Audio: Diverse Religious Experience, by Dr. Bin Song.

(1936 words. )

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College for the course of “Introduction to Comparative Religion: Eastern.”

As the course comes to its conclusion, let’s talk about comparison of religions. However, since the comparative study of religions from the inter-disciplinary angles of philosophy, religious studies, and theology is what my scholarly career has been dedicated to, it is hard to give a short video-lecture on such a rich topic.

In this regard, I will follow my writer-instinct that if nothing else you can talk about, or if there is too much you can talk about, be phenomenological. In other words, I’ll just describe my religious experiences.

Per the categories so nicely laid out in the assigned chapter of “how to think globally and affiliate locally” by Dr. Jeannine Diller, I am a differentialist pluralist regarding salvific religious experience, but an identist open inclusivist regarding the knowledge of ultimate reality. This means that I believe there are multiple types of religious experience, each of which fulfills distinctive paths to “salvation,” in whatever sense “salvation” can be understood by varying traditions. For instance, in the Christian tradition, prayer to God is a theistic religious experience leading to the salvation from sins. In the Buddhist tradition, meditation is an acosmic calming-down religious experience leading to nirvana, viz., salvation from human suffering. In the Ru (Confucian) tradition, performing ritualistic arts such as the one of Taiji Martial Art is a anthropo-cosmic religious experience leading to a continual harmonization of involved beings in evolving situations of life, viz., a salvation from chaos and imbalance in one’s individual and social life.

However, regarding the knowledge of the so-called ultimate reality, I am an identist. I believe ultimate reality is one, and different traditions have varying perceptions and conceptions of it. However, since my way of life is rooted in the ancient Ruism (Confucianism), I take Ruism as the base for me to learn about ultimate reality, the so-called Tian. Even so, I do not believe the long history of Ruist spirituality has exhausted all possibilities of the knowledge of such an ultimate reality, and hence, I am also eager to learn from other traditions so as to incorporate these outside insights into the Ru tradition. During the process, I hold on to no dogma nor incorrigible creed; instead, I am ready to change my pre-established conceptions whenever needed, and hence, grow my rooted Ruist way of life in an open-ended, yet continual and organic way. I call this type of interreligious studies as a rooted and open inclucivism.

Since I am experientially, salvifically pluralistic, but ontologically processual and inclusivist, I also see varying types of religious experiences lead to different modes of salvation, but these modes of salvation all engage humans with varying aspects of the same ultimate reality.

Good, let me give some brief accounts of three types of religious experience I have gone through: the theistic one, the acosmic one of pure awareness, and the anthropo-cosmic one.

Around the summer of 2004, I watched the movie Pulp Fiction, and was quite obsessed with one of its last scenes which is full of religious meanings. In that scene, one killer acted by Samuel L. Jackson miraculously avoided all bullets fired by his opponent from an incredibly close distance. Before this event, whenever the killer was about to kill someone, he would recite biblical verses, yet with no obvious understanding nor devotional feeling attached to these verses. However, after this miracle happened, the killer believed that this is a revelation, and he accordingly turned into a very pious Christian. In compassion, his killing partner, who is acted by John Travolta, experienced the same miracle, but because he has no habit of pointlessly reciting biblical verses, he didn’t see that as a miracle. In the movie, the partner was eventually killed, but the new Christian convert gave up his criminal vocation, and continued to live a pious life.

After watching the movie, I was so intrigued by its religious meaning to start regularly and intensively reading the Christian bible. During one night, when I played poker with my friends and was in a desperate situation, I shouted almost fanatically “God, please give me a black ace of spades” without really believing it could ever come true. However, I did draw a black ace of spades after I fanatically prayed my wishes. Honestly, because of the influence of the movie and my reading of the Christian bible during that time, I had a great feeling of awe in front of an almighty supreme being at that particular poker moment. I was stunned. Many years later, when I read Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) described his religious experience of God as a feeling of “mystery of terror and awe” towards the “absolute other,” I knew exactly what he is talking about.

Be theistic as such an experience may, my acosmic experience of pure awareness derives from my consistent practice of breathing meditation.

