Daoist Philosophy: Ease | Zhuangzi’s The Happiness of Fish, by the team of Hans-Georg Moeller.

Texts and Translations: (please refer to ctext.org; translations adapted by me)

1, 莊子與惠子遊於濠梁之上。莊子曰：「儵魚出遊從容，是魚樂也。」惠子曰：「子非魚，安知魚之樂？」莊子曰：「子非我，安知我不知魚之樂？」惠子曰：「我非子，固不知子矣；子固非魚也，子之不知魚之樂全矣。」莊子曰：「請循其本。子曰『汝安知魚樂』云者，既已知吾知之而問我，我知之濠上也。」(《秋水》外篇）

Zhuangzi and Huizi were walking on the bridge over the Hao, when the former said, ‘These thryssas come out, and play about at their ease – that is the enjoyment of fishes.’ The other said, ‘You are not a fish; how do you know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?’ Zhuangzi rejoined, ‘You are not I. How do you know that I do not know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?’ Huizi said, ‘I am not you; and though indeed I do not fully know you, you certainly are not a fish, and (the argument) is complete against your knowing what constitutes the happiness of fishes.’ Zhuangzi replied, ‘Let us keep to your original question. You said to me, “How do you know what constitutes the enjoyment of fishes?” You knew that I knew it, and yet you put your question to me – well, I know it (from our enjoying ourselves together) over the Hao.’ (Qiu Shui)

2, 惠子謂莊子曰：「人故無情乎？」莊子曰：「然。」惠子曰：「人而無情，何以謂之人？」莊子曰：「道與之貌，天與之形，惡得不謂之人？」惠子曰：「既謂之人，惡得無情？」莊子曰：「是非吾所謂情也。吾所謂無情者，言人之不以好惡內傷其身，常因自然而不益生也。」惠子曰：「不益生，何以有其身？」莊子曰：「道與之貌，天與之形，無以好惡內傷其身。今子外乎子之神，勞乎子之精，倚樹而吟，據槁梧而瞑。天選子之形，子以堅白鳴！] (《德充符》内篇）

Huizi said to Zhuangzi, ‘Can a man indeed be without desires and passions?’ The reply was, ‘He can.’ ‘But on what grounds do you call him a man, who is thus without passions and desires?’ Zhuangzi said, ‘The Dao gives him his personal appearance; Heaven gives him his bodily form; how should we not call him a man?’ Huizi rejoined, ‘Since you call him a man, how can he be without passions and desires?’ The reply was, ‘You are misunderstanding what I mean by passions and desires. What I mean when I say that he is without these is, that this man does not by his likings and dislikings do any inward harm to his body – he always pursues his course out of his own accord, and does not (try to) increase his (store of) life.’ Huizi rejoined, ‘If there were not that increasing of (the amount) of life, how would he preserve his body?’ Zhuangzi said, ‘The Dao gives him his personal appearance; Heaven gives him his bodily form; and he does not by his likings and dislikings do any internal harm to his body. But now you, Sir, spend your spirit as if it were something external to you, and subject your vital powers to toil. You sing (your ditties), leaning against a tree; you go to sleep, grasping the stump of a rotten dry tree. Heaven selected for you the bodily form (of a man), and you babble about the words of hardness and whiteness.’ (De Chong Fu.)

3, 惠子謂莊子曰：「吾有大樹，人謂之樗。其大本擁腫而不中繩墨，其小枝卷曲而不中規矩，立之塗，匠者不顧。今子之言，大而無用，眾所同去也。」莊子曰：「子獨不見狸狌乎？卑身而伏，以候敖者；東西跳梁，不避高下；中於機辟，死於罔罟。今夫斄牛，其大若垂天之雲。此能為大矣，而不能執鼠。今子有大樹，患其無用，何不樹之於無何有之鄉，廣莫之野，彷徨乎無為其側，逍遙乎寢臥其下？不夭斤斧，物無害者，無所可用，安所困苦哉！」(《逍遙遊》內篇）

