Sebastian Hayes

Taoism is not a clearcut phenomenon. The term covers a large spectrum of beliefs and attitudes ranging from the folk religion still practised in Taiwan to highly sophisticated theories about the origin of the universe.

The roots of Taoism lie in shamanism — but this is not saying very much since most, if not all, religions can ultimately be traced back to shamanism. What we can say, however, is that the sort of person who might have become a shaman in tribal society, found a convenient spiritual home in Taoism. The shaman often seems to have been a social misfit, also he or she was someone who claimed to have access to a deeper level of reality than the ordinary person. Many of the best known Chinese Taoists fit this description and, like the shaman, many of them cultivated ‘altered states of consciousness’ using alcohol and drugs.

Chinese thought largely split into two opposites, Confucianism and Taoism, later joined by Buddhism which was an import from India. Confucius concerned himself exclusively with man as a social being : his philosophy is rational and ethical. Taoism, especially the version of Chuang-tzu, rejected reason as a guide and assigned man an insignificant place in the world-schema. Self-styled Taoists, at recurrent intervals scandalised Chinese society by disregarding ritual and ceremony, opting out of society and searching for ecstasy in drunkenness, solitary communion with nature or sexual love. The illustrious Chinese poet living in the T’ang era, Li Po,  considered himself  a Taoist and reputedly died trying to embrace the reflection of the moon in the Yuang-tse river. So when the Californian hippies rediscovered the mystic cults of the East during the sixties, in the case of Taoism they were not just reading back their preoccupations into a bygone era, they really were treading in the footsteps of ancient Chinese drop-outs who took to the hills looking for the lost life of the instincts.

It is customary to divide the history of Taoism into three main periods : the philosophic era, the esoteric and the religious. It would seem that there was rather more overlap than scholars used to think, and behind all three is the persistent trace of shamanism, but the schema has value as a rough guide all the same.

In the first period, which was the Chinese equivalent of the classic era of Greece, Lao Tse and Chuang-tzu turned Taoism into a very advanced philosophic doctrine, or mélange of doctrines, with most of the cruder elements of the presumed earlier tradition eliminated. The ideal was that of the sage, not the magic-man or yogi: Chuang-tzu even cites the case of a searcher who misses the Way because of the exaggerated importance he gives to the acquisition of paranormal abilities.

But during the Han dynasty (206 BC  — 220 AD) Taoism changed course dramatically and practising Taoists became preoccupied, not to say obsessed, with precisely the acquisition of ‘powers’, especially the power to overcome death. The earlier Taoists were indifferent or hostile to the demands of society and cultivated an attitude of resignation towards life in general, taking what came to them without complaining or desiring more. But there was nothing resigned about the Taoists of the Han era and succeeding centuries : their maxim was, as a Taoist text of the time put it, “My destiny is in me, it is not in Heaven”. And since what most people, then as now,  want above all is health and longevity, Taoists set about achieving both, or attempting to, by deploying a vast gamut of techniques ranging from alchemy, strict dieting which included not only the avoidance of meat but cereals as well, yogic style breathing exercises, magical ritual, gymnastics, sexual practices which stressed retention of semen for men, and what we would today call group therapy. In fact this period of Taoism, at least as practised in court circles, has a contemporary feel to it : it is New Ageism gone mad!

One result was that several of the wealthier Taoists, including at least two Emperors, succeeded in killing themselves by imbibing elixirs of immortality. However, not all these researches were futile for they eventually gave rise to Tai Ch’I, Qi Gong (a sort of Chinese yoga) and Kung Fu amongst countless other disciplines. The contemporary American therapy ‘Rebirthing’ recalls the Taoist practice of ‘embryonic breathing’, while the idea of using visualization for healing and self-energizing purposes comes straight out of Taoist medical theory. Margot Anand, in her detailed and well-documented book, The Art of Sexual Ecstasy, confirms the soundness of many Taoist sexual practices, including several that were in the past dismissed as quite fantastic such as recycled male orgasm — though she does not consider it is possible to become  immortal by using such methods.

The immortality quest peaked somewhere around the VIth century AD and was succeeded by more conventional religious practices such as meditation, the study of ancient texts and giving food and shelter to the poor. But the esoteric tradition never really died out and has known something of a revival in post-Cultural Revolution China.

Lao Tse and Chung-tzu would have totally disapproved of the search for immortality, since for them death was not a problem : to die was to return to the source of all life, the eternal Tao. Chuang-tzu shocked people of his day time by singing and making music the day after his wife’s death — not, he hastened to explain, because he was not attached to her, but because it was unseemly to view death as a disaster. Reputedly, he joked when on his own deathbed and, like Saint Francis, specified that he wished to be laid naked on the ground exposed to the birds, also that there should be no form of funeral service held for him. As for Lao Tse, he only mentions death once in the Tao Te Ching.

