When was taoism

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. Besides the Great Dao the actual history of the universe , we can speak of tian nature:sky daos , which are also descriptive.

Dao s that advise us to accept or live by our nature, in effect, choose among equally natural dao s. Since we have natural ways to reform or compensate for our natures. Any dao we can choose or interpret is natural in the sense that it has for us at the time some physical realization—sound waves or pixels on a computer screen.

All dao s available for choice or recommendation are natural. If determinism is true, the Great Dao is the only tian nature:sky dao and every available dao for normative choice is a proper part of Great Dao. Thus de links dao with correct performance. The character ming names really includes all words. Grammatically, Chinese common nouns share more features with proper names and one-place predicates transitive verbs and adjectives than do familiar Indo-European nouns.

Chinese common nouns lack case and gender markings and Chinese grammar requires no grammatical noun-verb agreement. Like mass nouns, Chinese common nouns do not undergo pluralization and can stand alone as noun phrases. For related reasons, Chinese analysis postulated no substance-attribute structure to adjective-noun relations. Each names a region or part of the world. The most familiar statement of a widely shared implicit theory of names in ancient China is expressed beautifully in the Daode Jing.

To learn and understand a word is to know what is and what is not picked out by it. In the Daode Jing , the theory lends itself to a linguistic idealist interpretation. An interesting near homonym is ming command-fate which was routinely used as a verbal form of ming names. Another meaning-related near homonym is ming discerning:clear. There is less controversy about the meaning of chang constant , but its uses and importance in Chinese thought are not well understood.

We can better appreciate the uses of chang constant in ancient Chinese by analogy with causal and reliability theories in epistemology and semantics. He pointed to a related use in the Mozi which advocates that we should chang constant language that promotes [good? This quasi-imperative use underlies its role in Daoist relativistic and skeptical analysis. The Daode Jing has the most famous example of its use in the parallel opening couplet where it modifies both dao and ming names.

Mohist use of the concept is instructive. Tian nature:sky is a paradigm of constancy. The Mohists alluded to its regularity and universality to contrast with the temporary and local authority of social conventions and guidance by authority. They cast their disagreement with Confucians in terms of who offered a constant dao. This seems to bridge three measures of constancy.

Daoists, as the Laozi famously puts it, suggest that any dao that can dao guide or be used as a guide will not be a constant dao. It follows this claim with a parallel claims about ming names. Any name that can name is an inconstant name. This is arguably offered as the explanation of the inconstancy of dao asserted in the earlier sentence. The first character is not the main problem. In modern Mandarin, the character has two different tones. So a belief that S is P takes the de re form [believer] takes S to be wei P.

Ancient Chinese has several meaning-related homonyms, including wei is-only , wei to be called , and wei artificial. The cluster of concepts correspond to the pivotal Daoist contrast between tian nature and ren the human.

Little in the Laozi or earlier Chinese thought suggests any development of a distinction between voluntary, deliberate, or purposive action and its opposite. The most famous expression of this ideal comes in the paean to the butcher who carved oxen with the grace of a dancer.

Such behavior requires a focus and absorption that is incompatible with ordinary self-consciousness, purpose and rehearsal of instructions. Besides this loss of a sense of the ego, the experience is credited with creating a unity between the actor and the external world, and with a sense of heightened awareness and tranquility that comes with the masterful practice of an acquired skill.

Being a scholar-official is as much a skill as being a butcher and one may practice it with the same attitude of inner emptiness. Neo-Daoists conform to Confucian roles without regarding or interpreting them as ultimately right—or as anything else. With the importation of Indo-European Buddhism from India, wu-wei started to be interpreted via the Western conceptual apparatus contrasting desire or purpose and reason.

This shaped the modern Chinese interpretation and probably undermined the ideal. The activist 19 th century reformer, Kang You -wei Kang have- wei took the denial of the slogan as his scholarly name. It metaphorically represents the result of forgetting ming names and desires See Wu-wei. When societies adopt names or terms, it does so in order to instill and regulate desires for one of the pair created by the name-induced distinction.

Thus Daoist forgetting requires forgetting names and distinctions, but in doing so, frees itself from the socially induced, unnatural desires that cause strife and unhappiness in society e. Questions of textual theory are the focus of the bulk of modern scholarship. They include these kinds of questions.

This effectively replaces philosophical content with mythical narrative and claims of pedigree or status of the founder. This aversion to exposition is compounded with the traditional view that Daoist philosophy defies rational clarification.

This philosophical site, accordingly, will give only abbreviated attention to these textual theories. The traditional story centers on Laozi and the Daode Jing.

It credits the text to Laozi who was stopped at the pass while attempting to leave China to go to India and come to be known as Buddha. The keeper of the pass required him to leave his dao behind so Laozi dashed off odd quick characters of poetry. Zhuangzi inherited the insights and developed the Daoist outlook in parable form. Modern text detectives, Chinese and Western, have successfully cast doubt on this traditional view.

However, their alternative scenarios, while collectively more plausible than the traditional story, are diverse enough to lead a skeptic to conclude that no one knows the correct textual theories—even if some of them turn out to be true.

Textual theorists themselves tend more toward interpretive skepticism. They argue that textual theory is prior to and more certain than interpretation—which they treat as subjective projection. They would reject textual skepticism as defeatism and as self-defeating for an interpretive theorist.

