For some Daoists, this goal of human flourishing extends to a loftier goal: physical immortality. They seek to become immortals who feed on the wind, drink the dew, mount the clouds, and ride on dragons to the end of the earth (and beyond). But even these Daoists do not hope for (or fear) an afterlife. While the philosophers of ancient Greece affirmed a disembodied immortality of the soul after death, Daoists say that whatever immortality is available to us is to be found on earth and in this body.
Philosopher Grace Jantzen asserts that the great mystery at the heart of the great religions is not mortality but natality.11 This certainly applies to Daoism, which is more about nourishing life than defeating death. For Daoists, flourishing is built into the nature of things. Like trees that are made to grow, humans are made to flourish. But this is only possible if we live in harmony with the natural rhythms of the Dao. Unfortunately, most of us live in accordance with the dictates of social conventions, moral rules, formal education, and ritual prescriptions. Such civilization is a vampire. Its artifice sucks the life out of us, depleting our qi (vital energy) and taking us to an early grave. We act intentionally, from the will rather than the heart. We think too much and intuit too little. We commit ourselves to dichotomies that are really distinctions without a difference, distinguishing between what we like and dislike, what is right and wrong, what is beautiful and ugly. And so we die a little each day.
All this attention to conventional thought and morals doesn’t just kill individuals, however. It destroys social harmony, which is possible only when everyone does what they naturally do. While Confucians see etiquette and rituals as solutions to the world’s ills, Daoists see both as causes of the human problem of lifelessness. The Dao has created things to change spontaneously and without warning. But the stuff of society—etiquette and ritual, language and thought—molds us, constrains us, freezes us. We build barriers, in our individual and our social lives, that chop what was once a unified cosmos into smaller and smaller parts, separating us from one another and restricting “the free movement of the Dao.” This fragmentation seduces human beings into seeing themselves as isolated atoms, distinct from one another and from the Dao. So we become foreigners in our own land, frenetic creators of a civilization that with every so-called advance cuts us off from the original harmony of the “pristine Dao.”12
In other words, the Confucian project of actively cultivating such virtues as ren (human-heartedness) and li (ritual/etiquette/propriety) isn’t just ineffectual; it is harmful, both to individual flourishing and to social harmony. What the Confucians see as self-cultivation is actually self-destruction. No wonder so many of the students of Confucius came to early ends: “Yan Hui died early, Ji Lu was dismembered and pickled in Wei, Zi Xia was blinded, and Ran Boniu contracted leprosy.” Each sacrificed his nature—and his life—at the altar of the false god of social convention.13
Into all this trouble rides the sage. While the stuffy junzi (“profound person”) served as the Confucian model, the spontaneous sage—also known as the “genuine person” (zhenren)—functions as the exemplar in the Daoist tradition. Unrestrained by social shackles, the sage acts authentically and spontaneously, without expectation or goal. His reliance on intuitive wisdom over book learning may make him seem foolish to outsiders. But by freely flouting social norms, he is able to crash through the life-sucking barriers that accrete around artifice and allow the life-giving Dao to move where it will. Only this Dao can nurture us back to life. And the sage embodies it, combining in his own body the vitality of the child and the potency of the mother.
The techniques Daoists employ toward this goal of nurturing life are meant to ensure not only that we are healthy and long-lived but also that the life we live is vital and genuine. Typically these techniques work by preserving and circulating our qi, balancing our yin and yang, and otherwise returning us to the creativity of the Dao. These techniques include “sitting and forgetting,” “fasting of the mind,” and “free and easy wandering.” They also include dietary regimens, breath control, visualization exercises, purification rites, sexual practices, meditation techniques, and various physical exercises modeled after the movements of long-lived animals (“bear strides and bird stretches”).14 In outer alchemy, ancient Daoists experimented with metals such as cinnabar to create elixirs of immortality along the lines of the immortality plant sought by the title character in the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh. In inner alchemy, developed around the eleventh century C.E., the human body itself became the laboratory, and sages-to-be sought to create an “embryo of immortality” inside themselves by manipulating the “three treasures” of the human body: qi (vital energy), jing (sexual essence), and shen (spirit).15
All these techniques work by fostering union with the life-giving Dao, since vitality, longevity, and even immortality come only by living in harmony with the natural rhythms of things. I may be a father, a son, and a professor, but from the Daoist perspective none of these social roles captures who I really am. That is because I am a natural rather than a social being. So when I say this meeting is killing me or this party is death, I am speaking literally rather than metaphorically. The rituals and etiquette so prized by Confucians drain our vital energies and shorten our lives. Wandering in the mountains liberates us from the death-dealing details of everyday social life, infusing us with strength for the journey. Only by “getting the Dao” can we achieve the freedom and vitality of the sage.
