When was daoism founded

In a larger sense, since Daoism functioned in imperial China as a retreat and withdrawal from the struggles of the political arena, one might say that in a very general way the current relaxation of political pressure in reaction against the excesses of the Gang of Four represents a Daoistic phase of Chinese Maoism. Excerpted and adapted from Wm. DeBary, ed. Arthur P. Wolf, "Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors," in his ed. This anthology contains excellent and readable translations of poems, biographies, essays, and stories that are very successful in conveying religious attitudes.

A useful resource for classroom selections. The drafts were critiqued by the social studies teachers who attended with an eye to supplementing and correcting the information in textbooks and other materials used by teachers. The two articles should read as a pair;they complement each other in much the same way these two religions complemented each other throughout Chinese history.

Since Taoism is an coined, anglicized word, our choice is not to put it in the pinyin, in spite of the fact that we have changed "the Tao," the way, to "the Dao. It remains for the future to determine which will predominate. Unsupported Browser Detected. Daoism The Way. Notes Excerpted and adapted from Wm. Wolf, "Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors," pp. Author: Judith A. China Learning Initiatives. The Three Teachings. How Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism complement one another. Read on to learn about the "fourth teaching.

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Religious Influence on Korean Art. An overview of religious influence on Korean art throughout history. Religion in Vietnam. An introductory essay on Vietnamese world view throughout the ages. He is sometimes included in the list of Huang-Lao thinkers and cited as a source of Legalist thinking.

We will not attempt here to reconcile this latter with the essentially Daoist view presented in the Zhuangzi history. In religious language, we can describe this as worshipping dao guide rather than tian nature:sky. The key insight here is that like God and Nature appeal to tian nature:sky is normatively empty. All authority presupposes some dao guide. They even more clearly argue that the appeal to tian nature:sky could justify the thief as well as the sage.

For the general public, not cliques; changing and without selfishness; decisive but without any control; responsive to things without dividing in two. Not absorbed with reflection. Not calculating in knowing how. Not choosing among natural kinds and flowing along with them. They took bonding all the natural kinds together as the key. Great dao guide can embrace it but cannot distinguish it.

Dao guide does not leave anything out. He lived together with shi and fei , mixed acceptable and avoidable. He was indifferent to everything. If he was pushed he went, if pulled he followed—like a leaf whirling in the stream, like a feather in a wind, like dust on a millstone. He was complete and distinguished fei nothing …. Even a clod of earth cannot miss Dao.

It is really very strange…. Shen Dao avers that there is just one such total history—one actual past and one actual future. The actual is, obviously, natural so the great dao the natural pattern of behaviors, events and processes requires no learning, no knowledge, no language or shi-fei this-not this distinctions. The crucial implication of his approach is that great dao has no normative force. Our death is part of great dao—down to its very moment.

It recommends a particular possible future history. Why does Shen Dao think we should give up guiding ourselves by shared moral prescriptions? His stoic attitude and some of his slogans suggest that like the Stoics, he was a fatalist. We should not make shi-fei this-not this judgments. Consequently, he should not be saying that we should follow the great dao, because that would be to shi this:right whatever actually happens.

It simply happens. Further, his injunction against shi-fei judgments is an injunction—a negative prescription. The concept of knowledge it uses is prescriptive knowledge. In form and intent, it is a prescription—a dao guide. If we obey it, we disobey it. This is our first example of Daoist paradox! Still, it places Shen Dao in the dialectic just before Laozi, who directly precedes Zhuangzi.

The Zhuangzi ordering is theoretically informative, though chronologically inaccurate. We will discuss, here, mainly the contributions the Laozi makes to this Daoist dialectic. For a more complete and detailed treatment of the philosophy of the text, see the entry under Laozi. The most famous line of Daoist meta-theory of dao opens the Daode Jing. It thus shifts the focus of meta-discourse about dao from grounding its authority in nature to issues of language and the role of ming words in dao -ing.

