China's Green Religion

Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future

James Miller

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231544535
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

How can Daoism, China's indigenous religion, give us the aesthetic, ethical, political, and spiritual tools to address the root causes of our ecological crisis and construct a sustainable future? In China's Green Religion, James Miller shows how Daoism orients individuals toward a holistic understanding of religion and nature. Explicitly connecting human flourishing to the thriving of nature, Daoism fosters a "green" subjectivity and agency that transforms what it means to live a flourishing life on earth.

Through a groundbreaking reconstruction of Daoist philosophy and religion, Miller argues for four key, green insights: a vision of nature as a subjective power that informs human life; an anthropological idea of the porous body based on a sense of qi flowing through landscapes and human beings; a tradition of knowing founded on the experience of transformative power in specific landscapes and topographies; and an aesthetic and moral sensibility based on an affective sensitivity to how the world pervades the body and the body pervades the world. Environmentalists struggle to raise consciousness for their cause, Miller argues, because their activism relies on a quasi-Christian concept of "saving the earth." Instead, environmentalists should integrate nature and culture more seamlessly, cultivating through a contemporary intellectual vocabulary a compelling vision of how the earth materially and spiritually supports human flourishing.

1 Religion, Modernity, and Ecology

My aim in this book is to think through China’s indigenous religious tradition, Daoism, from the perspective of sustainability, and to think through sustainability from the perspective of Daoism. The reason for this is to provide a new way of thinking about Daoism as a religious and cultural tradition, and also to provide a new way of thinking about sustainability. My hope is that these new considerations will be relevant not only to China’s contemporary quest to construct an “ecological civilization,” but also more broadly to global movements to transition human society toward ecologically responsible forms of culture, economics, and politics. But what do these two things, Daoism and sustainability, have to do with each other? Are they even things that can or ought to be related?

Religion and Ecology

In a conventional modern Western understanding, religious traditions are primarily concerned with beliefs about the transcendent, supernatural world: Is there a God? What happens to us after we die? They are secondarily concerned with universal questions of social ethics: Is abortion ever justifiable? What crimes warrant the death penalty? Thirdly, they are concerned with group identity: How should men and women dress? What foods are permissible to eat? None of these three areas is, on the face of it, substantively connected to the question of sustainable ways of living. Surely the West is, or ought to be, a largely secular world, at least as regards ethics, public policy, science, and nature?

Academic scholarship on religion has come to analyze and explain the way that the modern idea of “religion” has been produced. Religion, we now know, is not simply a category that exists of its own accord as a kind of cultural or anthropological “given.” It is not self-evident that human beings have been religious everywhere and at every time in a similar way to one another. Rather, each culture in each historical period has invented its own understanding of the kinds of things that we have lately come to consider to be “religion.” As one simple example demonstrates, Chinese language did not have its own word for the Western concept of “religion” until the nineteenth century. The demands of translation caused a neologism, zongjiao 宗教, to be invented. This does not mean that there was no religion in China before then, but rather that Chinese people conceptualized the kinds of traditions and cultural complexes that we call religion differently enough to warrant the invention of a new term.

Equally important is the way that this modern idea of “religion” has also produced our modern understandings of “secularity.” That is to say, secularity is not the absence of religion as a general category, but rather a particular cultural and social form that emerged from the historical transformations and responses to religion in the modern West. Two academic works are particularly important here. Bruno Latour undertook what he termed the anthropology of science in We Have Never Been Modern and demonstrated that the forms in which scientific research took place in early modern Europe were deeply connected to emerging ideas about politics and society. So also Talal Asad undertook the anthropology of the secular, revealing how secularity is not simply the absence of “religion” but rather is shaped and constituted by it in particular ways.1 In short, what we think about “religion,” “nature,” or even “science” is influenced by particular historical, social, and political trajectories of thought.

This interaction among religion, secularity, and nature in the worldview of modernity has left those of us who inhabit modernity in a quandary when it comes to thinking about the relevance of “religion” for the ecological crisis, in that the key ways in which “religion” has been framed seem to leave it silent in the face of the world of geophysics, climate change, or geoengineering. The key question facing the human species at present might seem to be, first and foremost, about the material world rather than the immaterial world of gods, ghosts, and ancestors. It is a question that invites answers in terms of food supplies, species populations, climate change, and renewable energy, in short, questions to be answered by the natural sciences rather than theology. For this reason, bringing religion into play seems to muddy the waters at best. At worst, truly theological questions of gods and the afterlife may seem to be wicked distractions from the serious material questions that face the human species. Surely, one might argue, the amount of effort and ingenuity put into impossible and unsolvable theological questions might more profitably be directed at dealing with the pressing issues of climate change or renewable energy sources.

