rituals and preside over various public and private ceremonies. It understands itself as the direct descendant of the original Way of the Celestial Masters.

check.png Complete Perfection Taoism: The other Taoist denomination that you can find in China today. This branch is primarily monastic, which means that its members receive their training or live in monasteries. Founded in the 12th century, this is the newest existing branch of Taoism.

Important characteristics of religious Taoism

In some ways, there’s nothing at all mysterious about the different branches of Taoism; they look a lot like other religions you may already know, particularly some of the others from East Asia, like Buddhism or Shinto. Here are some of the characteristics that show up in most religious Taoist lineages:

check.png Deities: There are numerous Taoist gods and goddesses, but not every denomination venerates the exact same figures. Some of the most important include the “Three Pure Ones,” one of which is a deified Lao Tzu, and various historical and legendary persons.

check.png Scriptures: There are well over a thousand sacred Taoist texts, though almost certainly no single person has ever read them all from cover to cover. They deal with subjects as diverse as ritual formulas, alchemy, morality, and physiology.

check.png Priests: Taoist organizations developed an intricate and elaborate hierarchy of different priestly ranks. Ordained priests wear special clothing, have access to secret interpretations of texts, and preside over ritual functions.

check.png Sacred places: Through most of its history, a big part of Taoism has been its “sacred geography,” places that are considered to possess a special religious charge. Several important Taoist temples are built into the landscape of sacred mountains.

Not every hermit, magician, or exorcist is a Taoist

If you already feel challenged because the word Taoist is ambiguous and can refer to so many different types of Taoist philosophers or religious practitioners, you’ll probably go a little bit crazy when I tell you that it can also refer to people and things that aren’t even Taoists!

Because many Chinese haven’t always understood a lot of the murky or even secretive aspects of Taoist practice — like the elaborate rituals and the highly technical texts — they didn’t always know who really was and who really wasn’t a Taoist. But they did recognize that plenty of people did the same kinds of things they associate with Taoists, like performing ceremonies for communication with or safe passage of the dead, exorcising unwelcome spirits, or producing potions thought to heal illnesses or help one to achieve immortality. And they got in the habit of referring to these other characters as “Taoists,” without really caring whether they were actually ordained in a Taoist lineage.

It’s a lot like seeing one of your neighbors decorating her home with crystals, worshipping goddesses, and celebrating old pagan holidays, and then coming to the conclusion that this person is a Wiccan, a practitioner of the old religion that was often pejoratively identified as witchcraft. And it may not matter to you that she actually has no relationship with any Wiccan coven, has never learned any of the Wiccan oral traditions, and has never been initiated into any Wiccan community. For all intents and purposes, she may seem like a Wiccan to you, but only because you’re just not familiar with how the Wiccan “insiders” understand their own tradition.

What makes this such an edgy issue is that many of the Chinese who made this kind of mistake were conservative Confucian intellectuals, many of whom were already sensitized to Western ideas of “superstition.” They simply dismissed all this stuff as irrational nonsense, and they had no interest in differentiating “ordinary” charlatans and sorcerers from charlatans and sorcerers who had supposedly received some kind of special training. They were the ones who got to write the textbooks and history books, and they were often the ones who gave Western travelers and scholars their first information about China. As a result, there’s a longstanding habit of people assuming that when local and folk religious practices are obviously not Buddhist or Confucian, they must be Taoist. And some Chinese today may brand someone as a Taoist as another way of calling him a huckster! You can probably imagine how much havoc this has brought to studies of Chinese religion, and how much this may have bothered actual Taoists, who saw what they were doing as something very different from folk practices.

remember.eps There is a difference between Taoists who have been trained and initiated into Taoist lineages and the various local priests and folk religious practitioners who are erroneously called “Taoist.”