Since words are not constant, no dao that can be conveyed using words can be. What is being denied in saying such dao are not constant? The text does not elaborate on the concept, however the issue in ancient Chinese thought emerges as the crux of the dispute between Mohists and Confucians. Mohists attempted to regiment the debate by insisting on fa standards for interpreting guiding language.

The typical Confucian way of rectifying a name is to set an example—either of correct use of the term or correct action in following a dao that contains the term. The other reading is interpretive—no pattern of correct past use no social practice uniquely determines what concrete behavior counts as correct here-now or in the future. So, as Mozi had argued, tradition cannot determine what is the correct dao , but, the Laozi seems to add, that is so even presupposing a tradition.

It simply cannot be conveyed. The rest of the text—the very fact that there is more to the text—makes these two readings, particularly the last, the most common ones.

However the traditional story of Laozi undermines the argument for placing too much emphasis on the fact that after this opening stanza, he goes on to write a text. It suggests that he writes only because compelled to do so by the keeper of the pass. We can attribute to the Laozi the next development in Chinese pragmatics of language, how language shapes action.

Laozi draws illustrations using ming word pairs—opposites. When we learn a way of using a word e. This is how we pick out how to act—what to pick up, put down, go toward and so on. We interpret a dao by dividing things up into types. We learn this in concrete practice as we avoid or pursue the things named. Thus, with the names we acquire a disposition to behavior toward that type—we acquire a socialized value or desire for one of the two discriminants.

These acquired desires then shape our wei deeming:action. Much of the further reasoning found in the Laozi follows that of Song Xing. The artificially created desires lead to unnecessary competition and strife.

When we see that they are not natural, acquiring socialized desires e. And most important, acquiring knowledge in this way is losing the natural spontaneity and becoming subject to social control. The text, accordingly, entices us to free ourselves from this system signified by the slogan wu-wei lack-action. We are to set about forgetting all our socialization and return to the state of a newborn babe. The bulk of the Daode Jing is thus given over to motivating this paradoxical attitude.

One stark difference between the two main texts of Daoism is the relation to the School of Names. The Laozi , though clearly having a theory of the pragmatics of naming, betrays neither exposure to the doctrines nor the analytical terminology developed by the dialectical Mohists for dealing with theory of language. The Zhuangzi clearly does reveal that exposure.

To understand this phase in the development of Daoism, we note briefly what the outstanding linguistic issues were and how they were formulated, then we will look at the implications of Daoist responses—particularly those found in the Zhuangzi. The focus on ming words:names grows from recognizing the interpretive problem concerning acting on some guide. The disputes about dao are intimately tied to issues about words—in particular, what is to count as a correct use and what action or objects count as following the guidance.

The early Mohists advocated using a utilitarian standard to determine both the correct application of words to actions and the choice of word order in social guiding discourse.

Thus language content and conventions of interpretation should be governed by the utility principle. We should mark the distinctions that underlie names in ways that trace patterns of objective similarity and difference in things. This realism governs the correct ways both to use terms and to interpret them.

We rely on utility to determine how we structure terms into strings in guidance—in discourse dao. So, for example, a thief is a man—is governed by the rules of similarity. This realism led the later Mohists to linguistic conclusions that challenged any anti-language attitude—including those expressed by early Daoists. First, the later Mohists argued that in any disagreement about how to distinguish realities with names, there was a right answer. It may, however, be hard to know or prove.

This undermines both the nihilistic and the anti-language options to understanding Laozi. Second, Mohists argued that any attempt to formulate the anti-language position was self condemning. Other figures classified in the School of Names responded to the Mohist realists. Gongsun Long mentioned sporadically in the Zhuangzi took himself to be defending Confucian accounts of rectifying names and Hui Shi constructs what looks like a relativist challenge to Later Mohist accounts.

Hui Shi implicitly addressed the claim that the correct use of words depends on objective patterns of similarity and difference. What we know of his writings which the Zhuangzi history suggests were prodigious is mainly a sequence of theses cited at the end of the Zhuangzi history. A small elephant is considerably larger than a huge ant! So correct naming must not be based on objective distinctions in the world, but on our projections from a point of view or purpose in using them.

