Chapter 12
Writing What Can’t Be Spoken: The Many Texts of Taoism
In This Chapter
Untangling Taoist sacred scriptures
Developing the Taoist Canon
Peeking inside the Canon
Even people who don’t know much about religion have a pretty good idea that just about every tradition has to have some kind of sacred scripture. I mean, what kind of religion can it be if it doesn’t have an authoritative account of its own history, a list of divine commandments, and so forth? What’s more, many people can probably tick off each major tradition’s sacred texts. It’s a basic tidbit from any introductory class in world religion that Jews read the Hebrew Bible, Christians read the Old and New Testaments, Muslims read the Qur’an, and Taoists read the Tao Te Ching, right?
What’s more, you may have some expectations about what sort of things appear in such texts and how participants in the specific traditions use them. After all, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all seem to look to their respective texts to try to understand God’s will on any of a number of moral issues. They read the books for inspiration and comfort, they employ them during worship services, and people elected to Congress take the oath of office with their hands on their chosen texts. And they take seriously — though sometimes with considerable interpretation — what those texts say about God, creation, and the divine plan for the universe.
But when you dig more deeply into any one tradition, you start to discover that the matter of scripture can be a little more complicated. There may be more than just the one text you already know, or the contents may sound almost nothing like those of the Bible, or participants in the tradition may use the texts in ways you’d never imagined. In this chapter, I take you on a tour through Taoist sacred literature. You get a sense of what sorts of writings the Taoists consider sacred, how they compiled their canon, and how they use the texts in that canon.
The Tangled World of Taoist Literature
Just say the words Taoist and text in the same sentence, and many people put them together and immediately think of the Tao Te Ching. They may even come up with the Chuang Tzu, too. And — who knows? — maybe the Lieh Tzu or the Huai Nan Tzu. I suppose there could be a ringer who mentions something really obscure, like Hsi K’ang and His Poetic Essay on the Lute. Or perhaps The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet, or any of the dozens of other “Tao of” books that pop up as reliably as spring daffodils.
Because the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu are easily the best known Taoist texts in the West, it’s tempting to imagine that they are also the most important Taoist texts. And because you don’t hear too much about many other Taoist texts — when was the last time you heard someone mention the Obscure Essays on the Supreme Cultivation of the True or Requisite Knowledge for the Alchemical Laboratory? — you may also think that Taoists work with a fairly small and manageable pool of scripture. As it turns out, both assumptions don’t hold water.
In this section, I set straight some of these basic misconceptions about Taoist literature. You’ll find out some surprising details about the role of the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu, and get a glimpse into the enormity of the Taoist literary corpus.
Setting the record straight on Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu
The Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu are, indeed, important Taoist texts, but the Chinese have traditionally read and employed them in ways different from the individualistic, spiritualized interpretations that dominate Western readings of Taoism. First, just as Jews and Christians have historically relied heavily on commentaries to figure out how to interpret the Bible and apply it to their lives — the amusing recent book The Year of Living Biblically, by A. J. Jacobs (Simon & Schuster), points out how no one, absolutely no one, actually follows the “uninterpreted” Bible — Taoists also have their books linked to a rich and varied commentarial tradition. In fact, dozens of authoritative commentaries on the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu exist, and they sometimes say some surprising things and don’t always agree with one another. Here’s a random sampling:
Hsiang-er Commentary on the Lao Tzu: This treats the Tao Te Ching mainly as a text on cultivating the body. It talks about the Tao that lives in the human body, a Heavenly bureaucracy that records human acts of immorality, and the preservation of sexual energy.
Straightforward Explication of the True Scripture of the Way and Its Power: This text sees Lao Tzu as advocating austere practices similar to those in Buddhism, leading to a “great emptiness” that transcends the distinctions between “being” and “non-being.”
General Purport of the Anthology of Commentaries on the True Scripture of the Way and Its Power: This text contains, among other things, charts and diagrams that illustrate the cosmic and physical locations of spirits of the human body. It offers a kind of translator’s guide, which matches up key phrases in the Tao Te Ching to different organs, like relating the “mysterious female” to the kidneys.