Huizi said to Zhuangzi, ‘I have a large tree, which men call the Ailantus. Its trunk swells out to a large size, but is not fit for a carpenter to apply his line to it; its smaller branches are knotted and crooked, so that the disk and square cannot be used on them. Though planted on the wayside, a builder would not turn his head to look at it. Now your words, Sir, are great, but of no use – all unite in putting themselves away from them.’ Zhuangzi replied, ‘Have you never seen a wildcat or a weasel? There it lies, crouching and low, till the wandering small creatures approaches; east and west it leaps about, avoiding neither what is high nor what is low, till it is caught in a trap, or dies in a net. Again there is the Yak, so large that it is like a cloud hanging in the sky. It is large indeed, but it cannot catch mice. You, Sir, have a large tree and are troubled because it is of no use – why do you not plant it in a tract where there is nothing else, or in a wide and barren wild? There you might saunter idly by its side, or in the enjoyment of untroubled ease sleep beneath it. Neither ratchet nor axe would shorten its existence; there would be nothing to injure it. What is there in its uselessness to cause you distress?‘ (Xiao Yao You)

4, 莊子送葬，過惠子之墓，顧謂從者曰：「郢人堊慢其鼻端若蠅翼，使匠石斲之。匠石運斤成風，聽而斲之，盡堊而鼻不傷，郢人立不失容。宋元君聞之，召匠石曰：『嘗試為寡人為之。』匠石曰：『臣則嘗能斲之。雖然，臣之質死久矣。』自夫子之死也，吾無以為質矣，吾無與言之矣。」（《徐無鬼》外篇）

As Zhuangzi was accompanying a funeral, when passing by the grave of Huizi, he looked round, and said to his attendants, ‘On the top of the nose of that man of Ying there is a (little) bit of mud like a fly’s wing. He sent for the artisan Shi to cut it away. Shi whirled his axe so as to produce a wind, which immediately carried off the mud entirely, leaving the nose uninjured, and the man of Ying standing undisturbed. The ruler Yuan of Song heard of the feat, called the artisan Shi, and said to him, “Try and do the same thing on me.” The artisan said, “Your servant has been able to trim things in that way, but the material on which I have worked has been dead for a long time.” Zhuangzi said, ‘Since the death of the Master, I have had no material to work upon. I have had no one with whom to talk.’ (Xu Wu Gui)

Commentary by Bin Song.

The quoted Passages 1 and 4 are utilized by the video to explain the joy of rambling and seemingly aimless intellectual debate just as the joy of swimming fishes. However, the encounters of Zhuangzi and Huizi are ample in the text of Zhuangzi. If we consider other encounters together with the quoted ones, the message conveyed by the text of Zhuangzi is actually quite consistent.

In the above Passage 2, Zhuangzi disapproves of Huizi, and avers that an obsession with conceptual analysis and philosophical debate on right and wrong is to exhaust the natural life given by heaven. Therefore, in order to continue the naturally happy life of human beings, Zhuangzi thinks we should give up such analytic thinking all together.

The same message is delivered by Passage 3, where Huizi insists upon the definition of “greatness” and “usefulness” of things according to how they fits for varying human needs. However, Zhuangzi thinks this way of thinking about usefulness is just relative to, and thus, limited by social conventions. If we are free from such conventions, we can genuinely find the greatest use of a seemingly useless tree, niv., that of “there is nothing to injure it” and hence, keeping the tree’s natural longevity.

Therefore, in light of the passages 2 and 3, the debate about “happiness of fishes” between Zhuangzi and Huizi is actually to highlight, from the perspective of Zhuangzi, the limitedness of the analytical approach of Huizi’s thought. What Zhuangzi means is that analytical rigor, such as the one that features Huizi’s thought, cannot grasp the wholeness of the Dao, and hence, cannot let humans affectively being united with it. Instead, only if we give up our analytic thought, stop debating about right or wrong, and furthermore, aimlessly wander without being constrained by social conventions, we can achieve the ideal Daoist state of joy and the good life.