The arena of social ethics, however, seems a slightly more promising venue to bring religion and sustainability together. The question of sustainable forms of living can be understood as an ethical question. Do we have the right, for instance, to live in such a way that makes the lives of our grandchildren unviable? Do we have the right, as Harvard climate scientist Michael McElroy asked, to change the chemical composition of our atmosphere?2 Surely our religious traditions have something to say about these key questions regarding the long-term sustainability of the human species? The answer, frequently, is that they do not. Religious traditions are surprisingly useless when it comes to thinking about the questions that truly matter for the sustainability of life on earth. This is largely because the dominant religions of the present world are formed around the dominant ethical questions of the Axial Age, some 2,500 years ago. Although principles derived from these ethical systems can be applied to present-day issues, none of these traditions ever had to deal with the question of sustainability as faced by the human species today, and none of these traditions lived with the scientific knowledge to even formulate a question such as that of McElroy. As a result, although religious traditions can help us to think about ethical issues, when it comes to the question of sustainability, they are not as helpful as one might think.

Moreover, as Durkheim explained, religious traditions are particularly important for the formation of group identities at a larger scale than that of the clan.3 Religions forge the shared values that help human beings transcend their genetic ties and form into larger social networks such as those that enabled people to cooperate in the development of large-scale civilizations.4 Some religions, such as Buddhism or Islam, have been so successful in this regard that they have spread across the world, helping to forge multinational collective identities that assist in the development of global trade networks, and, alongside nation-states and their armies, play important roles in geopolitics to this day. From this perspective it might also be argued that religions have something positive to contribute to the formulation of an ecologically sustainable way of living for the human species. The religious forces that help to shape collective identities at levels larger than the clan, however, are the same forces that create religious rivalries. Group identities are always asserted over and against another group’s identity. Identity, whether religious identity, national identity, or gender identity, is always created in relation to the Other. For this reason, while global religions may have played an important role in helping to forge the major civilizations that shape the world today,5 they might be seen to be of relatively little use, or even positively unhelpful, when it comes to dealing with the issue of the long-term sustainability of the human species.

For these reasons—and doubtless more can be adduced—it would seem absurd to imagine that a religion, such as Daoism, can play an important role in helping to bring about a transition to a sustainable way of living for the human species in the twenty-first century: religions deal with the immaterial world, not the material world; they are rooted in the problems of the past, not the problems of the present; and their rivalries inhibit us from acting for the collective good of the species.

Despite such arguments against the relevance of religion for sustainability, there has been a considerable body of scholarship on the ways in which “religions” have historically understood “the environment” and the ways in which they can play useful roles in addressing today’s environmental challenges. A major approach to the study of religion and ecology has been undertaken in a series of books published by the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions based on conferences organized at Harvard by the Forum on Religion and Ecology. This series of conferences in the late 1990s was instrumental in establishing the academic field of religion and ecology today and in spurring both religious practitioners and academics to explore the ways in which religious traditions could fruitfully address the question of the environment.6

This approach to considering religious environmentalism can be characterized as having two phases. The first is that of examining religious texts and other foundational documents and statements to see the ways in which each religious tradition might understand the natural environment. Such approaches could examine myths of creation, view of nonhuman animals, or ethical texts that detail how human beings ought ideally to act in the world, and whether the natural environment might deserve some special protection for religious reasons. The second phase would be that of engaging with religious traditions to promote green policies and practices within the parameters of each tradition’s beliefs and values and engaging in constructive theological or philosophical reflection on how each tradition might perceive and positively contribute toward solving environmental issues. Such work involves both scholars and religious professionals.

On the religious front, the Chinese Daoist Association has been positively engaged on these issues, producing a series of policy statements and action plans on environmental issues from the late 1990s onward.7 In partnership with the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, they have established an “Ecology Temple” in the Heihe National Forest Park near Mt. Taibai, Shaanxi Province, where they have enshrined Laozi as the God of Ecology.