As this goal of enriching and extending life implies, the experiential dimension is Daoism’s forte. Rather than asking after truth, as did the Greeks, Daoism asks about where to go: what is the way to the Way? In fact, of all the great religions, Daoism may be the most allergic to doctrine. Whatever wisdom it holds it disseminates in parables and paradox and often in secret. Its core intuition is that there is a natural way, called the Dao, which at any given moment we can work with or against. To be fully human is to dance with this Dao, moving in rhythm with its core values of naturalness, equanimity, spontaneity, and freedom.
From Profound Primordiality to Deviant Belief
The influence of Daoism has waxed and waned throughout Chinese history, but it has almost always played second fiddle to its doppelganger of Confucianism. Daoism emerged in the midst of Confucian civilization, so Daoist jazz has from the beginning been contrasted with the classical music of Confucianism. Whereas Confucians argue that human beings become fully human by becoming social, Daoists say that we become fully human by becoming natural. Because the “pristine Dao” is within us, all we need to do is be ourselves.16 While this approach may sound thrilling to those among us who feel caged in by society, it has repeatedly sounded alarms of rebellion and anarchy to Chinese rulers. So bureaucrats have typically applauded Confucian philosophers and their prose more than Daoist hermits and their poetry.
Most Chinese, however, see these two traditions as complementary, not contradictory. From the start, Daoists adopted Confucius as one of their own (though his main function in Daoist texts seems to be to exhibit his dullardism and then to bow and scrape before his Daoist betters). Meanwhile, Confucians took up many of Daoism’s spiritual disciplines. So throughout Chinese history Confucians and Daoists have not only coexisted but complemented one another—Confucianism’s communitarianism and Daoism’s individualism, Confucianism’s formalism and Daoism’s flow, the hard yang of Confucianism and the soft yin of Daoism.
Daoism briefly penetrated corridors of power in the second century B.C.E., but its niche has typically been subjects rather than rulers. Popular support for Daoism rose in the fourth and fifth centuries C.E., about the same time Daoists started to gather their massive corpus of sacred texts into a canon of over 1,200 works divided (after the manner of the Buddhists Tripitaka, or “three baskets”) into “three caverns.” Particularly in the countryside, where Daoism absorbed local festivals and popular deities, Daoists positioned their tradition at the front of the class of the Three Teachings, boldly portraying the Buddha as a reincarnation of
the Daoist sage Laozi and Confucius as his humble (and sometimes bumbling) student.
Daoism’s glory years came in the Tang dynasty (618–907) when the imperial family, which shared a surname with Laozi, enhanced their status by enhancing his. Declaring Laozi “Most High August Sovereign of Profound Primordiality,” they proclaimed his birthday a national holiday and added the Daodejing to their list of required reading for civil-service exams.17 They also threw so much money at Daoist monasteries and temples that by the middle of the eighth century there were 1,687 Daoist institutions (550 of them for nuns) registered with the state.18
The thirteenth century saw the burning of Daoist books. In the seventeenth century, Daoism was denounced by Christian missionaries as “deviant belief,” and Chinese officials came to see it as unscientific, superstitious, and hyperritualized.19 During the Taiping Rebellion (1851–64), led by a visionary who fancied himself the brother of Jesus, Daoist priests were killed and their monasteries destroyed wherever the rebels held power. When communists came to power in 1949, Daoism was suppressed as a degenerate relic of feudalisms past. Under Mao Zedong, ordinations stopped, festivals were forbidden, and temples and monasteries were either shuttered or recommissioned as factories or government offices. Under Deng Xiaoping, who ascended to leadership in 1978, religious persecution was relaxed and Daoism was recognized as one of five official religions.