From this, according to the list of propositions in the Zhuangzi history, Hui Shi apparently concluded that we can cluster things in arbitrary ways.

This insight is not taken to be about sets and members, but about divisions into parts and wholes. From internal evidence, we would judge Hui Shi to have had much more influence on Zhuangzi than his knowledge of Laozi or of the contents of the Daode Jing as we know it.

Hui Shi appears more often in dialogue with Zhuangzi than any other figure and in ways that suggest a long-term philosophical involvement and interaction, like relationship of philosophical friends. Zhuangzi marks the high point of mature Daoist philosophical theory as he finds a better way to answer later Mohist challenges than did Hui Shi. The way to avoid the anti-language trap is:.

However, its Daoist thrust consists in depriving the absolutists of what they really want—the ability to declare that their opponent violates tian nature:sky or lacks its similar approval. We can only answer normative questions from within dao , not from the perspective of nature or any other authority.

We make normative or evaluative judgments only against the background of a presupposed way of justifying and interpreting them. The judgments depend on some discourse dao. The priority of dao over tian nature:sky underwrites the themes of dependency and relativism that pervade the Zhuangzi and ultimately the skepticism, the open-minded toleration and the political anarchism or disinterest in political activity or involvement.

Yet, while nature is not a standard, Daoism does countenance natural dao s. Mohism had presupposed one a natural impulse to benefit as had the Confucian intuitionist, Mencius a natural moral tendency in the heart-mind.

So the dependence on dao multiplies endlessly. The Zhuangzi hints at this in a famous image, humans live and act in ways as fish live and act in water. Being in a sea of ways is being human. We cannot get outside of dao to any more ultimate kind of authority. These meta-reflections inform relativist perspectival or pluralist and skeptical themes in the inner chapters of the Zhuangzi.

The style furthers both themes. Rather than speaking with an authorial voice, the text is filled with fantasy conversations between perspectives, including those of millipedes, convicts, musicians and the wind.

Does Zhuangzi then have anything to teach us? His is an example of the key lesson—open-minded receptivity to all the different voices of dao —particularly those who have run afoul of human authority or seem least authoritative. Each actual naturally existing dao has insights. They may be surprisingly valuable—as viewed from within our different ways. On the flip side, we gain nothing from trying to imagine a perfect or ultimate source of guidance. If there were a perfect man or ideal observer-actor, we probably could not understand him.

Would his ways have any relevance for us with our limits? Perfection may well look like its opposite to us. Laozi may have been tempted to postulate a perfect dao. It would be a dao with no social contribution. So the Zhuangzi differs in this important attitude from the Laozi —we need not try to escape from social life and conventions. Conventions underlie the possibility of communication and are, thus, useful. His most famous example concerns a butcher—hardly a prestige or status profession—who carves beef with the focus and absorption of a virtuoso dancer in an elegantly choreographed performance.

Other examples include lute players, cicada catchers, wheelwrights and logicians. Yet in the throes of skillful performance, we still can perfect them more and no matter how good we may become at one thing, may be miserable at others—particularly at conveying the skills to others.

Finally politically, Zhuangzi famously prefers fishing to high status and political office. Confucians and Mohists disagreed bitterly about what dao to follow in a society, but agreed without question that proper order was achieved only when a society followed a single dao.

Nothing requires suppressing or eliminating a dao that works from some point of view. The Zhuangzi text, as we noted, contains the writings of a range of thinkers loosely allied with these Daoist themes.

Large sections lean toward the primitivism of Laozi and others emphasize the relativism, and still others become eclectic and uncritical in their openness. For a more complete account see the entry on Zhuangzi and Texts and Textual Theory below.

The establishment of an authoritarian empire and the long-lived but philosophically dogmatic Confucian Han dynasty temporarily drained the vibrancy from Chinese philosophical thought. Classical Daoist philosophy was successfully extinguished by the imperial suppression of analytic thought. Confucian authoritarians like Xunzi argued that analysis of names leads to confusion and disorder. Only Huang-Lao thinking remained as a live influence and archivist of Daoist texts.