Seen from this perspective, the so-called intellectual friendship eulogized in Passage 4 is more about expressing Zhuangzi’s own feeling towards the ample intellectual exchanges between him and Huizi. Huizi tries to construct theories or discourses to argue positively about some endpoint. However, each of such constructions will be addressed by Zhuangzi for the purpose of deconstruction, and, hence, for disclosing the unique Daoist way of life of “sauntering idly by the side of a useless tree.” However, whether Huizi understands intellectual activities also as such would remain a question, and whether Zhuangzi’s such understanding can remain accommodating to Huizi is also worth asking.

Hence, my comment towards such a thought of Zhuangzi will be consistent with my previous one: I admit that union with nature, such as the contemplation over swimming fishes, is a great source of joy. However, if the joy is beyond human language to express, it is definitely not contrary to human endeavors which take such a try. In other words, the non-rationality of the mystical feeling or intuition towards the union with Dao is not contrary to rationality. In a certain way of life, it can even include the pursuit of rationality. That’s when human language is taken as a fallible, perfectible, yet indispensable tool to describe and integrate every piece of life experience into a growing and harmonizing whole.

Also, I have to remind that continual deconstruction is itself a claim to make, a stance to hold, and hence, a potential orthodox to defend. Therefore, when Zhuangzi advocates such a continually deconstructive, Daoist way of life, it is still a way of life, which has been argued and debated by Zhuangzi in the way of apparently non-debate, and non-argument. Understood as such, the wandering joy of intellectual activities beside a useless tree is factually based upon a specific understanding of what intellectual activities are, and in light of the above discussion, I doubt whether Zhuangzi ever thinks of alternative ways of understanding intellectual activities. In other words, if Zhuangzi knows the joy of fishes from his guts, does Zhuangzi really knows the joy of Huizi?

In this post, I will make use of Prof. Hans-Georg Moeller’s animation of key stories in the Zhuangzi, and their corresponding original texts, to make some commentaries of this extremely popular (at least in the West) Daoist thinker’s thought.

Texts and Translations: (From ctext.org, translations have been adapted by me).

齧缺問乎王倪曰：「子知物之所同是乎？」曰：「吾惡乎知之！」「子知子之所不知邪？」曰：「吾惡乎知之！」「然則物無知邪？」曰：「吾惡乎知之！雖然，嘗試言之。庸詎知吾所謂知之非不知邪？庸詎知吾所謂不知之非知邪？且吾嘗試問乎女：民溼寢則腰疾偏死，鰌然乎哉？木處則惴慄恂懼，猨猴然乎哉？三者孰知正處？民食芻豢，麋鹿食薦，蝍且甘帶，鴟鴉耆鼠，四者孰知正味？猨，猵狙以為雌，麋與鹿交，鰌與魚游。毛嬙、麗姬，人之所美也，魚見之深入，鳥見之高飛，麋鹿見之決驟。四者孰知天下之正色哉？自我觀之，仁義之端，是非之塗，樊然殽亂，吾惡能知其辯！」齧缺曰：「子不知利害，則至人固不知利害乎？」王倪曰：「至人神矣：大澤焚而不能熱，河、漢沍而不能寒，疾雷破山、風振海而不能驚。若然者，乘雲氣，騎日月，而遊乎四海之外。死生无變於己，而況利害之端乎！」（《齊物論》內篇)

