Russell Kirkland. Bioethics. Editor: Bruce Jennings, 4th Edition, Volume 6, Macmillan Reference USA, 2014.
Taoism (sometimes written Daoism) is a multifaceted cultural tradition known in China as Daojiao, “the Teachings of Tao.” This entry outlines the principal components of Taoism throughout Chinese history and then probes life and morality from Taoist perspectives, focusing on (1) understandings of the field of life activity (nature); (2) understandings of bodily life; (3) models for cultivating our lives’ true realities; (4) fostering life through therapeutic activities; and (5) understandings of death.
(Chinese terms were long romanized following a system called Wade-Giles. Communist China invented a different system, called pinyin, which has gained increasing currency worldwide. Where the two differ, this entry provides both forms upon first usage, then pinyin only in subsequent instances. Terms long ago accepted as English [like the term Taoism itself] are maintained on traditional terms.)
Taoism is neither a taxonomic umbrella for unconnected elements of a broader society (as is Hinduism) nor a founded tradition (as are Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam). Like Hinduism and Confucianism, Taoism has never been reducible to any set of propositions or doctrines, the profession of which is necessary or sufficient to determine one’s membership in the tradition’s core community. Rather, Taoism is a fluid religious organization first conceived by fifth-and sixth-century Chinese aristocrats who noticed the successful spread of Buddhism (imported from South Asia in the first centuries C.E.) and felt compelled to preserve and fortify China’s indigenous spiritual traditions. By the T’ang (Tang) dynasty (618-906 C.E.), such highly educated aristocrats embraced all religious models that could theoretically conduce to a spiritually ennobled life. They obeyed centuries of emperors in compiling a comprehensive collection of all pertinent writings, today called the Daozang (Tao-tsang). Only in the twenty-first century have audiences who read only English begun to be provided with solid scholarship rendering that tradition accessible (Kohn 2000; Kirkland 2004; Pregadio 2006).
More broadly, however, the term Taoism has often been employed in Asia and the West as a nebulous rubric for a holistic worldview first exemplified in a few unrelated anonymous texts from the fourth and third centuries B.C.E. The authors of those texts likely included teachings of local elders of both genders, not just male intellectuals dissenting from Confucian values. The earliest such text was apparently the Neiye (Nei-yeh; “Inner Development”), which profoundly influenced the basic concepts of traditional Chinese medicine, as well as many elements of later Taoist and Confucian thought and practice (Kirkland 1997). The Neiye uses the term Dao (Tao) in connection with terms such as qi (ch’ i), which signify the salubrious life forces that readers are urged to cultivate (xiuthsiii). Later writings offer refinements of such ideas, as well as alternative perspectives that would, in time, become accepted among Taoists. The Daozang (and other Taoist collections) contains many writings pertaining to the life sciences and varied modalities of healing. Taken together, such writings challenge and enrich one’s understandings of the nature of life (and death) itself.
The Taoist Heritage
Through the twentieth century, Western minds generally misidentified Taoism with the contents of two ancient texts. One is the Daode jing (Tao-te ching), also called the Laozi (Lao-tzu) (Lau 1982; Henricks 1989, 2000); the other is an unrelated text titled Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu) (Mair 1994). Each was the product of generations of development, not the work of a single author. The Daode jing first took shape in the early third century B.C.E.; the Zhuangzi that exists today dates from circa 300 C.E., with parts dating back to the fourth century B.C.E. Taoists of imperial times (221 B.C.E.-1911 C.E.) accepted these two texts as elements of their patrimony, though they were not seen as fundamental for each person’s thought or practice.
Despite common belief, the two texts were never held as a common canon by Chinese thinkers of any period and certainly never constituted Taoism in contrast to Confucianism or other schools. In fact, the “Second Sage” of Confucianism, Meng-tzu (also known as Mencius or Mengzi, fourth century B.C.E.), evidently knew the Neiye and explicitly advocated its core teachings—self-perfection through cultivating (xiu) the heart-mind (xinlhsin) and building up life energy (qi). (Nuanced analyses of such technical terms appear in Major et al. 2010, 869-913.) Throughout imperial times, self-perfection was a common goal among members of China’s literate class, who normally accepted the mutual validity of the Three Teachings (Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism).
The history of Taoism has been compared to a river formed from the confluence of many streams. Analysts today differ regarding the point at which the various tributaries became meaningfully united or whether they ever actually did. Western philosophers generally ignore all data later than the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.-221 C.E.), thus failing to learn the currents that China’s own intellectuals have cherished up through modern times. Contemporary Chinese Taoists, both in mainland China and abroad, perpetuate age-old models of spiritual cultivation, though twentieth-century minds were led to believe otherwise. Readers should beware of accepting simplistic pronouncements about Taoism from writers who cannot read the original texts and have negligible expertise in the full range of historical, textual, and intellectual data.