Collected Subtleties from the Sea of Meanings of the True Scripture of Southern Fluorescence: This text collects several different readings of the Chuang Tzu, including some that portray the ultimate goal as dissolving all beings into an undifferentiated unity, and that take special time to trash internal alchemy and physical exercises directed toward the cultivation of ch’i.
In short, Taoist “insiders” never really read the Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu in isolation — they almost always tied them to a much more extensive set of literature and practices, usually involving highly specialized language and coded exercises. That is, they function as ingredients, not “gospel,” in the complicated process of transmitting and realizing the Tao. What’s more — and this is the real shocker — although Taoists officially acknowledge more than 200 works of philosophy and commentary, those actually make up a relatively small fraction of their sacred scripture. In speaking about religion in general, the important 19th-century scholar Max Müller once said, “He who knows one, knows none.” More than a century later, he may as well have been talking about Taoism and Taoist texts. As far as Taoist practitioners are concerned, if you know only one Taoist text, you don’t really know any.
The Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu, the Taoist texts known best in the West, are not representative of the broader spectrum of Taoist texts.
Picking through a mysterious and unwieldy body of scriptures
As you may be starting to figure out by now, there are lots of Taoist sacred texts, and understanding any one of them probably requires familiarity with technical language, fluency in the intellectual background, experience with particular practices, and training or initiation from a qualified teacher. Perhaps more than the missionary bias against superstition and ritual, this helps explain why so little Taoist material has actually been translated into English. In short, if you were to look at some random Taoist text — without explanations of its context and detailed, step-by-step annotations of the various historical, theological, liturgical, alchemical, and physiological references — you just wouldn’t have a clue what it’s talking about. But don’t feel too bad about it. Even China experts who don’t specialize in that particular aspect of Taoism probably wouldn’t understand it either. And come to think of it, even with all those expert explanations and annotations, it wouldn’t be a piece of cake.
Taoist texts number in the hundreds — actually, well over a thousand — and they cover an enormous range of subjects, including alchemy (see Chapter 5) and physical cultivation (the training of the body for biological and spiritual benefits), medicine and diet, cosmological diagrams and speculation (describing and mapping the structure of the universe), and biographies of sages and immortals. But far and away, the majority of Taoist texts, around 800 of them, reflect the priorities of two millennia of Taoist practitioners and don’t really describe or communicate data for the reader; that is, they’re not mainly explanations or interpretations of ideas or histories. Mostly, they’re what you could call operative or instrumental texts; they’re texts that adepts employ in specific ritual or liturgical situations with the understanding that they possess some kind of performative power. That’s why you need to be properly initiated to have access to ritual secrets — this can be serious, even dangerous stuff, and the guardians of the tradition don’t usually treat such matters lightly. So, what kinds of instrumental texts are they, and how do Taoists use them? Here are the main types:
Ritual formulas to be recited as part of specific rituals
Hymns to be chanted during specific rituals
Petitions to be read and “delivered” to Heaven or specific deities
Instructions on how to meditate or what to visualize during rituals
Most Taoist scripture isn’t like the Bible, as much as it’s like the contents of a prayer book, or a catalogue of Wiccan spells, or even an operator’s manual for negotiating with spirits. These texts are important for what they can do, not exclusively what they say.
The Development of the Taoist Canon
All the recognized Taoist scriptures are assembled in a vast collection called the Taoist Canon (Tao-tsang). Canon is the term that people frequently use to describe a body of literature that a tradition recognizes as authoritative. Along these same lines, traditions establish the texts that belong in the canon by canonizing them, they regard works in the canon as canonical, and they regard works not in the canon (which may still be important) as extracanonical.
As you may expect, Taoism has its own idiosyncratic story when it comes to its canon. In this section, I bring you up to speed on that story. You get to know how the many Taoist texts came to be part of the Taoist Canon, what systems have been used for classifying those texts, how the Ming Dynasty established a more or less permanent canon, and what type of progress modern scholars have made in the truly daunting task of sorting the texts, translating them into English, and making them available and accessible to a Western audience.