In one night early this year of 2021, around 1:00 am, I woke up with my eyes open but my eyelids closed. At the first few minutes, I could not understand where I was. Since my eyelids were closed, I could only see some shapeless dark or crimson colors before my eyes, like facing the quiet and vast universe. My breathing was completely suspended; I felt no need to either inhale or exhale whatsoever. And this suspense of breathing lasted for quite a while before I felt the need to inhale a little bit and exhale slightly and accordingly. I could not feel the existence of my body either; one leg seemed to bend, while another one seems to cross over it; but overall, there was no obvious feeling of my hand, arm or other parts of the body. And I felt a complete ease, comfort, transparency and an endurable sense of peaceful joy. It was as if nothing exists in the world except your super translucent eyesight! However, when I opened my eyelids and got to understand I was actually sleeping on the original bed and waking up, I immediately realized that the psychosomatic state where I was at those moments was exactly the same as when I entered into a deeper state triggered by my normal practice of breathing meditation. Such a deeper state is normally featured by slow, delicate, and even suspended breathing; and I regularly do this practice after my lunch and during an afternoon nap. During this sort of meditative nap, I barely fall asleep, but can feel that when the ideal states of breathing happen, my eyes can open while my eyelids closed. Accompanying this unusual movement of my eyes, I can also enjoy a feeling of ease, comfort, transparency and being endurably reenergized for quite a while. This is also normally how I re-boost myself for my afternoon work.

However, on that night, for the first time in my life, the practice of breathing meditation went on by itself while I was asleep; when the spontaneous practice reached its ideal state, it woke me up with my eyes open but eyelids closed! What happened afterwards was that while lying on bed, I changed my sides and postures for several times. Nevertheless, however I positioned myself on the bed, the deep, slow, and delicate breathing just continued by itself. It constantly reenergized me, and put my state of consciousness in such a more and more mindful state that eventually, I got up around 2:00 am and started to write a paper, reply to emails, and do my other daily routines as a scholar. I did another nap in the breakfast time, and after that, I didn’t feel any fatigue or stress during the day because of the seemingly undercut sleep.

I call this religious experience as an acosmic one of pure awareness because of the complete disappearance of the split between me as a subject and the world as an object. Because of it, when I read how Patanjali talks about the non-dual “pure awareness” as underlying all concrete patterns of consciousness in the Yoga Sutra, I know intimately what he is talking about.

Lastly, I will give an even briefer account of my anthropo-cosmic experience of Oneness because of my intensive study of Ruism at the Daofeng Institute of Sino-Christian Studies in Hong Kong in the spring of 2011. That institute dwells in a very beautiful mountain, and its building are a mixture of ancient Chinese and Lutheran Christian styles. I was arranged into a room in a scholarly dormitory which shares the same common area with other scholars. from the window of it, I can feel the flourishing trees, flowers and hear bird chirping and tourists walking by. In that room, I used three months to decipher one singular verse in Confucius’ Analects. When talking about the goal of one’s good life one can ever dream about, Confucius was recorded as particularly approving of the following view:

“In the last month of Spring, once the Spring garments have been completed, I should like to assemble a company of five or six young people and six or seven kids to go bathe in the Yi River and enjoy the breeze upon the Rain Dance Altar, and then return singing to our residence.
” (Analects 11:26)

As mentioned, this quote is embedded in a long conversation between Confucius and his students on what is the desirable type of good human life. The experience depicted by the verse itself is anthropo-cosmic since the exuberating joy felt by the companions of human fellowship, including the young and old, co-vibrates with the life-generating season of spring in the cosmos. In order to re-liven the depicted experience, I tried to integrate everything I can do in that beautiful mountain during the three months into one holistic experience: I meditated every day and almost everywhere. I read, I wrote, I talked with other scholars, and I also hiked together and played sports together with them. We even cooked together so as to have dinners of a banquet style. During the process, friends played guitar, we sang songs, and sometimes, we also organized serious conferences, and exchange intellectual ideas. I wrote lots of poems in the three months, and when things cooled down a bit, the three months also turned out to be the most productive ones in my career of scholarly writing.