Taoists did articulate a distinctive sociopolitical model, exemplified in voluminous materials that remain mostly untranslated, such as the late-Han Taiping jing (Tai-p’ing ching) (translated in Hendrischke 2006). The Taiping jing relates that legendary rulers had maintained Grand Tranquility (Taiping) by practicing nonaction (wu-wei)—a behavioral ideal of avoiding purposive action and trusting the world’s natural order, an ideal that Westerners associate with the Daode jing. Both the Taiping jing and the Daode jing say that later rulers meddled with the world, disrupting Grand Tranquility, so now individuals must seek to restore that holistic well-being on a personal basis. But neither the Daode jing nor the Zhuangzi offer any specific directions that one may follow to achieve such goals. The Taiping jing, however, provides various instructions for doing so, including instructions for meditation, moral principles, and recommendations for enhancing health and longevity through hygienic practices, medicine, acupuncture, and even music therapy.
As the Han dynasty disintegrated, several social movements claimed the authority of the Taiping jing, including the Tianshi/T’ien-shih (Heavenly Masters), a hierarchical organization in which male and female priests performed healings using rituals intended to make amends for wrongdoings. Specialists disagree about that organization’s relevance for understanding later Taoism. It offered no model for self-cultivation and attracted few literati. It had died out by Tang times, though a later lineage of hereditary priests claimed continuity with the Tianshi, and this new organization—called Zhengyi/Cheng-i (Orthodox Unity; sometimes called Southern Taoism)—has endured, especially in Taiwan.
Since the thirteenth century, most of mainland China has been dominated by a literati-led tradition called Quanzhen/Ch’iian-chen (Complete Perfection; sometimes called Northern Taoism) (Yao 2000; Komjathy 2007). However, most twentieth-century interpreters were unaware of Quanzhen, and Westerners are just beginning to learn about it. The tradition’s founder, a twelfth-century scholar from a noble family, taught that spiritual immortality (shenxiantshen-hsien) can be attained in one’s present life by cultivating (xiu) one’s innate spiritual realities (xinglhsing) and harmonizing them with the fixed realities of one’s external life (ming).
Within a century of its founding, Quanzhen had developed monastic forms, which (like comparable Buddhist settings) integrated individuals’ spiritual practice within a community of copractitioners. Such monastic institutions were acknowledged as an important element of society at all levels and among people of both genders. As in several earlier Taoist traditions (though not the Zhengyi model, which resolutely excludes women from priesthood), women have played active roles in Quanzhen since its inception. Women continue to play leadership roles today, both at its base, Beijing’s White Cloud Abbey (Goossaert 2007), and at other Taoist centers, often traditional mountain sites.
The goal of Quanzhen self-cultivation is to perfect oneself fully within the body, thereby maintaining health throughout one’s life and ultimately achieving a transcendent condition, in which one’s perfected self will endure as long as the universe itself, despite the inevitable dissolution of one’s physical shell. As with “inner alchemy” and other earlier models of religious practice, the goal of Quanzhen Taoism is neither simply to prolong bodily life nor to disconnect oneself from the body. Though early Quanzhen was sponsored by the imperial regime of its day, later regimes often feared that any religious organization might enkindle political unrest. Therefore late-imperial dynasties forced schoolboys into a sterile scholasticism designed to produce Confucian academics and loyal bureaucrats. Those dynasties nominally recognized the Zhengyi hierarchs, hoping to undercut Quanzhen, which (like Ch’an/Chan Buddhism—known to Westerners as Zen Buddhism) promoted self-development rather than social conformity. After the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, Englishmen in China learned from informants who had long been conditioned to associate all respectable values with Confucianism and to disdain both Buddhism and Taoism (Girardot 2002).
Yet all Taoist ideas and practices endured—both at monastic settings and among literati—and twentieth-century intellectuals (e.g., in Shanghai) adapted such traditions to harmonize them with the modern scientific mentality (Liu 2009). After China’s brutal Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, when Red Guards forcibly shut down all religious organizations as well as colleges and universities, China’s government (though officially Communist) sanctioned the establishment of the Chinese Taoist Association and the Taoist College to train intellectuals. Today, as in imperial times, individuals attracted to Taoism respect any person’s sincere commitment to live a spiritual life by drawing upon any combination of traditional cultural elements.