Its superstitions and cosmologies mingled in the emerging eclectic Han-Confucianism. The fall of the Han some years later saw the emergence of a modified worldview drawing on the preserved texts which we call Neo-Daoism See Neo-Daoism.

Their philosophy reinvested a stoic spirit which they interpreted as the point of their new-Daoism. Thus they were Confucians on the outside and Daoists inside. This elaborated, for Neo-Daoists, the concept of wu-wei non-deeming action. The Book of Changes with its yin-yang account of change and its generational cosmology thus entered the list of Daoist texts and the Daode Jing was transformed in conventional wisdom into a detached cosmology.

Wang Bi identified dao with non-being while still treating it as the source of all creation—the basic substance which he associated with the taiji Great ultimate of the Yijing. His cosmology developed an interesting twist on that of Wang Bi. Non-being, he argued, did not, after all, exist. It was simply nothing and thus could not create anything. Simply put, there is no non-being—there is only being.

It generates and changes itself constantly by the totality the interrelations among its parts. Pragmatically, the two pictures were not very different. Each still had nothing at the center Daoist sage and being Confucian King around the edges, but Guo Xiang deemphasized any lines of force from non-being to being and emphasized instead the situation and contextual relations within the realm of being.

Buddhism came to China at a time when the intellectuals were hungry for fresh ideas, but it arrived with massive handicaps. That issue resonated superficially with a Buddhist puzzle about the nature of Nirvana. If Nirvana was the opposite of Samsara the eternal cycle of rebirth or reincarnation then was it a state of being or of non-being?

Nirvana is the achievement of the Buddha—the expression of Buddha-nature. So the cosmology of this version of Buddhism, like that of the Neo-Daoists, aided achievement of some goal. Realization of the puzzling nature of this state led to Buddhahood. Meantime, Buddhism came armed with a paradox that would delight thinkers of a Daoist turn of mind—the fabled paradox of desire.

Rebirth was caused by desire and Nirvana could be achieved only by the cessation of desire. That meant that in order to achieve Nirvana, one had to cease to want to achieve it. This argument informs the Mahayana notion of a Bodhisattva, who qualifies for Nirvana but voluntarily stays behind in the cycle of rebirth to help the rest of us.

Enlightenment could only be achieved all at once. This conclusion was also a consequence of the Buddhist view that the ego is an illusion. The Mahayana wing of Buddhism was the more successful in China because this implicit egalitarianism—everyone could be Buddha, just as everyone can be a Daoist or Confucian Sage.

The other Buddhist philosophy that had the greatest appeal in China was Madyamika, which answered the question of the nature of Nirvana or the Buddha nature by not answering it—Neo-Daoist quietism.

This helped blend discussion of dao and Buddha-nature even more and fueled the eventually widespread Confucian bias that they were the same basic religion. Modeled thus in style and progressively in content, Daoist religion, the quasi-religious Neo-Daoist stoical quietism began to blend with Buddhism.

In China, the two dominant theoretical Buddhist sects reflect the cosmological structures of the two Neo-Daoists. We can understand its Daoist character by returning to the paradox of desire. Pay attention! Daoism has a reputation of being impenetrable mainly because of its central concept, dao. Dao Tao is a pivotal concept of ancient Chinese thought. We can only offer synonyms: e. We typically use talk of ways in advising someone.

Ways are deeply practical i. Dao is also used concretely to refer to a road or path in Chinese, e. Roads guide us and facilitate our arrival at a desired destination. They are, as it were, physically real guiding or prescriptive structures. Though practical, describing something as a dao or a way need not be to recommend it. The Zhuangzi reminds us that thievery has a dao. Chinese nouns lack pluralization, so dao functions grammatically like a singular or mass term and semantically like a plural.