Nie Que asked Wang Ni, saying, ‘Do you know, Sir, what all creatures agree in approving and affirming?’ ‘How should I know it?’ was the reply. ‘Do you know what it is that you do not know?’ asked the other again, and he got the same reply. He asked a third time, ‘Then there is no way to know anything?’ and Wang Ni answered as before, (adding however), ‘Notwithstanding, I will try and explain my meaning. How do you know that when I say “I know it,” I really (am showing that) I do not know it, and that when I say “I do not know it,” I really am showing that I do know it.’ And let me ask you some questions: ‘If a man sleep in a damp place, he will have a pain in his loins, and half his body will be as if it were dead; but will it be so with an eel? If he be living in a tree, he will be frightened and all in a tremble; but will it be so with a monkey? And does any one of the three know his right place ? Men eat animals that have been fed on grain and grass; deer feed on the thick-set grass; centipedes enjoy small snakes; owls and crows delight in mice; but does any one of the four know the right taste? The dog-headed monkey finds its mate in the female gibbon; the elk and the axis deer cohabit; and the eel enjoys itself with other fishes. Mao Qiang and Li Ji were accounted by men to be most beautiful, but when fishes saw them, they dived deep in the water from them; when birds, they flew from them aloft; and when deer saw them, they separated and fled away. But did any of these four know which in the world is the right female attraction? As I look at the matter, the first principles of humaneness and righteousness and the paths of approval and disapproval are inextricably mixed and confused together – how is it possible that I should know how to discriminate among them?’ Nie Que said (further), ‘Since you, Sir, do not know what is advantageous and what is hurtful, is the Perfect man also in the same way without the knowledge of them?’ Wang Ni replied, ‘The Perfect man is spirit-like. Great lakes might be boiling about him, and he would not feel their heat; the He and the Han rivers might be frozen up, and he would not feel the cold; the hurrying thunderbolts might split the mountains, and the wind shake the ocean, without being able to make him afraid. Being such, he mounts on the clouds of the air, rides on the sun and moon, and rambles at ease beyond the four seas. Neither death nor life makes any change in him, and how much less should the considerations of advantage and injury do so!’

Commentary by Bin Song:

Aristotle in the Politics argues that relying upon languages and discourses to debate ethical matters in a polis is what distinguishes humans from non-human beings, and hence, Aristotle defines humans as “a political animal.” Similarly, Confucius in the Analects (the chapter of Wei Zi) refuses to live among birds and beasts as a detached hermit because Confucius thinks “being social” so as to help better the living conditions of human fellows in society is what “being a human” or “being humane” means essentially.

However, Zhuangzi holds a different view: everyone’s view of “humaneness” and “righteousness” is relative to their own perspective, and hence, being dedicated to moral debate is like arguing which one among men, deers, centipedes, owls and crows “know the right taste.” It can only bring “mixture and confusion,” and hence, Zhuangzi would never do that. Instead, what Zhuangzi longs for is to become a Perfect man who leaves every being alone while himself enjoying the utter freedom from debate, controversy and other complicated human artifices.

Quite obviously, the doubt towards the distinction between humans and the non-human nature is quite consistent in Laozi and Zhuangzi. Because of this, the text of Zhuangzi has its good reasons to be categorized as belonging to the same Daoist lineage in classical Chinese thought.

My questions: is there really no way to reach a consensus among all human beings about what is morally right or wrong? If this is the case, how can we have a United Nations and how can we have a Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Preaching moral dogmatics is mostly repulsive in modern context; however, does this mean that there are no morals at all? Even if reaching such a consensus may be indeed very hard, does the difficulty mean that we would give up the efforts once for all? Isn’t a case we can make that we humans can at least temporarily and pragmatically reach a certain consensus about what should be done in a specific context, while keeping it in mind that we can always change and refine the consensus when situations more evolve?

When claiming every moral judgment is relative to one’s perspective, isn’t Zhuangzi also making a non-relativist moral claim, viz., an absolutist one that every one is entitled to their own moral judgment?

Regarding the point made by the video, I question whether the withdrawal from debating and advocating a certain kind of morals is really therapeutic. When one is chronically abused in their family, when one young girl is sexually molested, or when one veteran suffers from traumas out of a war, does the sheer refusal to talk about morals really heal their wounds?

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.

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.