Life and Morality
The ethical dimensions of Taoism are less formulaic than those of other value systems: in general, men and women who gravitate toward the Taoist side of China’s Three Teachings have been those who, by temperament, see little need for normative expressions of their ideas or practices. Some misinformed twentieth-century interpreters reproached Taoism for selfish disregard of human society’s needs. Many inaccurately believed that Taoists, like the European philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), valued nature in opposition to humanity. Some denied even a theoretical possibility that Taoists could articulate ethical values. But, in reality, Taoists of all periods have taught and practiced an array of nuanced ethical ideals, though on terms sometimes distinct from, or even alien to, the humanistic values of Confucians and Western interpreters. Though the Daode jing and Zhuangzi have no common core of essential ideas, certain passages offer overlapping views of how life works, including some that attribute the world’s problems to humanity’s loss of perspective on the nature of its own reality, not just the nature of the visible world. The suggested goal is to regain that true understanding of life and thereby return to our original integration with most important realities of the world.
The Daode jing and Zhuangzi seldom explicitly mention aspects of bodily life—for example, diet, disease, sexuality, and health care. In fact, those texts’ apparent emphasis on elements of consciousness (rather than on external realities over which one has little control) was why twentieth-century Westerners who felt alienated from their own culture’s belief systems appropriated those writings for constructing what J. J. Clarke calls “the Tao of the West” (2000). But unlike that westernized Tao, the interests of China’s Taoists normally extend to all elements of human life, including the body, human society, and the needs of the state.
Understandings of the Field of Life Activity (Nature)
More than with any other Asian tradition, Westerners have tended to misinterpret Taoism as a corrective to the alleged failings of Western attitudes toward nature—failings variously identified as rationalism, industrialism, capitalism, patriarchalism, and Judeo-Christian values. In 1997 Clarke argued that these interpretations reflected “naive and over-inflated [beliefs] that Eastern traditions could provide a ready-made solution to Western ills” such as environmental problems (real or imagined) (177). But the end of the twentieth century, Clarke suggests, saw “increasing awareness that Eastern attitudes to nature have … often been suffused in the West with an idealised glow which has tended to obscure … those theoretical aspects of Eastern religions which might be at variance with ecological principles” (178). Clarke underscores “the need to take account of the historical and cultural distance between ancient Eastern philosophies and the contemporary environmental problematic, and not to imagine that the West can simply … adopt alien intellectual traditions wholesale” (178).
Support for certain ecological principles can indeed be found in medieval Taoist traditions. The most important Taoist of Tang times, Sima Chengzhen (Su-ma Ch’eng-chen; 646-730), successfully petitioned the emperor to found a wildlife preserve at a sacred mountain, “allocating forty li in a secluded area … as a blessed spot for the prolongation of the life of flora and fauna and for the construction of a [Taoist] abbey” (Kirkland 1986, 72). A subsequent emperor honored Sima’s successor similarly: he “prohibited hunting and fishing on the mountainside … and totally abolished the [imperial] livestock pens” (72). And when the imperial librarian retired in 745 to become a Taoist priest, he successfully petitioned the emperor “that a circular palace lake … be converted into a pond reserved for liberating living creatures,” a custom attested in earlier Taoist classics such as the Liezi (Lieh-tzw, fourth century C.E.) (73).
Concern for nonhuman life is also featured in Taoist moral literature. Only at the close of the twentieth century did the English-speaking world learn that numerous Taoist texts were reputedly revealed by divine beings, which are represented as both caring and active in our world. Foremost among them is the Old Lord (Laojun/Lao-chiin), whose name appears in imperial inscriptions from late Han times. According to centuries of myth, the Old Lord descended in antiquity and produced the Daode jing, and he reappears periodically to provide further instructions for spiritual development (Kohn 1998). The Old Lord does not play exactly the same roles that the God of the Bible or Koran play. But in medieval texts (translated in Kohn 2004) he dictates detailed moral prescriptions and proscriptions: The 180 Precepts of the Old Lord prohibit improperly felling trees, draining rivers or marshes, abusing animals, or even frightening birds and beasts, much less caging them (Hendrischke and Penny 1996; Schipper 2001). Like related texts up to modern times, The 180 Precepts admonishes humans to restrain all thoughtless and self-indulgent impulses lest we harm others (including unborn children: precept 13) or the world we live in.
Comparison with Modern Environmentalism. Though such teachings sometimes coincide with modern ecological principles, the humanist worldview and activist ethos of modern environmentalism are not consistent with the holistic worldview and noninterventionist ethos that permeate the Neiye, Daode jing, and Zhuangzi (Kirkland 2001; Goldin 2005). Read honestly, those works reveal a world that is never in need of corrective human action except through the ruler’s intermediary role or through the transformative spiritual power of the sage (the ideal personage who has fully cultivated Dao).