The process of canonization
Some traditions may passively encourage a general understanding that their sacred scripture suddenly materialized all at once, like a fully written (and fully bound) text handed to the people directly from God, but almost all religious canons have actually taken shape through elaborate and lengthy historical circumstances. For example, during the first few centuries after the death of Jesus, quite literally hundreds of different gospel accounts were in circulation, some in particular regions, some among particular sectarian groups, and some offering very different representations of Jesus. It was well into the 4th century before church leaders — the equivalent of a college of cardinals — convened a council largely for the purpose of deciding which texts qualified as authoritative, and which were inaccurate or even heretical. From their findings, they established the collection of short histories and letters we now know as the New Testament. In Buddhism, monks and nuns, who preserved and transmitted the Buddha’s teachings orally for a few hundred years, held several councils where they debated, among other things, the authenticity of competing versions of those teachings. Even in Islam, which views the Qur’an as nothing less than a divinely revealed text, Muslims understand that God didn’t deliver the book overnight, but that Muhammad received revelations for decades.
In other words, each canon has a particular history, and each tradition had its own cast of specific historical figures who were recognized for one reason or another as having authority to determine the makeup of that canon. The Taoist Canon also has its own unique story, but it is (of course) a lot different from the Christian, Buddhist, and Muslim stories. Here are a few of the most important things to keep in mind:
There have actually been several Taoist Canons, compiled at different times over Chinese history, sometimes several hundred years apart.
Almost every version of the Canon was commissioned by the emperor, usually for the purpose of cataloguing a comprehensive list of Taoist texts in use and reinforcing imperial sponsorship of (and authority over) the tradition.
Because there have been numerous collections, it may be helpful to think of the Taoist Canon as an open canon, kind of a like a textual amoeba with fluid contents and borders.
Sometimes, the decision about what made it in or what got kicked out could be traced to sectarian differences or even competition with other traditions. One time, they tossed several dozen anti-Buddhist texts.
Because the Canons represented comprehensive lists of Taoist texts in use, the materials ultimately came from different sources, lineages, and regions. So, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that any single Taoist has ever employed every text in the Canon. In fact, apart from the person or persons doing the compiling and review, probably very few Taoists have ever read the whole thing from cover to cover.
Try to think of the Taoist Canon more as a diverse collection than a unified work. When you read any text in the Canon, you can’t really make sense of it until you first identify its source, what kind of text it is, who originally used it and how, why it’s in the Canon, and so on. And try not to get too frustrated — it really is an overwhelming body of material.
The Three Caverns compilation
The most important of the early Taoist compilations, which began in the 5th century, involved sorting the existing Taoist texts into three categories, called caverns, a division that would last through pretty much all later versions of the Canon. The use of the term caverns — some scholars prefer to translate it as arcana — captures the sense of unearthing some mysterious repository of power and wisdom through an inward journey, though some texts also suggest that the caverns corresponded to Heavenly layers or realms. Either way, there’s also a good chance that the Taoists took a cue from the Buddhists, who already had a well-defined three-part textual canon, though the contents of the respective caverns didn’t really correspond in any way to those of the Buddhist divisions.
So, how did these Three Caverns work? Here’s a summary of the divisions and the basic contents of each:
The Cavern of Perfection: This section included texts from the Highest Purity (Shang-ch’ing) revelations, mostly on alchemy, meditation, and visualization. Although the Complete Perfection lineage would not come into existence for another several hundred years, it’s interesting to notice that the Chinese term translated as “perfection” is the same for both the cavern and the lineage.
The Cavern of Mystery: This section included texts from the Numinous Treasure (Ling-pao) revelations, mostly instructions on how to perform public rituals, as well as liturgical formulas to be read during the actual ceremonies.
The Cavern of Spirit: This section included texts from a tradition called the “Three Sovereigns,” which didn’t survive much beyond the formation of the Three Caverns. It probably involved things like talismans for calling on or drawing power from various deities.