I see a significant portion of the three months in that mountain as reviving the anthropo-cosmic religious experience approved by Confucius. This type of religious experience may not be that submissive, or ecstatic as the Christian and Hindu ones; however, its enduring, constantly energizing, and colorful nature definitely leaves an indelible mark on my life.

So, the final problem may be: since religious experiences are thus abundant and diverse, how do we deal with them? In the Ruist metaphysics, the ultimate reality of Tian has its mystical and ineffable dimension, which connects me to the “absolute other” nature of the theistic experience. Also, the all-pervading cosmic vital-energy was thought of by Ruist masters such as Zhang Zai (1020-1077) as best manifested by the purified state of human heartmind, a trope immediately relatable to Patanjali’s term of “Pure Awareness.” However, what remains the most important for such an incorporation of non-Ruist religious experiences to its own is that I expect that such a process of incorporating and harmonizing will never end. Life continues, civilization endures, and the entire cosmos is evolving. So, with such a felt cosmic and human energy of constant creativity, I believe our comparative study and practice of religions would never end either.

(2200 words)

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College for the course of “Introduction to Comparative Religion: Eastern.”

After giving a brief introduction to Daoism, let’s read its foundational text, the famous Dao De Jing (the Classic of Way and Virtue) written by Laozi.

For scholars, given all the historical evidences we can gather, it is hard to proclaim with the same degree of certainty as the case of Kongzi (Confucius) that Laozi is indeed a real historical figure, and he single-authored a foundational text of Chinese religion called Dao De Jing. An earliest, popular version of the story of Laozi and Kongzi was told by Si Maqian’s “Record of Grand Historian” written in around 90s B.C.E, when it had been already hundreds of years later than the estimated actual time of Laozi’s and Kongzi’s lives. According to this story, Laozi was a grand archivist in late Zhou Dynasty, and Kongzi, since being a dedicated learner of Zhou rituals, went to the capital of Zhou to learn with Laozi on rituals. However, Laozi dismissed Kongzi’s interest in rituals, and thought focusing upon the learning of rituals is a misguided path to the cosmic Way, the Dao. After the meeting, on the side of Kongzi, according to the story, Kongzi praised Laozi and thought Laozi’s thought is mysterious and admirable. However, on the side of Laozi, he was so disillusioned by the social and political realities of his time, and decided to ride on a cow towards the western border of Zhou Dynasty so as to flee as a hermit. However, before being about to depart from the border, a gatekeeper convinced Laozi to leave some words for later generations, and this became the ultimate occasion for Laozi to write down his thought in five thousand words, which become the received text of Dao De Jing.

Both Ruists and Daoists, viz., the respective followers of Kongzi and Laozi, have interest to promote the told story. For Ruists, it indicates the virtues of intellectual humbleness and independence of Kongzi, since Kongzi constantly learned from varying teachers and eventually came up with his own systematic thought. For Daoists, the story was frequently told to prove the superiority of Laozi’s thought upon Kongzi’s, and hence, spoke very well for the dissenting nature of Daoist thought we analyzed in our previous unit.

Not only the story itself was worth doubting regarding its historical authenticity; according to the best knowledge we have today, whether the 5000-word text of Dao De Jing is a single-authored book which was written earlier than the major texts in the Ru school such as the Analects is also highly controversial. As stated above, Daoists may have an interest to believe that Dao De Jing was much earlier than the Analects, but there are varying versions of the text which were recently excavated by archeologists, and these versions are sometimes quite different from each other and dated in varying periods of time. Therefore, it is basically safe for today’s scholars to conclude that the received Dao De Jing is a stabilized version which results from a time-consuming process of compositions and compilation, which may start from the 5th until 3rd century B.C.E. More importantly, if you read the entire body of the varying versions of Dao De Jing, the dissenting nature of Daoist thought from the Ru thought is obvious. Because a dissenting philosophy must come after the one which it dissents against, we have reasons to aver that at least a significant portion of Dao De Jing (DDJ) was written after the flourishing of Kongzi’s school, and its sedimented nature of compilation also derives from the fact that the debate between the two schools was continual in a long period of time.

