Daoism and Environmental Philosophy

Nourishing Life

Eric S. Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429678226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Daoism and Environmental Philosophy explores ethics and the philosophy of nature in the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and related texts to elucidate their potential significance in our contemporary environmental crisis.

This book traces early Daoist depictions of practices of embodied emptying and forgetting and communicative strategies of undoing the fixations of words, things, and theembodied self. These are aspects of an ethics of embracing plainness and simplicity, nourishing the asymmetrically differentiated yet shared elemental body of life of the myriad things, and being responsively attuned in encountering and responding to things. These critical and transformative dimensions of early Daoism provide exemplary models and insights for cultivating a more expansive ecological ethos, environmental culture of nature, and progressive political ecology.

This work will be of interest to students and scholars interested in philosophy, environmental ethics and philosophy, religious studies, and intellectual history.

1 Introduction

Early Daoist ethics and the philosophy of nature

What is Daoism? An Initial Overview

“Dao” and “Daoism”

According to chapter 16 of the Daodejing 道德經, attributed to the mysterious quasi-mythical “old master” (Laozi 老子), all things arise from and return to the dao 道 (fuwu yunyun, ge fugui qigen 夫物芸芸, 各復歸其根).¹ What is this dao? Most ancient and classical Chinese forms of discourse employed this word. It is an ordinary Chinese expression still in use today signifying path, road, and way. Already in antiquity, the word had a variety of specialized meanings: it could name a specific teaching or method (such as the dao of Confucius 孔子 or Mozi 墨子) or could designate the ultimate reality and truth of things and the cosmos: the whole or the one beyond human discourse and understanding. The dao, according to the cosmological account in the “Originating in Dao” (yuandao 原道) chapter of the Huainanzi 淮南子 that heavily relies on the Daodejing, is the generative that shelters and opens, envelops and bestows, empties and fills.²

According to deep ecologist Arne Næss, Daoism is a motivational ecosophy of environmental wisdom for our times.³ But what is “Daoism”?⁴ Of course, every “-ism” is a formulaic conventional expression inadequate to what it would designate. There is again no single univocal answer to this question, and the expression is at risk of being excessively inclusive or overly exclusive. On the one hand, the expression “Daoism” is a contested multivocal term that incorporates a diverse array of ideas, practices, and texts, and reducing them to a common “-ism” inadequately reflects the historical record. On the other hand, modern scholarly and popular conceptions of Daoism have been formed through complex relations with indigenous sources and voices, and recourse to historical and existing Daoist sources, transmissions, and practices is necessary both to contest and develop alternatives to anachronistic and ideological interpretations that impose their own constructions onto Chinese materials. The present work will repeatedly face difficulties of what a new or reimagined teaching of dao would look like under current crisis conditions, generated by human economic and social organization, and how to indirectly translate and revise early Daoist perspectives and strategies in the context of contemporary environmentalism, in particular given its investment in prescriptive, normative, and activist ways of thinking and speaking that the teaching of dao in the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi 莊子 appears to subvert for the sake of fatalistic quietude.

Early Chinese sources are characterized by intertextual and interdiscursive references to competing teachings (such as those of Confucius and Mozi) and record arguments between their proponents. These early accounts form the basis of the subsequent classification of various schools or families of teachings (jia 家) during the rule of Emperor Wu of Han 漢武帝 (who reigned from 141–87 bce) in the early Han dynasty by Sima Tan 司馬談 (c.165–110 bce) and his son the historian Sima Qian 司馬遷 (c.145–c.86 bce).⁵ In the Historical Record (Shiji 史記), also called the Records of the Grand Historian (Taishigong shu 太史公書), Sima Qian retrospectively recast (further developing his father’s classification of six schools) the diverse discursive forms of the Spring and Autumn (Chunqiu shidai 春秋時代) and Warring States (Zhanguo shidai 戰國時代) periods (sixth century to 221 bce) as the “hundred schools of thought” (zhuzi baijia 諸子百家).⁶

The expression daojia 道家 (the lineage or family of the dao) addressed by the elder and younger Sima is not found in the Laozi, the Zhuangzi, or extant pre-Han sources.⁷ It was used to designate the politically-oriented form of Daoism called (combining the names of the Yellow Emperor [Huangdi 黃帝] and Laozi) Huanglao 黃老, a prevailing discourse in the early Han dynasty, and, in particular, the teaching of Laozi that remained one of its primary reference points that encompassed apparently related figures such as Zhuangzi. The enigmatic figure of Laozi, who appears to be an amalgamation of personages, was already associated with visions of the functioning of the cosmos, personal self-cultivation, and the art of political rule in the Daodejing that would be taken up in Huanglao documents.