Taoist conceptions of history, humanity, and cosmos generally undercut the paternalistic tendencies latent in modern humanism, whether secular or religious. When environmentalists assume that nature is too weak to withstand the effects of human activity, humans become godlike: not only is our species supreme over all other creatures and indeed over the planet itself, but human wisdom can overcome all threats if one just cares enough to do enough. Humanistic altruism (like Meng-tzu’s teachings) urges development of feelings (like compassion) that are then assumed to provide justification for their possessor to intervene in life’s events, to save elements of nature that would otherwise remain helpless and hopeless. But chapter 5 of the Daode jing notes that such feelings are distinctly human products, never evident in the natural world itself: nature shows neither compassion nor shame when sending typhoons toward human habitations or when afflicting any population (human or nonhuman) with epidemic diseases. The implication of such perspectives is not that humans should abide by nature’s principles except when they feel that some living thing (or the planet itself) is threatened unless they act to save it. Rather, judging by the actions of nature, the moral feelings of humanistic altruists (including environmentalists) are incontestably absent in Nature, hence totally unnatural and not to be trusted, especially when they are used as justification for heroically intervening in life’s events.
Taoists have never distrusted life’s natural order. The Daode jing and Zhuangzi are adamant that all intervention in life’s events, however well-intentioned, is certain to have deleterious effects. In the Daode jing, Dao is a cosmic reality that is not only more powerful than anything humans can do but also unfailingly trustworthy. The Zhuangzi, meanwhile, vividly cautions readers to trust life to work the way it should because one can never be sure that one actually knows what is truly going on, much less what action might be morally correct. The text recounts several memorable stories in which a character experiences a sudden change that deeply troubles others around him, yet he patiently counsels accepting the course of life’s events without imposing judgment as to whether such events are good or bad, much less intervening to change the course of events. The concept of returning to Dao means governing one’s emotions, learning to perceive life’s natural benign forces at work, and learning to rely upon them—not on any heroic actions on one’s own part—to ensure all living things’ well-being.
Understandings of Bodily Life
Western religions presuppose that human beings were created and should live in accordance with their creator’s will. After Isaac Newton (1643-1727), and the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, intellectual elitists abandoned the majority’s faith in an unseen creator and began seeking to explain human life and the universe in strictly materialistic terms. Indeed, the crucial qualification for acceptance into modern elite is acquiescence to the dogma that nothing can exist except in forms detectible by the human senses or technology.
Within China’s Three Teachings, such simplistic materialism was never taken seriously, even among the most highly educated: while Confucians and Buddhists seem to discount physiological realities as relevant to the most important human project, others see the body as a microcosm of a universe that includes spiritual as well as material realities (Ishida 1989). Taoists would never accept the modern doctrine that each being has some enclosed, individualized self. Rather, every embodied being—human and nonhuman—lives within a matrix of unseen forces collectively called Dao, or Zhen/Chen (True Reality). In Taoist thought—more clearly than in any other non-Western tradition—the body is fundamental, not only for one’s personal spiritual practice but also for all aspects of life.
Though twentieth-century Westerners ignored the bodily aspect of Taoism, China’s Taoists have generally taken great interest in helping individuals preserve and maintain bodily health (Kohn 2006). The ancient Neiye’s teachings, which we might call biospiritual hygiene, were expanded by intellectuals at the court of a second-century B.C.E. ruler named Liu An, Prince of Huai-nan. Under his aegis, a substantial collection of integrated essays, the Huainanzi (Huai-nan-tzu), was compiled (Major et al. 2010). Like the Daode jing and Taiping jing, the Huainanzi elucidates how government can be strengthened through engagement with life’s subtle structures and processes, including cultivation of life essence (jinglching) and spirit (shen), as intimated in the Neiye. Centuries of later texts (few of which have been translated into any language) build upon the Huainanzi‘s detailed analysis of the human condition and suggest specific practices for reintegrating the individual and realigning him or her with the natural forces of the cosmos.
The Huainanzi‘s concepts of human life would eventually become common elements of how most Chinese minds understand bodily life. Classic Chinese texts such as the Huangdi neijing (perhaps first century C.E.) reflect most of the Neiye‘s understanding of bodily life, incorporating the concept of life energy (qi) into an explication of bodily life that integrates other theoretical concepts, such as yin and yang, to explain not only the organs and natural processes but also pathologies, thus informing both diagnosis and treatment (Sivin 1993). Such texts of traditional Chinese medicine (most of which remain not only untranslated but unexamined) did not originate in any identifiable Taoist setting, and their ideas persist in thought structures common among Chinese healers down to the present, regardless of such healers’ religious orientations (Sivin 1995, 2011; Lloyd and Sivin 2002).
Twentieth-century minds often associated Taoism with practices that Westerners call alchemy. Chinese minds distinguished outer alchemy (waidan/wai-tan) from inner alchemy (neidan/nei-tan). The former (more accurately called operative or laboratory alchemy) was a theoretical pursuit of personal transformation into pure spirit by creating and ingesting a purified natural substance called danltan (translated as elixir by interpreters eager to equate such traditions with Islamic and European alchemy).