As briefly discussed in last unit, if we treat Laozi and Kongzi as the representative, somewhat symbolic figures of the schools of thought they helped to initiate, Daoists and Ruists have very different reactions to the social chaos created by the disintegration of Zhou Dynasty: one we summarized as being short on civilization, while another as being long on civilization. Actually, to compare two thinkers, no better means can be furnished than juxtaposing the best society they are dreaming for during one worst time of human history.

This is what Laozi dreams for:

“Let the state be small and the people few. Even if there be techniques replacing tens of hundreds’ of people’s labor, they would not be used. Let the people look upon death as a grievous thing and renounce traveling afar. Though there be boats and carriages, yet nobody rides in them. Though there be armors and weapons, yet nobody takes them out. Let people go back to the old days when knots in ropes were still used. People relish their food, like their dresses, find ease in their homes, and are happy with their customs and ways of life. People in neighboring settlements behold one another from afar. They can hear the barking of dogs and the crowing of cocks from the neighborhood. Yet they age to death without meeting or communicating with each other.” (DDJ, version of Wang Bi’s, chapter 80, my own translation)

Instead, This is what Kongzi dreams for:

“When the Great Way is followed intentionally, all under Heaven is distributed appropriately. People with virtues and merits are selected for public office, trust is cherished, and courtesy is cultivated. The people not only love their own parents and children, they properly love other people’s parents and children as well. The elderly are attended until death; adults are employed; children are raised. Concerning widowers, widows, orphans, the aged with no children, the disabled, and the ailing: they are all nourished. Males and females are bonded in marriage; their talents and jobs are matched. It is detestable for possessions and resources to be thrown away upon the ground. However, when gathering them, people would not store them solely for selfish use. It is detestable that people refrain from using their strength to fulfill their duties. However, when people do use their strength, it is not solely for personal gain. Therefore, intrigues and deceptions can gain no foothold. There are neither robbers nor thieves; neither is there any mob nor rebellious bandits. The doors of households appear to be closed, but they are never locked. This is a society of great harmony.” (The Classic of Ritual, the Chapter of Liyun, my own translation.)

So, in a nutshell, Laozi dreamed for a minimalist human society where life is simple, people are few, technology is disregarded, sociality is undesirable, and in a word, humans barely depart from nature. Instead, the idyllic picture depicted by Kongzi is one of all-encompassing social harmony by which fruits of civilization are continually generated and fairly distributed, while every human being is willing to keep their robust moral compass, and hence, can co-thrive based upon the most ideal measure of governance and social co-ordination.

This juxtaposition of social dreams will become more interesting if we furthermore explore how these dreams are argued and legitimized in a cosmological scale. Normally, popular readers of ancient Chinese thought think cosmology is unique to Daoism, while Ruism just focuses upon ethics and politics. Unfortunately, this is one entrenched misconception which we need to dismantle. As discussed in last unit, there is a continual process of debate, critique, and mutual influence on virtually all topics of philosophy and religion between the named two schools of thought in the period of Warring States, which means if a Daoist text uses a cosmology to refute, or doubt the social activism advocated by the Ru school, Ruists would very probably come up with their own cosmology to contrast and counterbalance. In the following, I will illustrate how this happens using two texts which are respected by each of the named traditions as its own cosmological foundation: one is still Dao De Jing (DDJ), and another is called the Great Commentary (or the Appended Texts) of the Classic of Change (GC). For the purpose of comparison, I will still call the views in Dao De Jing as belonging to Laozi and the latter as to Kongzi.

Regarding how humans should comport themselves in face of society and nature, Laozi says: “humans follow the earth, the earth follows the heaven, the heaven follows the Dao, while the Dao proceeds out of its own.” (DDJ, chapter 25). However, Kongzi says: “Without humans, the Dao would not proceed automatically in the human world.” (GC, part II, chapter 8). Obviously, these two thinkers have a very different view towards how the Dao functions in human society.

Then, my question is: how the Dao proceeds in general in the cosmological scale? Why does Laozi think humans just need to imitate the cosmic Dao while Kongzi thinks humans need to manifest the cosmic Dao in a specifically human way?