Current textual thinking tends toward the view that all the classical Chinese texts were being continuously edited and maintained in textual communities over sometimes hundreds of years. This editing and emendation often reflected interaction with other text communities as they worked out alternative answers to shared questions. Text selection for interpretive and theoretical purposes becomes a more normative issue—which text is best? Textual theory was further complicated when archeologists unearthed new copies of the Daode Jing.

The traditionally dominant text was named after one of the earliest commentators—the Wang Bi version. Most translations deviated only slightly from that traditional version prior to the first archeological discovery in In that year, two versions of the Daode Jing were unearthed in a Mawang Dui tomb site. The discovery energized textual theorists who reasoned that as the earliest physically extant text, the Mawang Dui must be closer to the original should be treated as authoritative.

The discovery was quickly followed by a rash of new translations of the Dedao Jing the two parts of the text were reversed in the newly discovered manuscripts.

The argument for its authoritative status was weak. In fact, the discovery tended to confirm the evolutionary, multiple-editor view, while this enthusiasm treated textual evolution as if it took place by successive operations on a single physical text item. Wang Bi probably had access to a range of that population in selecting his version.

The archeological discovery was of a single instance—a branch of the stream. The historical circumstances of the presumed time of burial further undermined the optimistic assumption that the Mawang Dui was the original.

The Qin had set out to destroy traditional learning. The later Han ostensibly cherished and tried to recover textual scholarship.

In the succeeding Han, text collection, veneration preservation and copying became the norm. The theory that the Mawang Dui was the authoritative text assumes that the destructive political frenzy at the end of classical period had not affected the integrity of transmission that produced the Mawang Dui instances.

Then it must insist that in the succeeding period of textual veneration and preservation, radical changes were introduced into the entire population of copies and versions of the text so that all those on which Wang Bi drew on after the Han were corrupted—and in similar ways—from the orthodox Mawang Dui version. The opposite story is more probable—the sample was a version written with punctuation and interpretive emendation for a member of the superstitious ruling class.

Taking it as representing of the whole population of texts at the time is an elementary sampling error. The Mawang Dui fervor was further undermined in when another discovery of a still older pair of abridged texts dating from before BCE turned out to be more like the traditional text the order of selection reflected the traditional daode arrangement.

Even more notably, it strongly confirmed the gradual accretion view of the text suggesting that the Daode Jing was still in the process of being compiled at that late date. This locates the composition of the Daode Jing and the Zhuangzi almost side-by-side. On the other hand, there is little positive evidence that he did and there are many alternative stories of how he came to be regarded as the author of the Daode Jing.

The issues, however, are also separate. Laozi could have existed and not written any of the text attributed to him. On balance, the existence of Zhuangzi is considerably more probable, though little is known of him that is not from the text bearing his name—many of whose stories are obviously fanciful. In China today, parts of the traditional theory have been resurrected.

Some scholars are arguing for a pre-Confucius date for Laozi on various textual grounds especially poetic structure. So far, one important implication of modern textual theory has had little effect on popular interpretations. If we inevitably rely on the stories in the Zhuangzi — for our knowledge about him , then the known chief intellectual influence on Zhuangzi should be treated as the sophist and linguistic theorist, Hui Shi, not Laozi or the Daode Jing.

Textual theories of the Zhuangzi are more elaborate and consistent. Though they differ in details and identification of parts, text scholars largely converge on attributing the chapters, outside of the eight assigned to Zhuangzi himself, to students of Zhuangzi, to primitivists who are associated with Yang Zhu Yangists , and to other more eclectic and religious writers associated probably with the production of the other texts associated with Daoism.

Probably the association of the Laozi and Zhuangzi texts began when students of Zhuangzi noticed some shared or reinforcing themes expressed in a contemporary anonymous textual group working on the evolving Daode Jing. Perhaps both groups appreciated the affinity and began to exchange themes, expressions, and related lines of thought. This is a rough table of the state of textual theories of the two defining texts of Daoism. There are four main questions; the table lists, for each question, the traditional story, the range of theories, and the most plausible answer to the question.

Essentially the upshot is that they borrowed heavily from the two classical texts, often changing the context and failing to understand the philosophical point. The quotations they used were embedded in popular cosmological and religious contexts. The most influential treatments of Daoism are those that place their discussion in more general accounts of Chinese Philosophy.

Some important ones are:. Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society. National Geographic Society. Gina Borgia, National Geographic Society. For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. They will best know the preferred format.

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You cannot download interactives. Ancient China is responsible for a rich culture, still evident in modern China. From small farming communities rose dynasties such as the Zhou B. E , Qin B. E , and Ming C. Each had its own contribution to the region. During the Zhou Dynasty, for example, writing was standardized, iron working refined, and famous thinkers like Confucius and Sun-Tzu lived and shared their philosophies.

Learn more about the history and rich culture of Ancient China with this curated resource collection. Confucianism is one of the most influential religious philosophies in the history of China, and it has existed for over 2, years.

It is concerned with inner virtue, morality, and respect for the community and its values. From the mythic origins of the Chinese dynasties to the eventual fall of the last imperial house, Chinese emperors have long fought to maintain control over one of the most enduring empires on Earth. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience.

Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. The Origins of Taoism Last updated On this page Page options Print this page. Origins Taoism has no founder and no founding date. Livia Kohn states that: Taoism as a religion began in the year C. See also.