Taoism

• 1. Introduction

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  Taoism opens with a paradox spoken in the first line of the Tao Te Ching: "The Tao that can be told is not eternal Tao." The word at its center, written 道 in Chinese, has been translated as way, road, path, channel, or technique. Yet Taoists have insisted that on its deepest level it cannot be named at all. They have called it dark, indistinct, obscure, and silent.

  This is a tradition indigenous to China that grew from a handful of cryptic texts into a religion with state recognition, a vast pantheon, and centers spread across Korea, Singapore, Brazil, and California. It produced tai chi, qigong, feng shui, and the practice of internal alchemy. Its name in English even hides a quarrel over a single sound.

  How did inner-cultivation circles of master and disciple become an organized church with ordained priests? Why do scholars now reject the neat split between a Taoism of philosophy and a Taoism of religion? And how did decades of persecution turn a Chinese tradition into a faith with adherents on nearly every continent? The answers run from the Warring States period to a temple in Beijing that once held the last surviving copy of the entire Taoist canon.

• 2. A Word, Two Spellings

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  "Tao" and "Dao" are rival romanizations of the very same Chinese word, 道. The first comes from the Wade-Giles system, dominant in English-speaking countries until the late 20th century and still attached to certain established spellings. The second comes from Hanyu Pinyin, adopted in China in the 1950s and by the Library of Congress in 2000, which has largely replaced Wade-Giles in academic writing.

  The Standard Chinese pronunciation of 道 matches neither common English attempt. Its initial consonant is neither voiced nor aspirated, so the English "Dao" and the English "Tao" both miss the mark. One authority calls the version that rhymes with "tie" a mispronunciation, blaming the "clumsy Wade-Giles system" for misleading most readers. The point is that these Latin spellings were never meant to be read as English words.

  The naming trouble runs deeper than sound. English uses "Taoism" to cover two distinct Chinese terms. Daojia, the "School or Tradition of the Dao," traces to the early Han historian Sima Tan, who died in 110 BCE and placed it among six schools of thought. Daojiao, the "Teachings of the Dao," was coined by Lu Xiujing, who lived from 406 to 477, to mark Taoism off from Buddhism.

• 3. Philosophy Or Religion

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  James Legge, a Protestant missionary who lived from 1815 to 1897, is credited with the split that long shaped Western understanding: Philosophical Taoism on one side, Religious Taoism on the other. That division still appears in world religion textbooks meant for general readers. The first term gathered the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi; the second pointed to organized schools, temples, priesthoods, and ritual.

  Louis Komjathy calls the distinction "wholly inaccurate and untenable." He argues that even early classical Taoism already carried the marks of a religion, including a cosmology centered on the Dao, specific practices like meditation, and the aim of a mystical union. The philosopher Chung-ying Cheng likewise treats Taoism as a religion woven into Chinese history while still holding many forms of philosophy and practical wisdom.

  Isabelle Robinet and Livia Kohn put the matter plainly. "Taoism has never been a unified religion, and has constantly consisted of a combination of teachings based on a variety of original revelations." The boundary problem reaches even the word "Taoist" itself. In Western sinology it has traditionally translated daoshi, the ordained priest, while lay believers fell within the wider field of Chinese folk religion. The modern term for a lay member, dàojiàotú, only arrived with the 20th-century import of the Western category of organized religion.

• 4. Founders And First Sources

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  Harold Roth describes early Taoism as a set of "inner-cultivation lineages," communities of master and disciple practicing a contentless, nonconceptual meditation aimed at union with the Tao. These circles mixed with the fangshi, the method masters. Russell Kirkland goes further, arguing that before the Han dynasty there were no real Taoists at all, only behaviors and frameworks later synthesized into the first organized forms.

  The Tao Te Ching, attributed to Laozi, was composed between the 4th and 6th centuries BCE, and tradition holds that Laozi founded Taoism. His historicity is disputed, and many scholars see him as a legendary figure. Many Chinese Taoists instead credit the Yellow Emperor, who was said to have dreamed of an ideal kingdom whose tranquil inhabitants lived in harmony with natural law. On waking, Huangdi sought to bring those virtues to his own people.

  Isabelle Robinet identifies four components in the emergence of Taoism: the teachings of the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi, techniques for ecstasy, practices for longevity and becoming an immortal, and practices for exorcism. Female shamans played an important role in the early tradition, which was especially strong in the southern state of Chu. The most influential of the early hermits was Zhuang Zhou, who lived roughly from 370 to 290 BCE.

• 5. The Rise Of Organized Taoism

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  Zhang Daoling was said to have received a vision of Laozi in 142 CE, and to have warned that the world was ending. From the Five Pecks of Rice movement he built the Way of the Celestial Masters, generally traced as the first organized Taoism, a mass movement in which men and women alike could serve as libationers. A related group in Shandong, the Way of Great Peace, sought to topple the Han and sparked the Yellow Turban Rebellion, crushed after years of bloody war.

  The Celestial Masters survived because they did not join the revolt. The warlord Cao Cao officially recognized the school in 215 CE, gaining legitimacy for his rise in return. Alongside it ran Taiqing, or Great Clarity, a tradition of external alchemy that chased immortality through elixirs brewed from toxic substances like cinnabar, lead, mercury, and realgar.