There is a sequence of the cosmic creation of the Dao argued by Laozi. He says: “Out of Dao, One is generated. Out of One, Two is generated. Out of Two, Three is generated. Out of Three, the myriad things are generated.” (DDj, Chapter 42). According to my best knowledge, the sequence can be illustrated as the following chart:

“Non-being” (Dao) ➡ One (the undifferentiated whole of “being,”) ➡ Two (Yin/Yang vital-energy; Heaven and Earth) ➡ Three (Heaven, Earth, and Human Beings) ➡ the myriad things.

Chart I: Laozi’s Cosmology

The most important feature of this cosmological sequence are that 1) this is a temporally unfolding process which indicates how the Dao generates everything in the universe from the earliest stage of a gigantic vacuum of non-being, to an undifferentiated whole of being, via the differentiation and interaction of yin/yang vital energy, and then, comes up with a myriad concrete things. 2) Laozi cherishes the idea of “temporal priority” in this cosmological sequence such that one temporally earlier stage is always thought of as being more powerful and ideal than a later one, since the earlier one generates the later and thus, better manifests the power of the Dao. 3) Laozi actually thinks the cosmological sequence is cyclical, so that when any being, including plants, animals, and human society, comes to its mature shape, they will start to decay, degenerate, and hence, come back to the Dao, and then, the cosmic process will be regenerated again.

Given Laozi’s cosmology, it will be easy for us to understand why he dreams the minimalist human society where human conditions barely depart from nature: this is because the earlier stage of the cosmic generation where a human can be, the more powerful, ideal, and in a word, closer to the Dao we can become.

Now, let’s see how Kongzi envisions the cosmic generation of the Dao. He says in the Great Commentary that: “Thus, there is Ultimate Limit in the Change. Ultimate Limit creates two modes. Two modes create four images. Four images create eight trigrams. The eight trigrams define good and ill fortune. Good and ill fortune give rise to the great enterprise.” (GC, part I, chapter 11). Here, Ultimate Limit was the signifier to the Cosmic Dao which creates the entire universe in an ontologically layered process, and the process can be illustrated as follows:

Ultimate Limit (Dao)
⬇
… ➡ Two Modes (Yin/Yang Vital-Energies, or Heaven and Earth) ➡ …
⬇
… ➡ Four Images (Four Seasons) ➡ …
⬇
… ➡ Eight Trigrams (Thunder, Lightning, Wind, Rain, Sun, Moon, etc.) ➡ …
⬇
… ➡ Human Beings and a Myriad of things ➡ …

Chart II: Kongzi’s Cosmology

Here, what matters is not to seek any historical, temporal origin of the cosmos. Rather, Kongzi thinks that regardless of the origin of the universe, human beings just need to understand their conditions of living in the endlessly changing cosmos here and now, and hence, try their best to fulfill their potentiality of being a human so as to manifest the cosmic Dao in a uniquely human, and thus, humane way. Understood as such, the vertical arrows illustrated in the chart explain the varying layers of patterns and principles that regulate cosmic changes. Human life, on the one hand, is conditioned by these patterns and principles so that humans need to organize a society and civilization within the non-human nature. However, on the other hand, since these patterns and principles are just conditions, rather than cosmic causes, humans can still adapt to , or utilize them for creating new ways to manifest the cosmic Dao in a uniquely human way, viz., the way of humaneness and harmony as indicated by his social dream.

Yes, that’s it. This is how we read the Dao De Jing from the original historical context it arises and evolves. This cosmological and comparative angle I bring here is just one among many we can read the text, which succumbs to your judgment of its soundness, and surely the contrasting views of the two schools can be compatible with each other. But in order to furnish a compatible interpretation, we must know each of them in their own terms at first. When you delve into the text, you’ll find many other themes such as statecraft, meditation, military strategy, aesthetics, etc., which are no less riveting and worth of pondering. Since Dao De Jing is frequently touted as the second most translated book in the world, I guess, we should at least find one time in our life to read it. And I hope our course is just this time.

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College for the course of “Introduction to Comparative Religion: Eastern.”

The four stages of the development of Daoism can be summarized as follows:

Firstly, it starts as a seriously dissenting voice among the so-called hundred schools of thought in the period of Spring and Autumn and Warring States (770-221 B.C.E), with “dissent” here mainly understood as being against, or simply different from the emphasis of Ruism (Confucianism) on education, ritualization, social activism and ethical governance.