If this seems relatively easy to keep track of, you may as well enjoy the feeling while it lasts. A century or two after Taoists established the Three Caverns, they added what they called “Four Supplements” or “Four Auxiliaries,” possibly corresponding to stages of ordination and ritual transmission in the Way of the Celestial Masters, to create a seven-part canonical structure, where each part still corresponded to a different historical lineage. Here are the Four Supplements and their contents:
Great Mystery: This section included (hooray!) the Tao Te Ching, later philosophical works, and various commentaries.
Great Peace: This section included the Scripture of Great Peace, or at least one version of it, which had been one of the blueprints for the first millenarian Taoist groups.
Great Purity: This section included texts from the Great Purity (T’ai-ch’ing) revelations, mostly on alchemy and other physical cultivation practices.
Orthodox Unity: This section included scriptures on the precepts and rituals of the Way of the Celestial Masters. Much of this material may have been relatively new at the time, but it was attributed to Chang Tao-ling’s original revelations.
And just in case you’re still managing to keep all these straight, the Taoists then added a dozen subdivisions that they called “categories” within each Cavern and Supplement. So, every individual text was catalogued within a category, and that category fell within either a cavern or a supplement. The Twelve Categories are as follows:
Basic Writings
Spiritual Talismans
Secret Instructions
Numinous Charts
Genealogies and Registers
Precepts and Regulations
Ceremonial Liturgies
Techniques and Methods
Miscellaneous Arts
Records and Biographies
Praises and Eulogies
Memorials and Announcements
Finally, this is as good a time as any to point out how the Taoists eventually identified the Three Caverns as corresponding to the primary triad of Taoist deities. Though the various Canons wouldn’t always agree on the exact details, they did understand that the Three Pure Ones — Heavenly Worthy of the Primordial Beginning, Heavenly Worthy of Numinous Treasure, and Heavenly Worthy of the Way and Its Power — presided over three Heavens and had been responsible for revealing the scriptures in the respective Caverns.
The importance of the Ming Canon
When people refer to “the Taoist Canon,” they’re almost always thinking of the canon produced during the early part of the Ming Dynasty, the second-to-last historic Chinese dynasty. The Ming Canon was the last of the various Taoist Canons, and it’s the only one to survive intact. So, in that sense, it’s the existing Taoist Canon, the canon of the living Taoist traditions. It’s also likely to maintain its distinction as the final canon, although the future of China is always unpredictable, so there’s really no certainty that circumstances won’t conspire to add more texts to it, shave off a few, or produce a whole new compilation project. But at least for now, this is it.
History records that in the early 15th century, the third Ming emperor commissioned Chang Yü-ch’u, who was both the 43rd Celestial Master and the Chinese version of a renaissance man, to gather and edit an exhaustive collection of all Taoist books in circulation. Chang located books from various sources, edited them as he saw fit, and then presented them to an imperial panel that reviewed the submissions and gave them either a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Although both the emperor and Chang died before he could complete the project — which continued on and off for nearly four decades — a subsequent Ming emperor eventually approved a final version of the canon, had multiple copies printed, and circulated them among important Taoist temples, centers, and training facilities.
A century or so later, yet another Ming emperor commissioned Chang Kuo-hsiang, the 50th Celestial Master, to locate texts not currently in the Canon that he felt should be added (or should have been there in the first place). After 20-odd years, this Chang came up with several dozen more documents, which are now part of the Canon and sometimes identified separately as the Ming Canon Supplement. In short, the Ming Canon and Supplement basically defined what would remain the Taoist literary corpus up to this day.
Here are some basic facts and figures about the Ming Canon:
Chang Yü-ch’u maintained the basic structure of the Three Caverns, Four Supplements, and Twelve Categories, though he noodled quite a bit with what went where, probably for ideological reasons. As a result, the internal organization doesn’t always make sense to non-Taoists.
