Daoism in the 20th century: From Local
Traditions to Global Networks
A talk by David
Palmer and Elijah Siegler
Present: Richard
Nelson-Jones, Louis Gabaude,
Stephane Spano, Prasit Roekphisot, Bulgan Fuichbet, Michael Bauwens,
Moera
Saule, Guy Cardinal, Patrick McGowan, Thomas Ohlson, Simone Buys, John
Butt,
Peter Holmshaw, Ian White, Eric Lynn, Brock Wilson, Oliver Benjamin,
Silapakit
Teckandikum, Hathairat Munart. An audience of 19.
A summary of their talk prepared by David Palmer
and Elijah Siegler
Introduction: Tao Garden
(given by Elijah Siegler)
30 minutes outside Chiang Mai,
near the village of Doi Saket,
is a health spa called Tao
Garden.
It offers
massage, herbal treatments. Also classes for Daoist practices: six
healing
sounds, microcosmic orbit, “Taoist yoga,” etc. Many people
there say they
follow the Dao, practice Daoism, etc. and use terms such as qi, yin
yang etc.
What has Daoism to do with spa
treatment? How is Tao
Garden
a center of global Daoism? First, what is Daoism?
Historical
Introduction to Daoism (given by David Palmer)
Daoism is known as the
indigenous religion of China; it is
also increasingly considered to be a world religion. But unlike most
other
world religions, it does not present itself as having a clear founding
date,
founder, doctrine, and institution. Many different types of people,
with little
in common with each other, have claimed an affiliation to
“Daoism” over the
centuries.
The Spiritual Ancestor of All
Daoists: Laozi
But one thing all
“Daoists” share is a reference to Laozi,
the author of the Daodejing or Book of the Way and its Virtue,
which is
the best known Daoist classic. Little is known of Laozi as a historical
personage or even if he truly existed. He is said to have lived in the 6th
century BC, around the same time as the Buddha. He was a court
archivist and is
said to have been a teacher Confucius. He wandered off to the West on
the back
of buffalo. When he reached the Western Gate of the Chinese realm, Yin
Xi, the
guardian of the gate, entreated him to transmit his wisdom; he thus
composed
5000 verses on bamboo sticks; preserved as the Daodejing. Laozi
then
disappeared in the Mountains of the West.
The Daodejing is a text
about the “Dao”, which means
“way”, the ultimate source and law of the cosmos; and talks
about the operation
of the Dao and how to live in harmony with it; how to return to its
source;
selflessness, spontaneity; non-interfering action; water metaphor.
There are at least four types of
people who, in Chinese
history, have claimed a spiritual affiliation with Laozi and/or the Daodejing.
Indeed, Laozi didn’t found a sect or a religion; he had no
following; but many
types of people have claimed an affiliation to him; have been inspired
by him;
or have had revelations from him as a supreme god. The ideas,
traditions, and
practices of these people circulated and gradually came to be known as
“Daoism”.
a)
Seekers
after immortality. Concerned with cultivation of the body; healing
sickness;
prolonging life; refining and sublimating the human body until it would
transcend life and death. Concern with reversing the flow of bodily
decay,
bringing it back to its source in Dao; to manifest the operation of
Dao.
Pharmaceutical herbs; diet; stretching exercises (daoyin); breathing
exercises;
visualization and meditation exercises; external alchemy –
concoct the elixir
of immortality; internal alchemy – body as alchemical furnace.
This has led to
a substantial body of knowledge and traditions about the body, how to
maintain
and nurture it.
b)
Sectarian
masters & followers. Some immortality-seekers acquired healing and
other
magical powers; were seen as having attained immortality or in direct
communication with Immortals; they acquired large numbers of followers;
formed
a community. The first organized groups of Daoists. Sects had all the
elements
of what we would call a religion: scriptures; a pantheon of divinities;
a
ritual organization; etc. Also often had apocalyptic doctrines. Zhang
Daoling
claimed to have revelation from Laozi and founded the Heavenly Masters
sect,
which evolved into the first organized Daoist institution.
c)
Ritual
specialists. Original sectarian communities did not last, but their
ritual
knowledge continued to be transmitted. Became major ritual specialists
of local
cults. Organization of local cults. Ritual specialists accumulated a
large body
of tradition on rituals and the pantheon of divinities, which combined
Daoist
gods and local gods.
d)
Literati.
People of gentry classes who enjoyed dabbling in Daoist philosophy and
poetry,
as well as medicine and immortality, scholars and officials attracted
by
romantic ideals of detachment from this world; produced many works of
philosophy, poetry, novels on Daoist themes.
Daoist monasticism
Combines all four previous
forms. Main Daoist sect in China today:
Quanzhen (Complete Perfection, Complete Authenticity), founded in 12th
century by borrowing institutional structure of Buddhist monasticism.
Allowed a
setting for seeking immortality while serving communities as ritual
specialists.
The crisis of Daoism at the
beginning of the 20th
century
Situation at end of 19th
cent.: Quanzhen
monastics; sectarian groups; ritual specialists; unorganized networks
of
immortality seekers and body cultivators. No centralized institution;
often
little in common between these groups except that they claimed
connection to
Dao. Revolution of 1911; end of Chinese imperial system; introduction
of
Western concepts of “religion”, “superstition”.
Debates among intellectuals:
What was Daoism? A religion? A philosophy? Superstition?