Today Daoism has fewer religious professionals than any of China’s other official religions (Buddhism, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Islam), but ordinations are now going forward once again.20 Thanks to a combination of spiritually motivated foreign money and tourism-motivated government support, over a thousand Daoist temples have been restored and reopened. Over one hundred thousand worshippers attend the most popular Daoist festivals. Both the Mount Wudang temple complex in Hubei province and the Mount Mao temple in Jiangsu province draw hundreds of thousands of pilgrims and tourists each year. Some of the funds visitors pumped into the Mount Mao temple were used to build the world’s largest bronze statue of Laozi, unveiled at this site in 1998.
Daoism is represented in China today chiefly by two institutions: the earlier Celestial Masters sect popular in the south, and the later Complete Perfection sect popular in the north. Westerners keen on dividing these two sects along Protestant/Catholic lines have ended up tying themselves in knots. While Celestial Masters’ leaders have been called “Daoist popes,” they do not follow the Catholic practice of requiring clerical celibacy. And while the Complete Perfection sect has followed the Protestants in rebelling against the magical thinking and ritual preoccupations of their Celestial Masters predecessors, they follow Catholics in emphasizing monasticism and requiring their priests to take a vow of celibacy.
Laozi and the Daodejing
Daoists trace their lineage to Laozi and the enigmatic classic attributed to him, the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching). Dao means “way,” de means power or virtue, and jing means “classic.” So the Daodejing is “The Classic of the Way and Its Power” or “The Classic of the Way and Its Virtue.” This text used to be dated to the sixth century B.C.E., which would make Laozi a contemporary of the Buddha. But just as new discoveries have pushed forward the Buddha’s dates, the Daodejing is now typically dated to the third or fourth century B.C.E., though many of its key concepts are much older. Unlike the Jewish and Christian scriptures, which glory in names and dates and the verisimilitude of historical accuracy, the Daodejing “contains no dates and mentions no proper names, nothing that would tie it to history.”21 Its home ground is the timeless aphorism. Its core concept, the Dao, floats above and beyond the vicissitudes of historical time. As for Laozi himself, there is some chance that he never lived, so the Daodejing may well be the work of multiple authors. In either case, stories about Laozi sparring with Confucius (and winning) are probably the stuff of legend. Nonetheless, the legends endure, so at least in this sense Laozi not only lived, but lives on.
The term Laozi means “old master,” or “old child.” Legend has it that, like the title character played by Brad Pitt in the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Laozi was born old. As a young man, he worked as an archivist in the state of Zhou. It was a good job, but one day, convinced that civilization was in freefall, he quit. Climbing onto a water buffalo, he followed the advice later immortalized by the American newspaperman Horace Greeley to “Go west, young man.” In this case, west meant the border dividing the Chinese from the barbarians. Before he lit out for that terra incognita, a border guard aware of his reputation as a sage asked him to write something down before crossing. Laozi responded with a brief book of about five thousand characters known today as the Daodejing. He then rambled toward the western mountains, never to be heard from again. Or perhaps he made his way to India, where he was known as the Buddha. Or perhaps he went to Persia where, as Mani, he inspired the Christian heresy of Manichaeism. Or perhaps he ascended to the heavens. In any case, he would eventually come to be worshipped as Lord Lao, an incarnation of the Dao itself.
The eighty-one short chapters of the Daodejing, also called the Laozi (or the Lao-Tzu), can be read on a longish coffee break, but they have delighted and perplexed readers for millennia. This cryptic classic, part poetry and part prose, is divided into two parts: a more mystical opening section on the Dao, and a more political closing section on de. Although Confucians have long interpreted the Daodejing as a philosophical text, and Western Sinologists have generally followed their lead, a new generation of interpreters is coming to reckon with its spiritual and religious elements, including its roots in ancient Chinese traditions of shamanism and divination.