The Ming Canon totaled about 1,487 texts in all. Do I say “about” because no one has ever actually counted them? No, it’s actually that it’s just not always clear where one text officially ends and the next one begins. So, you may as well round it up to “about 1,500” texts. Either way, it’s one ginormous collection.
Among those nearly 1,500 texts, the Canon includes materials from some of the short-lived Taoist lineages that popped up in the 12th through 14th centuries. If not for this compilation, we’d probably know even less than we do about obscure groups like the Pure Tenuousness (Ch’ing-wei), Pure Brightness (Ch’ing-ming), and Spiritual Firmament (Shen-hsiao) sects.
The Taoist Canon almost certainly excluded many texts that a number of practitioners must have regarded as authentic. Because of this, you may come across independent, unaffiliated teachers who claim to possess “unknown” Taoist texts that have been in their family for generations. So, are these the “real deal”? Unfortunately, there isn’t one answer. Many of these texts have genuine connections to canonical texts and historic Taoist practices, and some may have really been passed down for centuries, and some no doubt are inventions of people interested in profit or self-promotion. It would be nice if there were some Taoist litmus test, but for the time being no one has invented one.
Reclamation projects: Cataloguing the Canon
The Ming Taoist Canon almost joined all its predecessors as a lost collection. The last Chinese Dynasty, the Manchu-run Ch’ing, was generally hostile to Taoism. The Confucian literati — the same ones who fed so much misinformation about Taoism to the European missionary scholars — didn’t hold back their contempt for Taoist institutions and practices as perpetuating backward superstition. The death knell nearly sounded during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when the Great Radiant Light Pavilion — the Taoist temple that contained the printing blocks for the Ming Canon — was destroyed by gunfire. This very well could have been it for Taoist scripture.
Fortunately, not long after the demise of the Ch’ing Dynasty and the founding of the Republic of China in 1912, the Chinese government took steps to reproduce and preserve the Canon. Working from copies of texts in the White Cloud Monastery, it produced a miniaturized version of the Canon through a process called photolithography, and published a thread-bound version of it in 1926. Since then, other editions have been published in both China and Taiwan, including a 49-volume version by the Chinese Taoist Association. Of course, all these versions have been in Chinese and include no helpful explanations of historical context. For at least a while, they’ve remained pretty impenetrable to Western audiences and to Chinese non-specialists.
One hugely important step in making this material more accessible to the English-speaking world is the monumental publication in 2004 of The Taoist Canon. Edited by top-flight scholars Kristofer Schipper and Franciscus Verellen, and involving nearly 30 other scholars for nearly 30 years, this three-volume collection testifies to the sheer enormity of the volume of textual material — it’s only an annotated index to the Taoist Canon, not a translation of it. Yes, you heard right! This 1,637-page collection is not an actual translation of the Canon, but a scholarly guide to each and every text. Still, don’t be disappointed — this work represents a giant step for anyone who wants to try to begin navigating a truly intimidating body of scripture.
The Taoist Canon is itself pretty intimidating, but when you figure out the general organization, you can use it encyclopedically — that is, not as a book to read from front to back, but as a reference book when you want to know about particular texts, periods, sects, and so forth. In the interest of intelligibility and continuity, the editors don’t follow the traditional Cavern-Supplement-Category structure; instead, they develop their own system, though not every Taoism scholar today will agree with the way they’ve sliced and diced the cataloguing of texts. The most important distinction they make is to divide all the texts into two categories, in part because the scholars employed different research tools to study them:
Books in general circulation: These include texts written for a general audience, many of which may have circulated independently outside the Canon. Most of the materials written by historians, philosophers, doctors, diviners, geographers, and so forth fall into this category.
Books in internal circulation: These include texts restricted to those with privileged “insider” access through initiation and ordination in a Taoist lineage. These texts, dealing with things like ritual, talismans, and registers, make up the majority of texts in the Canon. The irony is that now that the Canon has been published, the insider texts are available to everyone, but that doesn’t make them any more understandable, and ordained Taoists aren’t usually in any hurry to explain them.
