IB World Religions 1.8.1. Taoism in Context: the Tao, the Texts and the Tradition Notes

1.8.1. Taoism in Context: The Tao, the Texts and the Tradition

The Tao

1. Taoism takes its name from Tao (Pinyin Dao), an ordinary Chinese word for a road or a way. Taoists use it for the source and pattern of everything that exists.
2. Their central text refuses to pin the word down, saying that the Tao which can be told is not the eternal Tao. Taoists take that as a warning against cataloguing the Tao alongside ordinary things.
3. Taoist texts still describe how it behaves. They call it nameless, older than heaven and earth, present in everything without being any particular thing, and effortless in its working.
4. The Tao is not spoken of as a creator who plans and commands. Taoists prefer images of growth, saying that the ten thousand things, meaning the whole of nature, come out of the Tao as plants come out of soil.
5. The paired term is te (Pinyin de), virtue or power. It names the particular character a thing has when the Tao is expressing itself through that thing.
6. Two spelling systems are in circulation. Wade-Giles gives Tao, te and Ch'i, Pinyin gives Dao, de and Qi, and both are writing the same Chinese words.

The Tao Te Ching

1. The Tao Te Ching (Pinyin Daodejing), the Classic of the Way and its Power, is the central Taoist scripture. It is short, about five thousand Chinese characters in eighty-one brief chapters.
2. Tradition attributes it to Lao Tzu (Pinyin Laozi), the Old Master, an archivist at the Chou court who rode west out of China and wrote the book at the frontier guard's request.
3. Historians date the material to the Warring States period, the fourth to third centuries BCE, and read it as a compilation. Taoists honour Lao Tzu as its author, and religious Taoism worships him as a god.
4. The writing is terse and works by paradox. It praises softness over hardness and emptiness over fullness, on the ground that what yields outlasts what resists.
5. The title names the book's two halves, the chapters on Tao and those on te. Manuscripts found at Ma-wang-tui in 1973 put the te chapters first, so the text once circulated in more than one order.
6. Much of the book advises rulers to govern with a very light hand. The commentaries of Wang Pi and Ho-shang Kung shaped how Taoists have read it since.

The Chuang Tzu

1. The second great text is the Chuang Tzu (Pinyin Zhuangzi), named after Chuang Chou, who taught in the fourth century BCE. It is far longer than the Tao Te Ching and written mostly in stories.
2. Scholars treat the first seven Inner Chapters as Chuang Chou's own, with twenty-six more added by later followers. Taoists read the collection together as one voice.
3. The stories are built to loosen confidence in fixed categories. Taoists read them as arguing that useful and useless, or great and small, look absolute only from one limited standpoint.
4. Cook Ting has carved oxen for nineteen years with a blade still sharp, because he lets it travel along the natural openings rather than hacking through bone.
5. The book meets death in the same spirit. Chuang Tzu is found drumming and singing after his wife dies, saying she has gone back into the round of the seasons.
6. A third work, the Lieh Tzu, is grouped with these two. The tradition later gathered a vast body of further scripture into the Tao-tsang, the Taoist Canon.

Philosophical and religious Taoism

1. Writers on Taoism commonly divide the tradition in two. Tao-chia (Pinyin daojia), the school of the Tao, names the philosophical strand, and tao-chiao (Pinyin daojiao), the teaching of the Tao, names the organized religion.
2. Philosophical Taoism is what most readers meet first. It is the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu read as reflection on nature, on government and on the conduct of a life.
3. Religious Taoism has a datable beginning. In 142 CE Chang Tao-ling reported a revelation from the deified Lao Tzu and founded the Way of the Celestial Masters.
4. That movement built the institutions the religion still runs on. It ordained a priesthood, set a festival calendar, and worshipped a pantheon headed by the Three Pure Ones.
5. Alongside it grew longevity practice and inner alchemy, in which Taoists work on breath, diet, movement and meditation in order to refine what they are made of.
6. Both strands share a vocabulary and a conviction. They use Tao and te, and they hold that human life goes well when it runs with the grain of nature and badly when it works against it.

Taoists today

1. Two ordination lineages dominate Taoism today. Cheng-i (Pinyin Zhengyi), Orthodox Unity, descends from the Celestial Masters, and its tao-shih (priests) usually marry and live among the people.
2. Ch'uan-chen (Pinyin Quanzhen), Complete Perfection, was founded in the twelfth century and shaped by contact with Buddhism. Its clergy are monastic and celibate, based in temples such as Pai-yun Kuan in Beijing.
3. Taoism is most visible in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Chinese communities elsewhere. On the mainland it has been rebuilding since the 1980s under the China Taoist Association.
4. Temple practice is daily and unspectacular. Worshippers offer incense, consult the gods by shaking numbered chien sticks from a bamboo cylinder, and bring petitions for health and business.
5. The great communal rite is the chiao, a renewal ritual a temple may sponsor once in several years. It runs for days and is held to renew a community's standing with the powers around it.
6. Few Chinese people describe themselves as Taoist and nothing else. Taoist, Buddhist and Confucian elements are practised together in one household, so membership figures understate participation.
7. Taoist ideas also travel far beyond the temples, into t'ai chi ch'uan, traditional Chinese medicine and feng-shui.