Daoism, as transmissions of the way bearing overlapping yet distinctive family resemblances, does not only designate early texts linked with the names of early great masters such as Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Liezi 列子 (Lie Yukou 列禦寇, c. fifth century bce), who are unlikely to be the “authors” of the works traditionally attributed to them and may not have existed. Sima Qian included Laozi in the same chapter (Laozi Hanfei liezhuan 老子韓非列傳) as the “Legalist” (fajia 法家) Hanfeizi 韓非子 (third-century bce).⁸ This association is not coincidental, as the text attributed to Hanfei includes the earliest surviving commentaries on the Daodejing.⁹ There are close connections (as well as crucial differences as discussed later) between the text ascribed to Laozi, Huanglao Daoism, and the Legalist (the teaching that identifies dao with law) discourses that focused on means of power and administrative methods.¹⁰ Significant sources for interpreting “early” (or what some would rather classify as “proto-”) Daoism include eclectic excavated texts unearthed in Mawangdui 馬王堆 and anthologies that fused Daoist, Legalist, and also Confucian strategies of argumentation and interpretation such as the Huainanzi and the Guanzi 管子.¹¹

Transmissions of the dao between Religion and Philosophy

In addition to these early works composed and revised through the early Han period, lineages and transmissions of the dao can also encompass subsequent cultural, literary, philosophical, and religious movements linked to varying degrees with these sources, such as the eclectic literati of “mysterious learning” (xuanxue 玄學) active in the third and fourth centuries ce, which is controversially called “Neo-Daoism,” and so-called “religious Daoism” that combined these early sources with new revelations in the formation of its canon.¹²

The Daodejing commentary of the “mysterious learning” thinker Wang Bi 王弼 (226–249) elucidated an eclectic hybrid yet still in key respects (as his Ruist critics recurrently noted) fundamentally Laozian philosophy of “nature” and “nothingness” (in their early Chinese senses of ziran and wu) with a practical ethical-political intent.¹³ The Warring State text “Inward Training” (Neiye 內業) chapter of the Guanzi anthology and the Daodejing commentary ascribed to the “riverside elder” Heshang Gong 河上公 in the first century ce stressed the dao as informing a biospiritual model for practices of meditation and self-cultivation as well as a biopolitical model for governing and transforming society.¹⁴ To give preliminary definitions: “biospiritual” means in this context techniques, practices, and models of cultivating the embodied heart-mind and the mindful body; “biopolitics” signifies deploying bodily, biological, and medical language and models for governing and ordering society. Another indication of this tendency in the later Han dynasty can be found in the Laozi Inscription (Laozi ming 老子銘), ascribed to Bian Shao 邊韶 and dated 24 September, ce 165, in which Laozi appears as a scholar and sagely teacher, a spiritualized person who has become a numinous “immortal” or (in a non-Western onto-theological sense) “transcendent” (xian 仙, a character meaning person in the mountain) to the mundane world through biospiritual (practices of the experiential body), self-cultivation techniques, and as a cosmic deity embodying dao.¹⁵ The Scripture on Great Peace (Taiping Jing 太平經), a late Han period text linked with peasant rebellions and the beginnings of organized religious Daoism, and the Xiang’er Commentary (Laozi Xiang’er zhu 老子想爾注), a product of the late and post-Han organized theopolitical movement called the “Way of the Celestial Masters” (tianshi dao 天師道), identified Laozi as an incarnation of the most supreme Lord Lao (Taishang Laojun 太上老君).¹⁶ The vocabulary of “immortality” or “transcendence,” of becoming a spirit (shen 神) that is sometimes described as becoming a god or “divinization” (granting the differences between shen and Western conceptions of god/divinity), and the embodiment and personification of the dao in late and post-Han Daoist religious movements need to be interpreted in their early Chinese senses and contexts instead of according to how they might be conceived in Western metaphysics and onto-theology. In this context, the dao is personified in the god-like figure of Lord Lao who manifests the way and reveals the path to becoming a spiritually realized being (xian), popularly attributed with supernatural capacities, through techniques of biospiritual transformation and arts of inward alchemy (neidan shu 內丹術).¹⁷

These late and post-Han period developments saw the establishment of religious Daoist societies and institutions that continue to exist to this day. It would be overly narrow and misleading to regard Daoist masters and adepts (daoshi 道士) practicing dao (weidao 為道) as degenerate inheritors of a higher classical Daoism. Various critiques of “religious Daoism” reflect the concerns of the critics. Some aspects already emerged in Han dynasty and mysterious learning disputes over the possibility of immortality (e.g., Ji Kang 嵇康 and Xiang Xiu 向秀) and in Buddhist and Confucian discourses during the medieval period.¹⁸ The Buddhist monk Daoan 道安 (312–385) in his “Essay on the Two Teachings” (Erjiao lun 二教論) and the Daoist convert to Buddhism Zhen Luan 甄鸞 (535–566) in his “Laughing at Daoism” (Xiaodao Lun 笑道論) polemically distinguished lineages of the “way of immortals” (xiandao 仙道) and “way of spirits” (shendao 神道) from the higher wisdom of Laozi and Zhuangzi, which was still deemed inferior to the Buddhist dharma.¹⁹ More recently, their emphasis on “external” devotional rituals and inward alchemical and biospiritual meditative techniques led generations of Western scholars, particularly those with philosophical, Protestant, and secular disenchanting sensibilities, to drastically separate an earlier purer “contemplative” “...