Chinese alchemy actually originated independently of any form of Taoism. Twentieth-century interpreters fixated on a text called the Baopuzi (Pao-p’ u-tzu), written by a maverick fourth-century Confucian named Ge Hong (Ko Hung). Ge had inherited writings that he promoted as proof that a reputable gentleman could literally achieve deathlessness. But he never participated in his era’s Taoist traditions and ridiculed the classical Daode jing and Zhuangzi. Twenty-first-century scholars have begun translating textual traditions called Taiqing (Tai-ch’ing), dating from around the third century, which sixth-century Taoists would retroactively accept as elements of their heritage (Pregadio 2006). But by Tang times most Chinese minds had left behind interests in laboratory alchemy, focusing instead on spiritual perfection through meditative refinement—a model that they called inner alchemy because of the usefulness of the alchemical texts’ microcosmic symbology.
Taoist self-cultivation practices have flourished through modern times, not only at traditional religious centers (Goossaert 2007) but also among urban professionals such as Ch’en Yingning (1880-1969): As Xun Liu notes, “Chen and most of his peers … were trained specialists in the fields of medicine, geology, chemistry and modern education,” and “science came to constitute an important component of early twentieth-century Daoism” (2009, 250). Moreover, in Shanghai, intellectuals published periodicals that “tirelessly publicized … their vision of the affinity between Daoism and science by reinterpreting the alchemic body with concepts borrowed from modern physics, physiology, and cellular biology” (252). Both in Asia and the West such modern forms of Taoism have been unduly ignored. They may contribute substantially to more nuanced understandings of life in future generations.
Models for Cultivating Our Lives’ True Realities
The Taoist tradition, which emerged among China’s lettered aristocracy and later expanded into all classes, presents an array of teachings and practices designed to facilitate a vital personal transformation within a cosmos structured for such transformation. In each changing era Taoists provided models showing individuals how to experience, and work with, life’s deepest structures and energies, which subtly link every individual’s personal experience with the rest of the living world. Those links lie within the subtle informing structure of one’s own being, within the individual’s own bodily energies (as in contemporary healing modalities, such as Reiki and Healing Touch, as well as acupuncture).
For more than two millennia, Taoists have formulated practices to facilitate reintegration with the deeper realities of the cosmos through processes characterized as cultivation (xiu) or refinement (lianllien). Such activities are called cultivating True Reality (xiu Zhenlhsiu Chen), which occurs as the practitioner forges a new experiential engagement with the subtle forces and structures inherent to the practitioner’s personal reality. In so doing, the practitioner learns that all such structures and energies actually stretch throughout the external universe. In classical texts such as the Zhuangzi (and in later derivative texts), self-transformation sometimes appears to involve no more than altered perceptions. But most later Taoists have understood the process of refinement as a more comprehensive undertaking involving a transformation or sublimation of one’s physical reality as well. Such biospiritual ideals are often couched in terms of the imperative of fostering life (yangshenglyang-sheng).
Some writers have identified yangsheng with physiological practices designed to enhance personal health and prolong physical life (Kohn 1989). But within the Taoist worldview, fostering life presupposed an ethic of holistic moral and spiritual cultivation (Kirkland 1991). It assumed dedication not only to the practitioner’s own perfection but also to reestablishment of a broader, universal harmony (Kirkland 1986).
The D node jing (and some later Taoists) coined distinct (though little-noticed) technical terms for such selfless beneficence. One is (maternal) loving-kindness (tz’u/ci; Daode jing 67). Another is goodness, (shan), which shares the characteristics of water: “Water is good (shan) at benefiting all things, yet it retains its tranquility” (Daode jing 8). To non-Taoist eyes water cannot be morally meaningful, much less exemplary, because it does not do anything. But the Daode jing insists that restraint from activity is the only true goodness possible because there are subtle beneficent forces already working ceaselessly within life’s events, providing universal benefits, the way water does—without actively doing anything and without seeking or receiving recognition (Kirkland 2002).
The Daode jing repeatedly declares that if one harmonizes one’s behavior with life’s natural invisible reality (Dao), “without ‘doing’ there will remain nothing that is not done.” In the Daode jing both the individual life-form and the world in which all life-forms live are said to have mysteriously evolved from an unseen matrix that is not merely beneficent but also worthy of unconditional trust—like a loving mother who gives life to and nurtures all things without exerting any controlling behavior or receiving credit for what her nurturance accomplishes.