Usually translated as “the Way,” the term dao also refers to a “path” or “road.” All the great Chinese schools have wrestled with this keyword, but Daoists, as their name suggests, puzzled over its profundities, poking and prodding it to see where it might lead. And where it led was back to the source, to the subtle force that creates all things, sustains all things, and pervades all things, which is to say to the Dao itself. Both transcendent and immanent, both perfection and potential, the beginningless and endless Dao is at least as theological as it is philosophical. Everything comes out of it (originally) and returns to it (eventually). So while it represents ultimate reality, it also permeates everything, including our blood and bones. “The Tao is not far off,” Daoist sages say, “it is here in my body.”22
According to Laozi (or whoever wrote the Daodejing) this impersonal Dao lies beyond ordinary language and the ordinary mind, so it can never be fully understood or fully described. To try to capture it is to feel it slip through your fingers. So while Daoists use language to depict the Dao, they typically do so with humor and humility. The Dao is the way of untamed nature, the way of authentic human life, and the harmonious union of the two. But it is also the social harmony so prized by Confucians, because when everyone acts authentically and without artifice the natural result is social order.
Reversal and Return
The central verb in the Daodejing, and the term that gives the text momentum, is return. And where Laozi wants us to return is to the primordial unity of the Dao itself. “Tranquility is returning,” the Daodejing reads, so “return to the state of infancy,” “return to the state of the uncarved block.”23 One of the great themes of the Italian Renaissance was to return ad fontes—to the fountainhead. In this text the movement is back to nature and to the endlessly fertile waters out of which everything natural first emerged. “The movement of the Tao,” writes Laozi, “is to return.”24 And the fruits of this homecoming are revitalization and renewal.
This returning is necessary only because human beings have left behind the natural rhythms of the country for the artificial syncopations of civilization. At birth, human beings are in full possession of the Dao. We are, in a famous metaphor from the Daodejing, uncarved blocks—simplicity itself. But Confucians and other civilizers insist on carving these blocks into useful parents and subjects, husbands and wives. Laozi se
es each cut as a little death, with each shaving stealing from us our natural vitality, wearing us down, and shortening our lives. As Henry David Thoreau and Huck Finn can attest, however, this custom also steals from us our uniqueness. How can we be free to become ourselves if society is forever conspiring to turn us into something else? Must a government’s need for good citizens and a family’s need for filial children come before our own individual desires to flourish in our own way and on our own terms?
Laozi is responding here to Confucians who are convinced that both humanity and society are at their best when they are most intricately intertwined. For Laozi, however, the rituals and etiquette of polite society are a trap. The way back—and it is a returning—is to reverse the socialization process. The way to freedom leads through nature, which far more than society embodies the unity and harmony of the Dao. It is social beings who force things, who fight the way things are, who swim against the tide. Natural beings accept what is. If they find themselves in a riptide, they float with it until it is safe to swim to shore.
Closely related to this theme of return is the theme of reversal. Like a good wander, the Dao will surprise you. In fact, this sometimes seems to be its full-time job. In the New Testament parables of Jesus, the kingdom of God is about reversals—overturning our expectations by putting the rich before the poor and the last before the first. In the Daodejing it is the Dao that plays fast and loose with our expectations. We are to yield rather than pursue, to let go rather than grasp. We are to prefer the valley, which safeguards us in a storm; the female, which outlives the male; and the infant, whose freedom and vitality are unbound. Like James Agee, whose Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) glories in the everyday lives of “nobodies,” Daoism roots for the underdogs. In the endless dance of the passive yin and the active yang, we are to partner with the soft and the supple, the weak and the quiet. We are to let things come to us rather than pursuing what we think we want and need. And why? Because yielding will make us free, and freedom will make us flourish.
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