Daoism in the West
Daoism is rich storehouse of
Chinese culture, but in
“retreat” after the Tang dynasty. (It became a religion of
priests without a
congregation).
Religious Daoism as superstition
comes from the Confucian
literati. They informed Protestant missionaries. The view that that
contemporary Daoism was backwards and a degeneration of pure
philosophical
Daoism. Example: James Legge (1815-1897) a Scottish Congregationalist
missionary, the leading scholar of Chinese religion from the late 1870s
until
the end of the century. Works still influential today.
Many translations of Daodejing
by poets who know no Chinese.
Daodejing popular because of its brevity, its lack of proper names, and
especially its multiplicity of possible meanings.
Most textbooks and reference
works still begin their entries
on Daoism by noting the distinction between religious and philosophical
Daoism.
A famous example: From Huston Smith, The
Religions of Man, 1958:
When the [philosophical] concept
was
translated to make contact with the average villager and
institutionalized
around this translation it would be rendered in cruder and eventually
perverted
terms. To pass from the lofty heights of the Tao Te Ching to the
priestcraft of
Popular Taoism is like passing from a crystal mountain spring to the
thick,
fetid waters of a stagnant canal . . . [at times becoming] little more
than a
funeral racket.
(Little published before 1978
has much value)
Another subject
was physical
practice and alchemy. The ideas
advanced by scholars such as Henri Maspero, Joseph Needham, and Robert
Van
Gulik about Daoist conceptions health, longevity, immortality, and
transcendence appealed to the West’s growing need for
body-centered
spirituality.
This was the intellectual
preparation. The other half of the
equation was the Chinese immigrants themselves. Who were they? They
knew the
Daodejing, Calligraphy, taiji chuan and other forms of exercise, called
Taoist
yoga (later called qigong).
But they were not Daoists but
literati—nostalgic for their
lost world.
The late 1960s: immigration
reform; spiritual hunger in the
west
Later, full blown Daoist masters
(on the guru model). Much
deeper into body centered practice- internal alchemy. Also a time when
sexual
practice - kundalini, Tantra, general books on sex (Joy of Sex) became
popular.
By the late 1970s and 1980s, a
plethora of “Tao of” books…
“Tao” Centers.
With the New Age, Daoism became
a vehicle for feminist and
ecological thought.
But what was happening in China
at the same time…?
Qigong in PRC (DP)
By the time the Communist Party
of China (CCP) took power in
1949, the Quanzhen monastic order had attained recognition as an
official
religion and could thus enjoy a limited degree of religious freedom.
All the
other traditions I have described as claiming a link to Daoism –
the body
cultivation, sectarian groups, and ritual specialists were to be
discarded as
“feudal superstition”. At the same time, however, some CCP
officials took an
interest in longevity and body cultivation techniques for their health
benefits. They undertook a project of secularizing the techniques under
the new
category of qigong. These practices thus moved from the popular
religious and Daoist milieu into the hospitals and sanatoria of the new
state
in the 1950’s.
Qigong was banned in the
Cultural Revolution, but in
defiance of official condemnations a new model of mass practice in
public parks
was popularized in Beijing
in the 1970’s. By the end of the 70’s, with the Cultural
Revolution concluded,
senior government officials encouraged the propagation of qigong.
Thousands of masters, many of whom had Daoist backgrounds, came out of
obscurity and started teaching their methods under the name of qigong.
However, the religious roots could not be completely eliminated. Some
popular
methods induced trance states in which practitioners had visions of
deities and
Daoist immortals. Many qigong methods were steeped in Daoist
or Buddhist
cosmology and symbolism. Many qigong masters were seen as
having miraculous
healing powers through their ability to project vital energy or qi
to
other people. Some, including several of China’s most powerful
political
leaders as well as its most influential scientists, believed that this qi
was the key to a new worldwide scientific revolution. Enthusiasm for qigong
reached
its peak at the end of the 1980’s – around 100 million
people were practicing qigong. Through qigong, many
people became
interested in Daoism.
By the mid 1990’s,
however, for a number of reasons the
political support for qigong declined, some scientists began
to wage a
heated polemic against the “pseudo-science” and
“superstition” of many qigong practices, and the
general climate became
unfavorable to qigong in
China. Most of the famous qigong masters emigrated to the
United States,
Australia, Canada, France, and other Western countries, where they
could find a
more welcoming environment in the New Age and alternative medicine
worlds.
Daoist Identity (ES)
Who would become a Daoist?
American Daoist identity provides
both a loose set of values and practices and a grounded feeling of
history and
tradition. Thus Daoist identity is both fluid and grounded at the same
time.
Individually tailored,
body-centered spirituality.
Mix-and-match practices.
All this is present at Tao Garden
here in Chiang Mai…
Conclusion: Tao Garden
(DP)
Tao
Garden
founded by Mantak Chia, a Thai-born Chinese
who learned Daoist body techniques from a master in Hong Kong and developed them into
“Universal Tao” system that is
designed to be compatible with Western sensibilities. This is the most
widespread form of Daoist body cultivation in the West. Tao Garden
attracts students from around the world. Although cut off from the
Chinese
world. But now, Chia’s chief American disciple takes Westerners
on pilgrimage
to Chinese Daoist sites. Tao Garden also invites Quanzhen monk from
Mainland China
to teach.
Daoism has become globalized, and the center of this is here in Chiang
Mai.
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