When you’re clear on this distinction, you’ll have an easier time following the structure of the volumes. You may also want to keep in mind that although the title The Taoist Canon seems to use the same system as this book for transliterating Chinese names, the collection itself actually uses the pinyin system, so the names may not be immediately familiar to you. For example, Chang Tao-ling is suddenly going to appear as Zhang Daoling, and Ch’üan-chen (Complete Perfection) Taoism as Quanzhen — the kinds of changes that will really keep you on your Taoist toes. In any event, here’s more or less what you can expect when you poke your nose into its pages:
The first volume begins with a 50-page general introduction, not to Taoism, but to the history of the Taoist Canon and the project that produced this set.
Most of the first two volumes contain text-by-text descriptions of each entry in the Canon. These are organized chronologically, with each period divided into texts in general circulation and texts in internal circulation. What’s more, each of those categories is divided into several headings and subheadings, including such titles as “Didactic and Doctrinal Treatises, “Cosmogony and the Pantheon,” “Lamp Rituals,” and “Hymnology.” These entries are really the “meat” of the work.
The third volume begins with brief biographies of Taoists whose names show up frequently in earlier parts of the book. These aren’t your basic classical philosophers like Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu; they’re Taoist adepts who authored commentaries or received revealed texts that appear in the Canon.
The third volume also contains a bibliography running about 40 pages. Most of the references are in Chinese or Japanese, or come from pretty technical scholarly journals, but you may find some of them helpful if you want to trace the research on a particular topic.
Finally, the third volume includes several indices, mostly listing all the texts in the Canon through several different methods: in line with the order in the previous two volumes, according to the order in the originally published Ming Canon, in alphabetical order (again, using the pinyin system), and cross-referenced to other editions of the Canon.
Materials Found in the Taoist Canon
Obviously, with nearly 1,500 texts in the Taoist Canon, most of which are coded to be intelligible only to those trained and initiated into a specific lineage, and with even the English index to the Canon running more than 1,600 pages in length, it’s probably not such a hot idea to try to do justice to all the contents in this single chapter. But on the other hand, it is possible to take some modest steps toward untangling those complicated scriptures.
In this section, I outline some of the main types of texts in the Taoist Canon, give a few examples of each, and offer up some interesting tidbits about their contents, function, or history.
Philosophies and commentaries
Even though the general thrust of the Taoist Canon is liturgical (that is, relating to rituals and ceremonies) rather than philosophical, it does include many philosophical texts from all periods of Chinese history. The foundational classical Taoist texts and their respective commentaries are all there, but you may also be a bit surprised to find that some unlikely outliers have found their way into the collection as well. Here’s a sampling of some of the items in this category, including both the obvious entries and the “aliens”:
The main classical Taoist texts from the Hundred Schools Period through the Huang-Lao era of the Han Dynasty — the Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Huai Nan Tzu — and dozens of commentaries on them.
Other texts from the Hundred Schools Period that few people consider Taoist, like the self-titled works by Mo Tzu, the legalist Han Fei Tzu, the dialectician Kung-sun Lung-tzu, the political strategist Kuei Ku Tzu, and the syncretist Yü Tzu. In some cases, there are plausible connections between the texts and Taoism — for example, the Han Fei Tzu includes commentary chapters on the Tao Te Ching — but more often than not it’s hard to figure out why Taoists included them.
Independent later philosophical works, some of which are presented as companion pieces to earlier classical texts. One such text is the 8th-century Arcane Principles of Master Tsung-hsüan, which discusses the Tao and how it manifests in the universe, while advocating purification and concentration as ways to understand it. Another example is the Scripture of Western Ascent, a 5th-century document that represents itself as instructions that the historic Lao Tzu passed on to the gatekeeper before he disappeared off to the West.
Commentaries on materials from different periods of Taoist revelations, like Highest Clarity, Numinous Treasure, and later Orthodox Unity texts. A bunch of these commentaries address the very first text to appear in the Ming Canon, the Numinous Treasure Scripture on Salvation.