The gist of the dissent of Daoism from Ruism in their classical period can be briefly described as follows:

In face of the rampant social turmoil and interstate wars created by the collapse of the late Zhou Dynasty, Confucius diagnosed the origin of the social disease as the “under-civilization,” or “under-humanization” of each human individual. Therefore, in order to recover the social order and regain the so-called “peace under the heavens” as elaborated by the text of Great Learning, Confucius’s ambition was to build an independent school to provide people with a more universal access to education, and furthermore, to cultivate students’ virtues and knowledge via a broad learning process of the fruits of ancient civilizations. Ultimately, Confucius intended his students to become a noble-minded, exemplary human, the so-called Junzi, and hence, get hired by governments to serve the society as ethical and competent civil leaders. For Confucius, this process of education and self-cultivation of a junzi is the ultimate path for the society to recover the delicate ritual system that once functioned well in early Zhou Dynasty, and hence, to realize the sustainable development of the civilization.

However, for the Daoist philosophers, such as Laozi and Zhuangzi, they have different understanding of the situation. They thought the cause of social turmoil is not the “under-civilization” of human individuals. It is actually the “over-civilization” of human individuals when their innocent, naturally flourishing human life gets complicated by the increase of human knowledge, the artificiality of human intelligence, the unrestrained social competition and the advancement of technology. In other words, for Daoist thinkers, education leads to the over-development of human intelligence, and if individuals rely upon this advanced development of human intelligence to compete for limited social resource, chaos will follow and government will fall apart. Therefore, rather than calling for more education and social engagement of the so-called noble-minded, exemplary individuals, Daoist thinkers advocate less education and less social engagement of human beings in general. Ultimately, a primitive natural state of society, where each individual enjoys their life alone with little use of technology and sociality, will be the ideal society human beings could ever have.

Of course, this is a rather very sketchy account of the contrast between Daoism and Ruism, and I intend the value of this account to be more heuristic than prescriptive. However, an important angle to understand the origin of Daoism, similar to the case of Buddhism versus Vedic and Upanishadic Hinduism, is indeed to grasp how different and similar it is in comparison to the Ru school which Confucius helped to transmit and strengthen. This is also the reason why it is appropriate to teach the Daoist tradition after Ruism in our course.

Secondly, everything we just talked of transpired in the pre-Qin period of ancient China. After Qin Dynasty reunified the Warring States and was shortly replaced by another unifying dynasty, Han Dynasty, Daoism, mainly in the form of the so-called Huang-Lao thought, played a very prominent role of statecraft and governance in early Han Dynasty, largely from 202-130s B.C.E. The major sociological reason for such a prominent role is that the Daoist political philosophy, as indicated by the above account, largely takes a “laissez-faire” approach which precludes the substantial interference and proactive coordination of governments with local people’s economic and social activities. This mentality fit very well with the need of early Han Dynasty to recover itself from the devastating wars and turmoil caused by the dynastic change between Qin and Han. In this period of its history, Daoist thought also incorporated a cluster of thoughts and practices that flourished here and there in the vast Han territory, and developed features such as the practice of sorcery, divination, shamanistic rituals, longevity, medicine, and the cosmological speculation over the all-pervasive correlation of everything in the universe via the theory of yin/yang and five phases.

Thirdly, however, under the reign of the Emperor Wu (156-87 B. C.E), the central government of Han Dynasty intended more ideological unity of its political system. In front of the Emperor Wu, there were mainly three options for him to achieve this: firstly, Legalism, which emphasizes strengthening the central authority of an empire through a strict law system of reward and punishment. This school of thought was once adopted by the prior Qin dynasty. It helped Qin to win over enemies on the battlefield and thus reunify the territory, but it failed Qin in the later peaceful time since Qin’s harsh punishments upon its subjects engendered uncontrollable resentments and rebellions. Qin accordingly became one of the most short-lived dynasties in ancient Chinese history. In light of Qin’s failure, Legalism seemed not quite a choice for Emperor Wu.

