Religious vs. Philosophical Taoism

Walk into a temple on Mount Wudang and you will find robed priests performing rituals to a pantheon of immortals, burning paper offerings, and consulting talismans painted in cinnabar ink. Open the Daodejing in a quiet room and you will find a slim book of aphorisms about water, emptiness, and the futility of trying too hard. Both are called Taoism. Both trace themselves to the same ancient sources. And yet they look so different that Western scholars, beginning in the nineteenth century, drew a sharp line between them: philosophical Taoism, or daojia, the Taoism of texts and ideas; and religious Taoism, or daojiao, the Taoism of priests, rituals, and gods.

The philosophical strand centers on two books. The Daodejing, traditionally attributed to Laozi, is a compact work of about five thousand characters that meditates on the dao — the way things are, prior to and beneath all naming — and on de, the kind of power or virtue that flows from acting in accord with it. Its central practical idea is wuwei, often translated as non-action, though a better gloss is effortless responsiveness: the carpenter who cuts with the grain, the cook whose blade slips through the joints because he has stopped forcing it. The Zhuangzi, a longer and more playful text, extends this with stories of butterflies, useless trees, and skeptics who cheerfully refuse to take their own opinions seriously. Read this way, Taoism is a contemplative philosophy about how to live lightly in a world that resists being managed.

The religious strand looks different on its surface. It emerged as an organized movement in the second century CE, when a healer named Zhang Daoling reported a revelation from a deified Laozi and founded the Way of the Celestial Masters. From there grew a vast tradition: ordained priests, liturgies, scriptures revealed by celestial beings, an elaborate hierarchy of immortals and bureaucratic gods modeled on the imperial court, internal alchemy aimed at transforming the body into a vessel of long life, and external alchemy aimed, sometimes fatally, at brewing the same result in a cauldron. Religious Taoism is communal, ritual, and concerned with health, protection, and ascent — practical concerns that the Daodejing addresses only obliquely.

It is tempting to see the two as separate religions sharing a name by accident. They are not. The deified Laozi worshipped in temples is the same Laozi credited with the Daodejing. Wuwei reappears in meditation manuals as a technique. The Zhuangzi's images of the perfected person who rides the wind became, in liturgical contexts, descriptions of actual immortals one might hope to join. The philosophical texts supplied the religious tradition with much of its vocabulary and many of its goals; the religious tradition kept the texts alive, copied them, and embedded them in lived practice for two thousand years.

The sharp daojia/daojiao distinction, scholars now widely agree, was partly an artifact of European observers who wanted to extract a respectable philosophy from what they regarded as superstition. Chinese sources before the modern period rarely drew the line so cleanly. A literatus might read the Zhuangzi for solace, consult a Taoist priest for a funeral, and practice breathing exercises drawn from internal alchemy, without feeling he had crossed any boundaries. The two strands are better thought of as emphases within a single tradition — one tilted toward reflection, the other toward ritual — than as separate things.

Still, the distinction earns its keep. It marks a real difference between reading a text for its arguments and entering a temple to participate in its rites, between asking what the dao is and asking the dao for help. A reader who notices both faces of Taoism, and notices also that they have always belonged to each other, is closer to understanding the tradition than one who has chosen sides.