Religious
Daoism
I started out this book by emphasizing that what I am describing is Daoism as a practical philosophy. At this point I should mention that this is in opposition to Daoism as a religion. Most Westerners don't even know that there is such a thing. Oddly enough, I've found that people really have a hard time recognizing something that they don't expect. For example, I used to identify myself as a “Daoist” and tried to live something like a religious Daoist and found that even friends simply couldn't wrap their heads around this idea. One fellow got it into his head that I was a Muslim and I could never get him to understand that I am not. Another called me a Buddhist for much the same reason. A Benedictine nun friend had the idea that I had just made up all this Daoism stuff. Well, I didn't. In China and amongst the Chinese diaspora there are temples, and, “priests” (daoshi) of a religion known as “Daoism”.
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I'm not an expert, but from my reading on the subject it seems the religion came from a lot of different sources. As I mentioned above, there appears to have been an oral tradition that created foundational texts such as the Nei-Yeh and the Dao De Jing. This tradition also created meditation techniques like sitting and forgetting, holding onto the One, and, internal alchemy.
In addition, there was another stream called “Chinese folk religion”. This is a part of the cultural inheritance of ordinary Chinese society. It includes things like a pantheon of various gods and immortals such as the Jade Emperor, the Queen Mother of the West, the Ghost King, General Kwan, the God of Longevity, and so on. (When you go into a Chinese-owned business in the West you will often see an altar to one or several of these folk gods.)
In addition, there are shamanist traditions that involve things like the “sand oracle”. This involves a specialist who is “possessed” by one of the gods and who answers questions put to the her by writing with a chopstick on a pan of sand. (I was told that the fellow who travelled from Hong Kong to Canada to set up the Fung Loy Kok temple and who initiated me, immigrated on the advice of a sand oracle.)
Yet another element in the creation of the Daoist religion was a rebellion by the exploited lower classes of Chinese society. This was the “yellow turban rebellion” which started in the year 184 and lasted until the year 205 CE. It was organized by the “Five Pecks of Rice Daoists”, led by the “Celestial Master”. (The “five pecks of rice” refers to a tax that members were expected to pay into a communal bank and which was used to help the poor and support collective undertakings.) After the rebellion was quashed by the armies of Imperial China (part of the campaign is described in the Chinese classic novel Three Kingdoms) the movement became more religiously focused and lives on today as one of the two major daoist sects: Zheng Yi Dào, or, “the Way of Orthodox Unity”. Orthodox Daoism tends to be based on a priesthood that minister to local communities of followers. They hold public rituals, organize charitable activity, perform exorcisms and healing ceremonies, and, generally act something like pastors in rural protestant Christian communities.
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The other major sect of Daoism, the Quanzhen or “the Way of Completeness and Truth”, was founded about a thousand years after Orthodox Daoism by Wang Chongyang. The legend is that Wang met three Daoist immortals in a tavern and they taught him secret meditation techniques, which he went on to perfect while living many years of intense practice, first in a tomb and then in a hut. After this period, he adopted seven followers (who became famous as the “Seven Daoist Masters” of Chinese folklore), who then went on to found seven major Daoist sects. The most famous of these disciples, Changchun zi, caught the ear of the Mongol Emperor Genghis Khan, who granted him land in the Imperial Capital of Beijing, which eventually became one of the greatest sites in Daoism, the White Cloud Temple.
The Quanzhen school grew in something of a tension with Buddhism, which had come from India after the creation of Orthodox Daoism. Chinese culture was generally opposed to celibacy and monasticism, which is reflected in the teachings of the Celestial Master, who encouraged his followers to marry and integrate themselves into the community. In contrast, Buddhism has always encouraged its followers to isolate themselves from mainstream society. By the time of Wang Chongyang Buddhism had become very popular in China, and the obvious conclusion would be that it influenced the development of Quanzhen Daoism---which favours monasticism, just like Buddhism.
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In addition, I understand that in the 19th century there were popular spiritual movements amongst the lower classes which taught the unity of all religions and the importance of charity and mutual aid. Unfortunately, the Communist Party of China saw these groups as competitors and ruthlessly suppressed them in mainland China. The temple that I was initiated into, the Fung Loy Kok, was an offshoot of a Hong Kong organization, the Yuen Yuen Institute, that embodied these ideals. This adds yet another element “to the mix”.
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I suspect that the majority of people who read this book will consider all religions to be not much more than superstitious nonsense. To a certain extent I do too, but I have to offer one caveate. To understand it, I think people have to realize that while all people may be created equal, they are not created the same.
One of the “basic operating assumptions” that all human beings work with is the idea that each of us has a similar way of experiencing the world. When I see a rose, I assume that someone else sees much the same thing. But in point of fact, it is very difficult to know if this is actually true. I can point at what I see and tell someone else that it is a “rose”, which will lead to her using the same word whenever she sees the same thing again. But I have no real way of telling if she sees a soft, red, nest of petals. For all I know, she might be seeing what I would experience as a hard, blue, pile of crystals.
If this sounds absurd, consider the fact that a certain percentage of the population suffers from an affliction known as colour blindness. I went to school with a guy who simply could not tell the difference between green and red because both looked the same to him. This caused a problem for him on his family's farm because it meant that he couldn't tell the difference in ripeness for some types of fruit. His experience of a rose is significantly different than mine.