The second choice was Daoism, which, as stated, was favored by the Han emperors prior to Wu for quite a length of time. However, the “laissez-faire” approach of statecraft might be good for a time of recovery from devastating wars, but not equally fit for the sustainable development of a country, since the growth of local economic and political powers needs coordination, and the unity of the central government needs to be supported by a strong ideology.

So, eventually, propelled by Ru scholars’ persuading efforts such as Dong Zhongshu (179-104 B.C.E), the Emperor Wu chose Ruism, one lineage of thought that cherishes the values of ancient civilization, emphasizes unity within diversity, and favors a soft approach via education, family-nurturing, and ritualized public life to regain the desired unity. In other words, in the eyes of the Emperor Wu, the Ru tradition incorporates the good sides, avoids the bad sides from other schools of thought, and more importantly, can serve the diverse needs of social classes while still being able to unify the entire country as a whole. This decisive policy-move by the Emperor Wu was named by later Historians as “taking down a hundred schools of thought, while venerating the Ru statecraft alone.”

Then, we got to the fourth stage of the development of the Daoist religion in ancient China. The impact of the edict of the Emperor Wu in Han Dynasty to elevate the status of Ruism turned out to be extremely profound and long-lasting for the entire history of imperial China until early 20th century. Ruism became a state ideology, and its vast knowledge about ethics, statecraft and ancient civilizations constitutes the major criteria by which varying dynasties and imperial courts select governmental-officials among young and ambitious literati via the system of civil-examination. In other words, Ruism became the intellectual and spiritual foundation of the social elite of ancient China. This drove Daoism and its devoted affiliates and sympathizers, who were once very powerful in the court of early Han Dynasty, to find alternative social spaces to survive and evolve. In this regard, the establishment of the theocratic regime Tian Shi Dao (The Way of Heavenly Master) by Zhang Daoling (34-156 C.E) in the remote southwestern areas and in a time of rampant peasant rebellions in late Han Dynasty was a milestone event. This was the first time Daoism got established as an organized religion, and such a Daoist religion also started to construct its pantheon of deities, compile its canon, build its monastery, officialize its rules of rituals and ceremonies, and hence get intertwined with families and communities of its surrounding local areas.

However, despite that Tian Shi Dao being the first organized Daoist religion in ancient China, there were various Daoist religions created in the later history, which had no organizational relationship with Tian Shi Dao. On the other hand, although the Daoist thought lost its favor in the imperial court under the reign of the Emperor Wu in Han Dynasty, it never completely disappeared from politics. Rather, certain reigns of emperors in some dynasties actually were quite fond of the Daoist religion, and saw themselves as a loyal devotee of those Daoist deities. For the everyday life of local commoners and folks, we also witnessed a ceaseless process of intermingling and mutual-generating of practices and thoughts among the Daoist, Buddhist, Western, folk religions and the dominant Ruist social ethics. For instance, you’ll find strong traces of the Buddhist breathing technique in the Daoist method of “inner-alchemy”; you’ll find Daoist groups sometimes quite fervently advocated the Ru ethic of filiality to parents, loyalty to rulers and humaneness to all beings; you can even find the Catholic idea of “purgatory” to be overtly taught in some of the Daoist canon. In other words, in the fourth stage of the development of Daoist religion, it constantly meanders, metamorphizes, and proliferates into a loosely recognizable body of the so-called Daoist religion which includes a vast array of deviance, devolution, and diversity.

Because of this, I believe you must feel somewhat confused if you decide to learn Daoism starting from the most recent form of a Daoist religious order in the contemporary world (just as the assigned video indicates), since it would lie at one very end of a history which has evolved for almost three thousand years, and thus, was itself predominantly featured by diversity rather than unity.

Nevertheless, all trees, no matter how much ramified and widespread they seem, have their roots. By the same token, no matter how diverse Daoist orders can be from each other, they almost all read Laozi and Zhuangzi, the earliest Daoist texts in the initial stage of Daoist religion. Therefore, for our introductory course on Eastern Religion, we’ll spend some considerable time to read these two texts as well. I hope via this approach of being introduced to Daoism, we can be equipped with basic intellectual tools to understand the later, more colorful development of Daoist religions.