Fostering Life through Therapeutic Activities
Nathan Sivin notes that “preventing and curing illness was an essential part of every organized religion, not only in China but throughout the pre-modern world. You might say that health care was the cutting edge of religious organization” (2011, 11). Taoists agreed with Confucians that each person must lead a moral life, cultivate his (or, for Taoists, her) higher moral and spiritual faculties, and participate in restoring and maintaining the health of the world, including society and government. Throughout imperial times, Taoists expressed a range of altruistic ideals—some that modern minds can readily embrace and others that seem not only alien but hardly credible. Yet the writings that admonish us to leave the world alone are neither heartless nor defeatist: they simply commend modes of beneficent involvement in world processes that most today tend to dismiss because in human terms (whether theistic or humanistic) such forms of involvement are inconceivable. For instance, in modern health care, as in modern government, some acknowledge the value of prayer. But modern secularism militates against believing that self-cultivation or ritual activity could have therapeutic efficacy.
Because of such modern biases, few people have noticed that premodern Taoists—such as Confucius himself, centuries of emperors, and many East Asian Buddhists—were certain that correct performance of certain rites would produce beneficial effects for the entire world. Taoist liturgies such as the “Rite of the Golden Register” (Chin-lu chai/Jinlu zhai; sometimes performed under imperial auspices) are believed to harmonize the world by forestalling natural disasters and engendering peace (Kohn 2000, 309-39). Sivin observes that earlier texts such as the Huangdi neijing “tell us about a unity that encompassed the state, the cosmos, and the human body Medicine deals with disturbances in that order within the body (bing, ji); statecraft deals with disorder in society (luan).” From the third century B.C.E. onward “the same intellectuals set the standards in all three domains: cosmology, political theory, and medical doctrine” (2007a, 47).
In addition, some Taoists (like many Christians) have believed that their foremost exemplars acquired healing powers arising from their moral and spiritual exaltation. For instance, texts spanning several centuries (some compiled by emperors and government officials) depict the Taoist Ye Fashan (Yeh Fa-shan, 631-720) as a heavenly official who was exiled to earth to earn back his celestial position through selfless exertion on behalf of others. Through altruistic thaumaturgy (miracle working), most specifically theurgy (summoning spirit helpers), Ye reportedly cured diseases, dispelled bad weather, and even saved emperors’ lives. The texts glorify his life of public service, encouraging readers to emulate Ye’s commitment to the general welfare (Kirkland 1992, 1993).
More generally, Taoist texts describe therapeutic modalities more comprehensible to modern minds, once the reader views them through holistic lenses rather than humanistic or theistic lenses. Like other traditional cultures (such as the Navajo), Taoists generally consider physical illness to be a symptom of biospiritual imbalance, and they teach that illness remits when one reestablishes one’s harmony with life’s deeper realities. In traditional Chinese medicine, disease is most often explained as a result of misalignment of qi (the natural life force that permeates the natural biophysical world as well as each living thing).
Texts on physiological aspects of nourishing life are still used today in the training of Chinese physicians, though they are known by only a handful of scholars and practitioners. One such text is “On the Essential Meaning of the Absorption of Life-Energy” (Fuqi jingyi limlFn-ch’ i ching-i lun), by Sima Chengzhen, the foremost Taoist leader of Tang times. Like related texts by theorists of that day, especially the physician Sun Simo (or Sun Simiao, died 682), Sima’s work methodically explains the nature of biospiritual reality and provides guidelines for sublimating personal deficiencies and establishing a healthy personal existence (Engelhardt 1989; Kirkland 1997-1998).
Certain intellectuals well-versed in such concepts were not only active in the theoretical dimensions of the physical and biological sciences but also pursued the more practical issue of treating physical maladies (Engelhardt 2000; Sivin 2011). Chinese pharmacology and medicine evolved in tandem with medieval Taoists’ efforts at nourishing life. Sivin notes that the most celebrated sixth-century Taoist, Tao Hongjing (T’ao Hung-ching, 456-536), “became the leading author of his time on materia medica. In his career, religion and classical medicine were intimately conjoined” (2007b, 145). And Alexi Volkov observes that “alchemical theory, the scholarly traditions dealing with plants and minerals, as well as astronomical and calendrical knowledge constituted the conceptual core of the teaching” of Tao’s tradition “and played an important role in its esoteric practices” (2004, 521).
The Taoist medical practitioner Sun Simo advised other educated gentlemen of his time about the importance of cultivating the vital nature (yangxing), admonishing that fulfillment depends upon order within oneself, which requires proper movement of the life energy (qi) and vital essence (jing) (Sivin 1968, 106-19). Sun reputedly authored influential texts on self-cultivation, such as the “Inscription on Visualizing Spirit (Shen) and Refining Life-Energy (Qi)” (Ts’un-shen lien-ch’i ming/Cunshen lianqi ming; translated in Kohn 2010, 174-78). It integrates a five-stage cultivation of one’s heart/mind (an ideal of both Taoists and neo-Confucians through late-imperial times) with a seven-stage cultivation of the whole person, beginning with eliminating “diseases inherited from former lives” (177) by bringing the heart/mind, spirit, and vital energy into tranquility. Sun appends this writing to his “Pillowbook,” which prescribes moderation and selfcontrol in consumption and sensual pleasures, prohibits improper sensual activities, and provides instructions for guiding one’s life energy through visualizational meditation, which ultimately produces apotropaic powers (the ability to avert evil influences) (Engelhardt 1989, 279-88).