What we think of as one way would be one part of dao. We partition dao by modification. So we can talk about, e. Dao is a little like the water—an expanse constituting the realm in which humans live, work and play. To be human is to be in a realm of ways to guide us. Daoists are more likely to play with these metaphysical metaphors than are Confucians or Mohists—who mainly point to their favored part of dao.

Western philosophers have endlessly analyzed and dissected a cluster of terms thought to be central to our thinking, e.

Dao , by contrast, was the center of Chinese philosophical discussion. The centrality tempts interpreters to identify dao with the central concepts of the Western philosophical agenda, but that is to lose the important difference between the two traditions. Dao remains essentially a concept of guidance, a prescriptive or normative term.

The best known example is the famous first line of the Dao de Jing. In a famous Confucian example of this use, Confucius criticizes dao -ing the people with laws rather than dao -ing them with ritual. This verbal sense is now often marked by a graphic variation dao to direct.

Throughout classical texts, we find that dao s are spoken, heard, forgotten, transmitted, learned, studied, understood and misunderstood, distorted, mastered, and performed with pleasure. Different countries and historical periods have different dao. Footprints of the linguistic component of the concept of dao are scattered through all kinds of modern Chinese compound words.

To know is to know a dao. It is in some ways too narrow and in others too broad. We can write, gesture, point, and exemplify as well as speak dao s. On the other hand, not all speaking writing etc. The activity of dao -ing is primarily normative: giving guidance. To dao is to put guidance into language—including body language e.

Roads or paths are embodied in a physical reality, but are not simply the reality. One feature that dao and speech share is the need for interpretation. But with dao the interpretation takes the form of xing walk:conduct , not that of a theory or a belief. In this respect, the relevant notion of interpretation is aesthetic. It is the kind of interpretation done when a conductor interprets a score, an actor a character in a play, a soldier his orders in the course of battle.

A complete metaphysics of dao requires a distinction between normative way types and interpretive, real-time tokens. Daoist theory does introduces the tokens most dramatically with Shen Dao who focuses on what he calls Great Dao—the actual history of the world past, present and future. That image draws our attention to a purely descriptive way—a way that is not a normative way not a guide.

That we can never free normative ways from ways of choosing and interpreting them. We are in a sea of dao. The artists—commissioned professionals, but also leading Daoist masters, adepts, scholar -amateurs, and even emperors—working in written, painted , sewn, sculpted, or modeled media, created an astonishingly eclectic body of works ranging from sublime evocations of cosmic principles to elaborate visions of immortal realms and paradises as well as visualizations of the Daoist pantheon, medicinal charts, and ritual implements.

Other works have a clear liturgical purpose, while the religious function of a third category of art objects is more ambiguous, reflecting the widespread assimilation of Daoist concepts and auspicious imagery in Chinese popular culture.

The Daoist sage Laozi is often shown riding on an ox or in an ox cart as he prepared to leave China by way of a pass to the West. Legend has it that he authored the Daodejing when the guard at the pass asked him to write down his teachings. A small bronze sculpture Images of the other paramount figure of Daoist philosophy, Zhuangzi, are less common, but The Pleasure of Fishes The horizontal landscape Cloudy Mountains A superbly crafted gilt-brass sculpture by a fifteenth-century artist The robe of a Daoist dignitary daoshi Beneficent Rain Two Ming-dynasty paintings depict members of the Daoist pantheon, which resembles a complex bureaucracy made up of deities in the form of stars, officials, marshals, and lords.

Star Deities of the Northern and Central Dippers Both images, which recall large-scale temple murals, were created as part of extensive sets of icons used in religious rituals similar to those performed by Buddhists.

The Lord of the Northern Palace, Zhenwu The Daoist deity The Investiture of a Daoist Deity Among the many divinities in the Daoist pantheon, few are as prominent as the Eight Immortals, a group of legendary figures that first became popular in the twelfth century Landscape representations often evoke Daoist themes, such as Spring Dawn over the Elixir Terrace Augustin, Birgitta.

Watt et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, Eichman, Shawn. Fong, Wen C. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, See on MetPublications.