Taoism For Dummies

Jonathan Herman

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118423981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religioni asiatiche

The definitive guide to understanding Taoism—no matter your background or faith

Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching is the second most translated book in the world, and the practice of religious Taoism is on the rise in China, where adherents currently number in the hundreds of millions. Yet there remains a remarkable lack of reliable information about Taoism for curious westerners. Taoism For Dummies provides comprehensive coverage of Taoism's origins in China's Chou Dynasty, its underlying quietist principles, its emergence as a major religion, various interpretation of its core texts, including both Eastern and Western interpretations, key Taoist concepts, and much more. It also provides a fascinating glimpse of Taoism in contemporary China.

• The ideal guide for readers interested in this influential religion, as well as those taking an introductory course on Taoism or Chinese Religion
• A valuable source of insight for those with an interest in modern Chinese culture and beliefs

Part I

Navigating the World of Taoism

In this part . . .

When you take your first steps into the world of Taoism, be prepared for some basic questions to come fast and furious. Is Taoism a philosophy or a religion? What’s the relationship between Taoism and other Chinese traditions, like Confucianism, Buddhism, or folk religion? What are the different types of Taoism? What are the most common misconceptions about Taoism? How is Taoism different from Western traditions?

Sit back, and get ready to participate in a great adventure. Or better yet, lean forward and prepare to devour every word, because Taoism can be fascinating, sophisticated, and inspiring, and it can also surprise you at every turn.

Chapter 1

An Introduction to Taoism

In This Chapter

Getting oriented to Taoism

Tracing Taoist history

Considering Taoist ideas

Examining Taoist practice

Not much more than a half-century ago, many Americans had their main exposure to Chinese people and things Chinese from an exotic meal at the local Chinese restaurant, a touristy adventure in a big-city Chinatown, or even a Charlie Chan movie. Today, things have certainly changed, and the Chinese presence in America (and in the world) has come a long way from pu-pu platters, isolated ethnic enclaves, and cinematic sages speaking fortune-cookie dialogue in broken English. Today nearly 4 million Chinese people (or people of at least partial Chinese descent) live in the United States, and Chinese people may make up close to 5 percent of the Canadian population. What’s more, Chinese people now participate in pretty much every aspect of modern American culture — their contributions to schools, neighborhoods, businesses, and local communities are as important and as visible as those of any other American. And, by the way, you just may have heard somewhere that China is now an important global economic and political power, too!

So, what could possibly be a better time for picking up a few pointers on Taoism, one of China’s oldest (and most interesting) indigenous religious traditions? If you’re not Chinese, learning about Taoism could help you gain some insight into Chinese religious, philosophical, and cultural sensibilities. If you are Chinese, it’s a chance to get to know your own background and history a little better. But the funny thing is that even though Taoism has informed much of Chinese identity, it isn’t the easiest thing to find. Very few Chinese people in America identify themselves specifically as Taoists, and most communities don’t have Taoist temples. And when you do find a Taoist temple or teaching center, you may find that the staff and students consist entirely of non-Chinese people. In other words, despite the unprecedented integration of Chinese in the West, and even with the deluge of “Tao of” readers on bookstore shelves, Taoism is still pretty much a mystery to many people.

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Taoism or Daoism?

Maybe you already know that the first syllable of Taoism is pronounced dow (as in the Dow Jones Industrial Average), or that some books spell it Daoism rather than Taoism. Maybe you’ve noticed that the capital of China used to be called “Peking” but today is called “Beijing” (even though you still order Peking duck at Chinese restaurants). And textbooks used to call the longtime leader of China “Mao Tse-tung,” but today they call him “Mao Zedong.” What’s going on here?