Among Sun’s other writings are two still-current medical treatises, the Qianjin fang (Ch’ien-chin fang; Formulas Worth a Thousand) and a supplement, Qianjin yi fang (Kirkland 1998, 111-16; Sivin 2010). The Qianjin fang contains a detailed disquisition on the physician’s ethical duties, reminiscent of the Hippocratic oath. Sun announces his motivation as altruistic compassion: “Because my heart is set on helping others, I have gone into all these details.” Sun’s ideal “great physician” establishes internal composure before tending to others’ needs:
In the great physician’s therapeutic practice, he must make his spirits serene and his will firm, so that he desires nothing and seeks nothing. First he resolves to attain a compassionate and concerned frame of mind, and vows to relieve the suffering of all sentient beings. If someone endangered by sickness comes and asks him for help, he will not be concerned whether the patient is noble or humble, poor or rich, old or young, beautiful or ugly, enemy or intimate, acquaintance or friend, Chinese or foreign, foolish or wise. He will treat all equally, and thought of as though they were his nearest kin. Looking neither forward nor backward, he will not worry about what is propitious for himself, or begrudge his own life. When he sees the suffering of others, it is as if it were his own. With this concern deep in his heart, he does not avoid personal risk. Night and day, despite heat and cold, hunger, thirst, and fatigue, with concentrated mind he sets out to save them. He does not permit himself a frame of mind that lets him waste time and engage in social niceties. …
In diagnosis his attitude is deeply serious; in close examination of the physical signs he does not ignore the least detail. In determining the course of therapy with needles and drugs he is in no respect unsystematic. Even though it is considered best to treat disorders expeditiously, the essential thing is not become confused when the time comes to act. Instead he should be reflective and intent on understanding. (Sivin 2010)
Sun also reports that he does “not use living things” in his work because “in taking life for the sake of giving life, we put life even further from us.” He even specifies limits for using creatures that one acquires already lifeless, as well as life-forms that remain mere potential, such as chicken eggs.
Through late-imperial times, thoughtful critics of health care practices produced other detailed prescriptions for conscientious physicians, meticulously differentiating sound practices from malpractice (Sivin 2010). Yet such judicious explications of medical ethics remain mostly unpublished, and much remains to be learned that may help modern minds broaden their perspective (Kirkland 2008; Sivin 2011; Scheid and MacPherson 2012).
Volkov notes that not only were the life sciences and hard sciences intertwined in premodern China, but literati whom modern readers would label as scientists “used religious (and, in particular, Taoist) networks”: they “were open to both types of activities, ‘religious’ and ‘scientific,’ and perceived them as complementary rather than conflicting” (2004). It is within that context that Taoist scholars must evaluate little-known Taoist traditions that turned the skills of the fully developed spiritual leader into therapeutic techniques. Says Sivin, “The aim of masters and their disciples was religious cultivation. Therapy was a way to share the power that cultivation gave them” (2011, 13). One tradition of ritual therapeutics, Qingwei (Ch’ing-wei), was reputedly founded by a young woman around 900 C.E. Qingwei thunder rites (leifa) were designed to empower a priest or priestess to internalize the spiritual power inherent in atmospheric electrical discharges; then, using that power, the priest or priestess could aid others by performing healing. Another early-modern therapeutic tradition, Tianxin/T’ien-hsin (Heart of Heaven), taught priests how to heal by drawing down the spiritual power of the stars, which have been central elements of Taoist concepts of the living cosmos since earliest times. Eventually such movements were superseded by Quanzhen Taoism, whose literati participants included authors of astronomical texts who, like Isaac Newton, were “representatives of a synthetic tradition embracing esoteric (alchemical) and scientific (astronomical) expertise” (Volkov 2004, 529).
In Quanzhen practice, as in most earlier Taoist traditions, self-perfection is understood as grounded in restraint from self-indulgent activity: one maintains quietude while upholding traditional moral precepts and practicing goodness (shan). Through biospiritual cultivation (whether articulated as inner alchemy or through other conceptual models), the practitioner, as Louis Komjathy explains, “refines and transforms the body’s vital substances, (circulating) purified qi … through the body’s various psychic channels” until a transcendent “subtle body, the body of pure qi and spirit, is activated … and one’s innate connection with … Dao is awakened” (2007, 123).