Talismans and registers
Of all the scriptures in the Taoist Canon, instrumental texts like talismans and registers have probably drawn the least interest from Westerners who like their Taoist philosophy spiritualized and don’t really get how a contemplative vision of spontaneity and returning to the Tao can have anything to do with texts meant to control, cajole, or ward off spirits. But texts like these often provide hints as to what’s going on in Taoist esoteric practice and show just how much the West still has to learn about the living Taoist tradition.
Talismans are probably the hardest texts to read, because they often contain diagrams, symbols, or patterns that look like graphs, rather than literal text; when they do contain what appear to be regular Chinese characters, it’s understood that their true meaning is accessible only to the deities who were believed to have bestowed the talismans sometime in the distant past. One of the most important historical talismans, the Preface to the Five Numinous Treasure Talismans, included recipes for longevity and other instructions, but it was mostly employed as an important ingredient in the performance of ritual. Here are some of the many functions of the various Taoist talismans:
Conduits to Physical Healing
Marking off Sacred Space
Protection from Evil Spirits or General Dangers
Assisting Safe Passage of the Dead
Aids to Meditation
Blueprints for Ritual Gestures
Registers are a lot like talismans, in that they deal with controlling deities, may contain symbols and drawings rather than words, and are intelligible only to initiated insiders. They also represent some of the earliest Taoist texts after the Classical Period, which go back to the original Way of the Celestial Masters. For the most part, they list deities that those possessing them can summon, and are conferred upon initiates in their stages of ordination. One typical register, The Highest Purity Register of the Three Hundred and Sixty Five True and Divine Forces from the Nine Heavens in the Upper Origin of the Golden True Jade Emperor, gives a sense of what territory they can cover.
Ritual texts and alchemical manuals
Although these should technically fall into two different categories — ritual texts relate to public ceremonies, and alchemical manuals relate to personal cultivation — both reflect the emphasis in the Taoist Canon on achieving some kinds of concrete, though cosmically significant, results through proper forms of practice. Some of these texts offer specific instructions on executing rituals or performing alchemical transformations, some are meant to be chanted or recited, and some contain mechanisms for directly petitioning deities. A number of these texts may come off as fairly straightforward, but most resemble talismans and registers, in that they employ language that’s not easily understood by those who aren’t Taoist adepts.
Most of the texts in the Canon relate to ritual or cultivation practices, and much of the material survives today, even if the actual texts aren’t always employed in their entirety. To give you a taste for the range of practices these texts cover, here’s a brief romp through some of the more interesting ones:
The Ten Islands and Three Isles of the Immortals Liturgies for the Yellow Register Ceremony: In tandem with three other ritual texts, this scripture contributes to a ceremony conducted to remove sin and facilitate safe passage for up to nine generations of ancestors. Several other texts offer variations of the “Yellow Register” theme.
The Great Complete Collection of Ritual Protocols of the Tao: This text serves as a ritual handbook for at least 20 different Taoist rituals, covering subjects like rainmaking and having male children. Most of the rituals have an astrological bent to them, designed to honor stars that control one’s fate.
Secret Instructions for Prolonging Life, of the Purple Court of the Northern Emperor’s Seven Primordia: This text describes a colorful ritual involving the burning of ceremonial paper money and lighting seven lamps in a prescribed space. The purpose of the ritual is to present offerings to deities associated with the Big Dipper, on behalf of oneself and one’s ancestors.
The Cavern of Perfection’s Most High Perfect Scripture of Wisdom That Destroys Demons: This text sort of combines alchemy with exorcism — it presents hymns and lists drugs that can be used to drive away evil spirits that cause illness.
Morality books
A genre of text called morality books or virtue books (shan-shu) circulated in China for many years both inside and outside the Taoist Canon. Some incorporated technical Taoist language and sophisticated cosmology, but many contained basic moral formulas that could be recited orally and transmitted to the masses, even those who were illiterate. By and large, these texts encouraged specific moral actions, enumerated lengthy lists of transgressions to avoid, and indicated the rewards or punishments that would follow from those actions.