Now lets push this issue even further. There is also a very small percentage of people who have something called “synethesia”, which means that they experience one type of sense in ways that most people associate with another sense altogether. A sound, for example, may have a colour. This is so alien to me that I simply cannot understand what it would be like. In my experience, only visual objects have colour. Yet we don't see sound, we only hear it---so how could it have a colour?
Let's go totally wild. There are cases of individuals who have been profoundly blind since birth yet they have learned how to live much like normal people by developing the ability to echo locate like bats. One example I saw on YouTube has developed this ability to the point where he is able to ride a bicycle and shoot hoops with a basketball. He does it just like a bat---he makes clicking noises and uses the echos he hears to create a mental three dimensional image that allows him to navigate the world around him.
There are other examples. People who become chess masters often show off by playing multiple games of chess in their heads. This isn't a “fluke”, but rather a by-product of developing the ability to recognize the patterns in play that define a master instead of an ordinary player. Another example is a random pattern autostereogram (look it up on Wikipedia.) These are pictures that look like nothing at all until a person's brain learns the “trick” of decoding the information---but once you do, a full-fledged, three-dimensional picture “jumps” up at you off the page. The point I am trying to make is that contrary to naive assumptions, people do not all experience the world in the same way. And for some people religion is all total “bosh”, whereas others experience something incredibly important.
Part of this is a question of emotion. People aren't just thinking beings, but also feeling ones. And for many people, religion is about feeling deeply about a specific God. I've never been able to understand the strong feeling that some Christians have about their Gods (Jesus, the Father, the Saints), but then again my childhood experiences were not conducive to feeling deeply about other family members. (Union meetings where people talk about “brothers” and “sisters” also leave me cold.)
What I do have more sympathy towards are people who claim to have had religious experiences.
When God came into my teenage or college bedroom in that way, unasked and unmistakable, the next morning I would wake up changed. I’d go out into the world and give away everything I could. Wouldn’t drive past a broken-down car without stopping to help, was kind and grateful even with my parents, couldn’t stop singing, built houses for poor people, gave secret gifts to my friends, things like that. Sometimes it lasted for weeks; once, when I was in my early twenties, it lasted for nearly a year. It is called being on fire for God. It’s like you’ve glimpsed the world’s best secret: that love need not be scarce.
“Letter from Williamsburg”, by Kristin Dombek,
The Paris Review, Summer 2013 No. 205
I've had experiences like the ones Dombek describes, which is why I have some sympathy for them. I've also had them associated with numinous dreams where I met with figures from Daoist mythology---the Goddess of Mercy and the Ghost King.
People who've never had this sort of experience say that they simply cannot understand what people are talking about. (I suspect that a fraction of this population have actually had something like this happen to them, but it scared them so much that they refuse to admit it.) But I have to take most of them on their word. After all can we really know what it's like to be in someone else's skin?
Of course, some folks will probably just dismiss this as something akin to a manic episode and chalk all religious experiences to low grade psychiatric illness. As someone with more than my fair share of exposure to people with obvious psychiatric disorders, my humble opinion is that this is a facile response. The line between madness and sanity is far more ambiguous than that point of view would suggest. We create a socially-sanctioned definition and discard many important elements of ordinary consciousness in creating the “received version” of what it means to be a human being. My opinion is in line with that of Temple Grandin (the famous autistic professor of animal science.) I once heard her interviewed on the CBC where she suggested that human consciousness exists on a continuum and both autism and bipolar disorder are extremes of very useful human tendencies. Remove all autism from the human population and you will have removed all the scientists, mathematicians and engineers too. And take away bipolar disorder, and there would be no more artists. I won't hazard a guess about what is involved in religious experiences, but perhaps if we removed the ability to love God we would also remove the ability to love anything or anyone.
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Another thing to remember about organized religion is that it is a way of unifying a population of people around a central theme or set of ideals. When people see a ritual they are not arguing amongst themselves in a search for some sort of clear and precise truth. Instead, they are doing one or many of several different things. They might be enjoying music and art, or, they might be feeling good about being part of a community experience, or, they may be feeling nostalgic about past experiences of a similar sort, or, they might be having a profoundly emotional experience triggered by feelings associated with specific symbols. The feeling and ideas aroused by the experience may vary from person to person, indeed, they might be totally contradictory. But because the ideas and emotions raised remain on the theoretical level instead of being explicitly articulated, there is no opportunity for people to realize this fact, so the event brings them together instead of pushing them apart. For example, a given ritual might be attended by an artist who appreciates the beautiful caligraphy on the altar; an old woman who is reminded about the village festivals of her youth; a young mother who is happy to be surrounded by her extended family; children who are happy for all the noise, gaudy clothes, and, good food; and, a young intellectual who views the public worship of the Gods as a way of connecting to the long history of the nation. All the same things can be said about a Roman Catholic mass.
Contrast this with what happens when a philosopher tries to get people to clearly articulate their beliefs about a contentious subject. People who thought that they were in agreement usually find out that they believe very different things. Tempers often flare up. And the community divides. Ritual unites a community---discursive reasoning divides it. This is why ancient Athens put Socrates to death and why I can seem to be a total jerk at a party. But the great value of discursive reasoning is that it deflates superstition, expands human knowledge, and, separates fact from opinion. It offers progress in place of comfort. I understand the appeal of religion, but ultimately I know that I am more of a philosopher than a believer. This is why I ultimately rejected religious Daoism and am writing this book. But it doesn't mean that I cannot understand the appeal. I would hope that all those rationalists who read this book will at least try to understand this point too.
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