Like the ancient Neiye and Huangdi neijing, the early “Quanzhen” masters considered the leakage of the body’s vital qi the prime cause of disease and death, notes Stephen Eskildsen. “This leakage, in turn, was attributed to ignorance and lack of discipline,” though Taoists have always recognized that disease and injury can also “occur as a result of outside influences or circumstances beyond one’s control” (2004, 74). Some writings suggest that individuals’ susceptibility to specific maladies can originate in utero, when the mother is affected by deleterious conditions. So just as the early-medieval 180 Precepts forbids abortion, Quanzhen writings urge prenatal care to ensure that the child becomes robust enough to resist external health challenges, not only by the mother’s maintaining a healthy lifestyle but also by nourishing life through biospiritual cultivation. Like the Tianshi centuries earlier, early-modern Quanzhen masters “saw it as their responsibility to heal the diseases of others,” says Eskildsen. “The Quanzhen masters possessed and transmitted a great deal of knowledge on how to prevent, cure and anticipate diseases. With this knowledge, they expected to be … at least capable of curing their own diseases … without the aid of a physician or medicines” (2004, 88).
These interrelated values and practices remain alive today at the White Cloud Abbey and wherever Taoists practice throughout China. Sivin observes that, in late-imperial times, “healing by priests and monks … remained the only sophisticated therapy available to the great majority” of the populace (2007b, 146). The religious establishments of both Buddhists and Taoists came to provide social services, including medicine and public health. As Norman J. Girardot notes, “Hospitals, orphan care, and community quarantine procedures were linked to the activities of the Taoist and Buddhist monasteries. … The root of this concern for community health care … could be interpreted as an aspect of the selfless kindness and concern for human health extended to all persons in the practice of wu-wei,” that is, the teachings of the Daode jing (1978, 1:636).
Attitudes toward Death
Until the late twentieth century, the most intensely debated issue regarding Taoism was its teachings on death. Some interpreters insisted that the religious Taoists of imperial times struggled to avert death, whereas earlier philosophical Taoists espoused accepting death as the natural conclusion to life. Some passages in classical texts (especially the Zhuangzi) support that interpretation, but the Daode jing and hundreds of later texts suggest the desirability of attaining a deathless state, though not necessarily by precluding bodily death per se. Both the Zhuangzi and the Liezi are fdled with characters who discover that what one experiences after death may actually be better than one’s experiences before death. Meanwhile, the most famous proponent of immortality, the fourth-century aristocrat Ge Hong, actually distanced himself from all representatives of Taoism. Later Taoists did preserve and sometimes read his writings, but other writers were contemptuous of immortality as a goal. The 180 Precepts represents the Old Lord as saying
Unless the precepts … are held to, even if a human life lasts 10,000 years, how is it different from an old tree or an ancient rock? It is better to hold to the precepts for a single day and to die as a virtuous man, living without committing evil. (Thus) you will serve as a heavenly official, ascending to immortality through corpse-liberation. (Hendrischke and Penny 1996, 21)
Here, as in many Taoist texts of all periods (including Quanzhen texts), immortality closely parallels the eternal life that Christians expect as a postmortem reward for a pious life—not endless prologation of bodily existence. In fact, Taoists of all periods would be puzzled by the insistence of some modern minds that the prevention of human death should override all other values. To Taoists the reality of any being’s life extends far beyond the biological activity of its body, and extending the latter for its own sake hardly seems even desirable. The Taoist goal is always integration with the deeper dimensions of life, and on those terms any model that defines life on strictly biological terms seems quite perverted.
Conclusion
To perceive the ethical dimensions of what the Chinese today call Taoist culture, one must peer carefully into the entire history of China, extrapolating from a plethora of sources produced in divergent spheres of a highly diverse tradition—few of which have yet been well studied. From the data explored so far, one learns that to live a proper Taoist life is, in simplest terms, to live in such a way that one maintains, or restores, life’s holistic unity. The Taoist life requires dedication to a process of self-refinement, whereby one contributes to the well-being of others.
Though certain writings present explicit moral injunctions, Taoism never developed a monolithic ethical code, the following of which would, in itself, constitute morality. Texts such as The 180 Precepts do present the Old Lord as a lawgiver, but few later Taoist texts mention such facts, and they seldom express ethical activity as obedience to divine authority. Yet Taoists also disdain notions that the individual, or even the human species, should be honored as an independent locus of moral value—much less the highest. In fact, the history of Taoism can be read as a concerted effort to disabuse humans of all notions of self-importance and to guide all who sincerely care about life to a higher state of awareness. From such heightened awareness of life’s true nature one selflessly aids others through diligent application of traditional teachings and practices.