Probably the best known — and best loved — of the morality books is the Treatise of the Most High on Impulse and Response, which is often translated as something like the Book of Rewards and Punishments or the Tractate on Actions and Their Retributions. The title alludes to the ancient yin-yang notions of resonance and correlation among different configurations of ch’i, but in the text itself, “impulse and response” is pretty clearly talking about the good or bad results of respective moral or immoral actions. This short text has been published in everything from rinky-dink pamphlets to illustrated multivolume coffee-table editions, and it’s not all that uncommon to come across Chinese people today who fondly recall their grandmothers reciting the text to them at bedtime. If you have your heart set on finding a popular Taoist Bible, this just might be it.
When you browse the Impulse and Response text — it’s a pretty quick and easy read — you’ll probably notice that it’s absolutely saturated with Chinese syncretism. That is, the text is a wonderful hodgepodge of Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian ideas, mixed together into a totally digestible stew. Here’s some of what you’ll find there:
Attribution to Lao Tzu: The entire text, though obviously a much later work, is supposedly spoken by the “Most High,” whom the readers traditionally understand as Lao Tzu. This gives it a kind of Taoist imprimatur (mark of approval) from the very beginning.
The Buddhist idea of karma: Though the text doesn’t identify the idea as Buddhist, it’s clearly using the standard Buddhist notion that all actions produce effects, based entirely on the moral disposition of those actions. In short, good actions produce rewards and bad actions produce punishments, mainly lengthening or shortening your overall life expectancy.
Popular understandings of deities: Unlike Buddhism, which views the karmic process as automatic (much like gravity), this text depicts spirits of Heaven and Earth as the ones who pass judgment and dispense rewards and punishments.
Confucian morality: Even though it’s a Taoist book employing Buddhist notions of karma, the prescribed morality is Confucian through and through. The text encourages such things as loyalty to the ruler, obedience to parents, kindness to orphans and widows, modesty, and ritual propriety.
Dashes of Buddhist morality: A handful of Buddhist ideas glom onto the Confucian morals, so it’s forbidden to harm not only other people, but also animals, insects, plants, and trees.
Taoist deities and immortality: The text also describes the Taoist idea of spirits inhabiting the human body, who are nurtured by good acts and poisoned by bad ones. Those who follow the right ways and serve the spirits correctly can be rewarded by becoming Taoist immortals.
Common-sense customs: Many of the admonitions allude to basic folk customs that may seem kind of odd to a modern Western audience. For example, you’re not allowed to lounge naked at night, feel lust at the sight of a beautiful woman, hope your creditors die before they can collect what you owe them, sing and dance on sacred days, cook food with dirty firewood, or take a whiz while facing north!
From medicine to numerology
While philosophy, talismans, registers, ritual, alchemy, and morality all figure prominently in the Taoist Canon, a number of other subjects — medicine, pharmacology, divination, breathing methods, biography, sacred geography, mythology, meteorology and numerology — all show up there as well. Just to make sure you don’t ever really think you’ve got the entire Canon under control, here are a few more titles to whet your appetite:
Diagram of the Chou Dynasty Book of Changes: This is a series of more than a hundred diagrams used to interpret the ancient divination manual, the I Ching.
Enlarged and illustrated Materia Medica (Pharmacology): This extensive medical handbook catalogues hundreds of animals, insects, vegetables, herbs, and so forth, describing each in terms of taste, toxicity, and application to healing.
Comprehensive Mirror of Perfected Immortals and Those Who Embodied the Tao through the Ages: This text attempts, not always successfully, to present a complete chronological record of Taoist immortals and “saints,” tracing back to incarnations of Lao Tzu and legendary immortals of antiquity, and stretching forward to patriarchs of the Complete Perfection Lineage.
The August Ultimate through the Ages: Written (or compiled) by an 11th-century Confucian scholar — which goes to show you just how diverse the Canon texts can be — this odd numerological text combines mathematics and delineation of historical cycles with metaphysical speculation.