Part of it is the difference in regional dialects, but the bigger issue is that the sources that regularly deal with things Chinese — texts, newspapers, websites — use two different Romanization systems, which are sometimes in a kind of competition with each other. The Wade–Giles system, which spells Tao with a T, took hold in the early 1900s and dominated almost all publications for most of the 20th century. However, the Chinese were never nuts about the system and eventually developed Hanyu Pinyin, the system with the D, in the late 1950s. This one started to pick up international recognition by the early 1980s, though Taiwan initially resisted it, and many areas with large Chinese populations — like American Chinatowns — have been slow to adopt it. In some circles, choosing one system over another could be perceived as making a political statement, but none of that is figuring into the choice for this book. We’ve gone with Taoism for this book because the publisher judged that more readers would recognize Taoism than Daoism. So, this book uses the older Wade–Giles system, except when referring to place names (like Beijing or Xi’an) where a different spelling will probably be more familiar to most readers.

So, why does the Wade–Giles system spell things with a T even though they’re pronounced like a D? Is this some bizarre code that only nerdy polyglots can understand? There are actually a few reasons:

There’s no Chinese alphabet. Each character has a specific pronunciation (including a particular tone) that you can only know if someone else (like your parents) teaches it to you; you can’t just read the letters and know the exact pronunciation.

There are lots of sounds in Chinese that don’t have exact parallels in English. Every time you read a Romanized Chinese word or name, it’s really just an approximation of that word.

Although there is no Chinese alphabet, many characters do have certain phonetic characteristics — calligraphic hints as to how they could be pronounced — and usually, words that are etymologically related sound similar. For example, some characters that are pronounced tao (with a t sound) are related and look similar to some that are pronounced dao (with a d sound). So, the creators of the Wade–Giles system asked a question that would only matter to specialists: How on Earth can we put all the taos and all the daos close to each other in Chinese-English dictionaries that are arranged alphabetically?

Their solution was ingenious . . . or kind of crazy, depending on how you look at it. Try the following exercise: Hold the open palm of your hand right in front of your face — up close to your lips, but not touching them — and say the English word tie. Do you notice that you get a breath of air blowing against your palm? Now say the word die. Do you notice that your lips, teeth, and tongue seem to be doing the exact same thing as when you said tie, but without the breath of air on your palm? That’s because tie and die are essentially the same words, but one is aspirated (that is, breathed with a burst of air), and the other is not. And so, the Wade–Giles architects decided that t’ao (with the apostrophe) would be read as written, with the aspirated t sound, while tao (without the apostrophe) would be read with the unaspirated d sound. And — voilà! — tao is pronounced like dow! And that’s why pao is pronounced like bow and kao is pronounced like cow. You can check out Appendix C for a complete pronunciation guide to the Wade–Giles system used in this book.

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Getting the Lay of the Taoist Land

As you get oriented to Taoism, you quickly find out that there seem to be lots of different kinds of Taoism and Taoists, and that it’s often hard to figure out how any one of these “Taoisms” relates to any other. Part of this is that the Chinese aren’t always consistent in how they use the terms, and they may even apply them to people and practices that technically aren’t really Taoist. It’s especially common for people to call various nondenominational family or community customs “popular Taoism” or “folk Taoism,” just because they’re clearly not Buddhist and no one’s quite sure what category to put them in. Certainly, a big part of navigating Taoism is the process of sorting one strain from another.

Along these same lines, Taoism (like every other one of the world’s major traditions) changes over time, and not always in a linear fashion that you can chronicle with a nice, neat, century-by-century timeline. If you try to imagine a Taoist family tree, you need to be prepared for lots of gnarled branches, limbs that snap suddenly and then somehow seem to regrow again in some other location, roots that entangle with those of other trees and then become indistinguishable from each other, and oddly shaped fruits that look and taste completely different from other fruits growing on different vines on the very same tree. It is, to put it mildly, a tangled family tree.

The first step to keeping all the Taoisms straight in your mind is to develop a certain working vocabulary for classifying Taoism. This often involves examining the categories you hear most often online and in textbooks — like “philosophical Taoism” and “religious Taoism” — and then moving on to more careful and more nuanced language and divisions. You can find a discuss...