  The Six Dynasties era, from 316 to 589, brought two new schools. Shangqing grew from revelations granted to Yang Xi between 364 and 370. Lingbao came from scriptures that Ge Chaofu compiled between 397 and 402, and it borrowed heavily from Mahayana Buddhism, even promoting universal salvation. In this period Louguan, the first Taoist monastic institution, was founded in the Zhongnan Mountains by a master named Yin Tong.

• 6. Imperial Patrons And Schools

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  The Gaozong Emperor decreed that the Tao Te Ching become a topic in the imperial examinations, a sign of how high Taoism rose under the Tang, the height of its influence in China. Du Guangting, who lived from 850 to 933, served as court Taoist and reorganized the Daozang after war and loss. Under the 7th-century Emperor Taizong the Five Dragons Temple was built at the Wudang Mountains, which would become a home for Taoist martial arts.

  Wang Chongyang, who lived from 1113 to 1170, founded the Quanzhen, or Complete Perfection, school in Shandong in the 12th century. It turned toward inner transformation, monasticism, and asceticism, and held that the three teachings of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism "when investigated, prove to be but one school." Quanzhen became the largest school in China after master Qiu Chuji met Genghis Khan, who made him leader of all Chinese religions and exempted Quanzhen from taxation.

  The Ming dynasty, from 1368 to 1644, raised the legends of the Eight Immortals, the most important being Lü Dongbin. It also saw the Jingming, or Pure Illumination, school, which derided alchemy, fasting, and breathwork in favor of mental cultivation toward the mind's original purity. Under the Qing, from 1644 to 1912, Taoism's influence declined, and the Longmen school took root at the White Cloud Temple.

• 7. Persecution And Global Spread

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  By the 20th century only one complete copy of the Daozang survived intact, stored at the White Cloud Monastery in Beijing. The 19th and 20th centuries brought waves of destruction during what is called the century of humiliation, driven by Confucian prejudice, modernist ideologies, colonialism, and Christian missionary activity. Chen Yingning, who lived from 1880 to 1969, kept the practice alive through the early Chinese Taoist Association.

  During the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, many Taoist priests were laicized and sent to work camps, and temples were destroyed or turned to secular use. The result was an exodus. Taoists emigrated to Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Europe, and North America. In this way communist repression had the unintended effect of scattering Taoists worldwide and turning Taoism into a world religion.

  Recovery came with the reform and opening up period beginning in 1979, which restored temples and allowed Taoist literature to be published again. The 1980s and 1990s saw a so-called Qigong fever sweep China, producing new movements such as Falun Gong, later outlawed by the Chinese Communist Party. Today Taoism is one of five officially recognized religions in the People's Republic of China, where institutions are state-owned and ordination training requires courses in Marxism.

• 8. The Way And Its Virtues

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  Livia Kohn describes the Tao as "the underlying cosmic power which creates the universe, supports culture and the state, saves the good and punishes the wicked." Komjathy gives it four characteristics: source of all existence, unnamable mystery, all-pervading sacred presence, and universe as cosmological process. The Tao is thus an organic order, not a willful creator but an infinite natural pattern, both transcendent and immanent within each person.

  De, the active expression of the Tao, is often translated as virtue or power, and it arises from living and cultivating the Tao rather than from conventional morality. Ziran, meaning "self-so" or self-organization, names the primordial state of all things and points toward naturalness. The Zhuangzi offers the image of pu, the uncarved log, standing for original nature before the imprint of culture.

  Wu wei, often rendered non-action or effortless action, is a primary ethical concept, associated in ancient texts with water and the way it flows around obstacles. The Tao Te Ching warns, "act of things and you will ruin them. Grasp for things and you will lose them." The Three Treasures gather the central virtues: ci, usually translated as compassion, jian, as moderation, and bugan wei tianxia xian, usually rendered as humility. Arthur Waley read them in social terms as abstention from aggressive war, simplicity of living, and refusal to assert active authority.

  At the top of the simplified pantheon Komjathy presents stands the Dao itself, the uncreated source. Below it are the Three Pure Ones, the highest manifestations, among them Daode Tianzun, seen as the deified form of Laozi. Beneath them the Jade Emperor, Yuhuang Dadi, administers the cosmos through a celestial bureaucracy modeled on the imperial court of ancient China, assisted by the Four Heavenly Ministers.

  The Queen Mother of the West, Xiwangmu, is a supreme mother goddess tied to immortality through images of Kunlun, peaches, and paradise. Xuanwu serves as a martial protector linked to exorcism and northern power. Bixia Yuanjun is the goddess of childbirth and destiny associated with Mount Tai, while Tudigong, the Lord of the Land, guards a single village, temple, or block. Unseen beings are classified as shen, gods and spirits, zong, ancestors, and gui, ghosts.

  The Taoist body itself is treated as a universe, mapped with elixir fields called dantian and animating forces like the hun and po. The Three Treasures appear here too as jing, the essence and foundation of vitality, qi, the vital breath, and shen, the spirit. According to the Zhuangzi, "human life is the accumulation of qi; death is its dispersal." Through such cultivation Taoists sought the highest goal: to become a zhenren, a perfected person, or a xian, an immortal said to be made of pure breath and light, eternally young because their life is wholly at one with the Tao.