At the same time, academic scholarship has made considerable headway toward understanding how Daoists have historically engaged with the natural environment, what values might drive those engagements, and what principles lie behind such values.8 Such work has at least given credence to the notion that elements of the Daoist tradition bear a strong affinity with ideas of an ecological sense of self, in which the individual’s self-understanding cannot ultimately be divorced from his or her environmental context.9 It has also helped promote understanding of the ethical principles that have driven Daoists and others to take care of the local environments around Daoist sacred sites.10

Given this recent scholarship, we may more clearly understand the role that Daoism might play in dealing with environmental issues. Moreover, even if the numbers of Daoist priests and monks in China is very small, Daoism nonetheless plays an important role in the basic shape of Chinese culture. It is China’s indigenous religious tradition and also a repository of deep cultural capital and philosophical orientations that resonate widely across Chinese culture even if Chinese people are not themselves “Daoists.” As Yang Der-Ruey explains, there are “many new types of agents becoming involved in Daoism as a social sphere,” ranging from business leaders and unofficial lay groups, to charismatic masters without formal training and online networks and bulletin boards.11 As the reform and opening of China continue, Yang concludes, the patterns of relationship among those who might be identified with Daoism go well beyond the official orthodoxy of the Chinese Daoist Association and may function more like business networks in a market economy. The potential for Daoist ideas, values, and culture to engage with a wide range of people in China beyond a narrow class of religious professionals is quite profound.

Similar work has been undertaken by scholars in regards to many of the world’s traditions, and as a result a whole new field of scholarship has been born. These kinds of arguments do make valid points about the way Daoists have traditionally imagined, valued, and acted in the natural world, but this book hopes to make a different kind of argument. My goal is to move beyond the relatively narrow goal of ecocritical analysis and to consider Daoist studies from the broader perspective of sustainability. To do so is not simply to see which kind of values and motifs are “useful” for the modern world, but rather to use those core values and motifs as diagnostic tools for interpreting and assessing the categories of imagination that have produced “religion,” “nature,” and “the environment” as fundamental themes of modernity. This expanded approach to the study of religion and nature also seeks to draw inspiration from some of those historical ideas and values to articulate a new, constructive approach to thinking about environmental problems and the relation of culture (including religion) to environmental issues.

Green Religion

A second approach to the field of religion and ecology is captured by the term “green religion,” which denotes modes of religious or quasi-religious activity explicitly focused on nature or the natural world. Bron Taylor distinguishes here between “green religion” (which posits that environmentally friendly behavior is a religious obligation) and “dark green religion” (in which nature is sacred, has intrinsic value, and is therefore due reverent care).12 Taylor’s goal here is to distinguish the way that some religions can develop environmentally friendly aspects to them, or promote environmental ethics as part of their general religious orientation, from modes of religious activity that have at their core the reverent attention to nature. Such activity may not be regarded as religious in a standard modern sense, but may also refer to a whole class of cultural activities that fall under the broad heading of religious naturalism, in which devotion to the natural world or specific aspects of it motivates the values and behavior of the devotee. This may include surfing spirituality or radical environmentalism, both of which in various ways are motivated by a sense of the natural world as an ultimate sacred value.

In positing Daoism as a “green religion” it is possible to examine the ways in which various Daoist traditions fit into Taylor’s framework of green versus dark green religion. Certainly there are Daoist ethical codes that include what we would, in retrospect, regard as environmental ethics.13 A careful analysis of such codes in their historical context might yield clues as to whether the desire to protect aspects of the natural environment was motivated by the perception of the natural world as “sacred” or whether these “green values” were the by-product of some other ordering principle of religion. Through such an analysis, one would be able to say whether a particular Daoist activity or text was “green” or “dark green” according to Taylor’s scheme.

As in the previous discussion of how religion and ecology have traditionally been related in scholarship, I would like to reframe the question and move scholarship in a new direction. Instead of articulating whether such and such a religion is “green” or “dark green” according to various criteria articulated by the academic community, I would like to point out the ways that Daoism as a tradition has articulated concepts of “religion” and “nature” that differ from how we might articulate them in contemporary discourse. Next, I would like to demonstrate how taking those Daoist conceptions seriously might prove useful in contributing to academic scholarship on how to think about the categories of religion and nature functioning together. To put it another way, I do not take Daoism simply as data to be analyzed according to a conceptual scheme devised by the academic world. Rather, I take Daoism as containing a wide range of texts, values, and practices that are shaped by common ways of articulating fundamental categories of experience of the world, categories that may be relevant for rethinking the place of human beings in the world, and the world in human beings. Such categories and ways of ordering the social i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Religion, Modernity, and Ecology
• 2. The Subjectivity of Nature
• 3. Liquid Ecology
• 4. The Porosity of the Body
• 5. The Locative Imagination
• 6. The Political Ecology of the Daoist Body
• 7. From Modernity to Sustainability
• 8. From Sustainability to Flourishing
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index