Philosophical Taoism never completely died out and throughout Chinese history maintained a strong appeal for Chinese poets and men of letters who found the official Confucianism too dry and rationalistic for their taste. But it produced no new creative thinkers (none at any rate who have been translated) and tended to be eclipsed by Buddhism, a relatively late import from India.

Amongst the peasantry Taoism evolved into a folk  religion with strong shamanistic elements that was still widespread in mainland China at the beginning of the twentieth century, though already under pressure from Westernization. Long before Mao’s Cultural Revolution, educated Chinese regarded folk Taoism with distaste as an unwholesome relic from the past — though the government in Taiwan for a time viewed it favourably for precisely this reason. One or two contemporary Western intellectuals claim to have been initiated into Taoist orders still active in Taiwan.

Rather than giving more details about Taoism in Chinese history (which can be gleaned from other books), I think it much more illuminating to approach it from our Western viewpoint — however shocking this may appear to scholars. Martin Palmer and other writers on Taoism argue that it is being ignorant and snobbish to concentrate on the Taoism of Lao Tse and bypass the rich folk tradition. But folk traditions cannot easily be imported from one country to another since, precisely because they are folk traditions, they are tied to their place of origin in a way ideas are not. In any case we can find very similar practices much less farther afield : there seems no point in exchanging the Catholic saints for the Eight Immortals of Taoism, and if one finds the idea of eternal punishment monstrous it does not become any less so because the décor is more exotic. (For popular Taoism had its Hell as well.) But the ideas and practices of philosophic Taoism really are very different from what we come across in Western religion and philosophy, hence their enduring interest and appeal.

Although the main Taoist texts were translated during the nineteenth century, it was Jung who brought Taoism to the notice of the general public. He found in the yin-yang theories of Taoist alchemists anticipations of his own ideas, in particular the notion that each person has within him or her self an ‘anima’ or ‘animus’ corresponding to the opposite gender and with which it is necessary to come to terms. Health, whether physical or psychological, is  not a pure state but a successful dynamic interplay of  opposing elements. The well-known yin-yang mandala which appears on the national flag of South Korea [  gives graphic expression to this dynamic : the white side contains a point of black and the black side a point of white.

In reality yin-yang theories were by no means restricted to Taoism and we first come across the mandala itself in texts written during the XIth century AD, that is, over one thousand five hundred years after the compilation of the Tao Te Ching. At this time educated Taoists, and also Confucians, were concerned about the balancing out of ‘male’ and ‘female’ elements within the personality, much as people in the West are today.

But Lao Tse and Chuang-tzu stress the essential oneness of the universe rather than polarity. In a truly dualistic system, such as Zoroastrianism, the two opposing forces are eternal and nothing underlies them. This is not the Taoist conception which stresses flux and posits a single principle behind and within everything that exists, the Tao. As Kuan Lu put it, “The fact is that, in the transformations that affect all things, constant forms do not exist. (…) Light and dark partake of the same cycle of changes, life and death of a single Way”  (Kuan Lu, Records of the Three Kingdoms, tr. DeWoskin).

The transformations of  yin into yang and yang into yin are endless and have always existed though the underlying principle remains the same. It is a very important feature of Taoism that it stresses process, the interplay of opposites, rather than, for example, the static perfection of Plato’s Forms  or the absolute quiescence of Nirvana. Nothing remains what it is for very long, but  the yin-yang process is not entirely random either since underneath there is the same repetitive oscillation. Other cycles, like those of the seasons, or the changing situations represented by the hexagrams of the I Ching , are more complex but at bottom are just as repetitive. Ultimately there is nothing new under the sun for everything already pre-exists within the Tao. The sage finds a solace, even a kind of ecstasy, in this endless rocking movement that reconciles him or her* to misfortune and even death.

Marx also saw the dynamic interplay of opposites as the basis of all phenomena , but he added a forward movement too since he believed in progress, an idea entirely alien to the Taoist mentality and for that matter to traditional Chinese thought as a whole. History is not driving towards a goal, whether it be imposed by God or man. This lack of any aim or ‘meaning’ to life does not, however, strike Chuang-tzu as being at all depressing : the issue that tormented Bertrand Russell and other humanists, that the human     species will one day become extinct, is not a problem for Chuang-tzu. Taoism is practically unique amongst religions and philosophies in that it accords no special importance to man.

The basic schema of philosophic Taoism is of two regions called Heaven and Earth, and beyond them the Tao itself. Both Heaven and Earth are manifestations of the original Tao, are not ultimately separate from it, and will eventually return to the source from which they have sprung. Thus, underneath an apparent dualism, there is a monistic view as in all forms of mystical thought : in the last resort there is only one ‘thing’. As Lieh-Tzu, the third main Taoist author, puts it :

“That, then, which engenders all things is itself unengendered; that by which all things are evolved is itself untouched by evolution. Self-engendered and self-evolved, it ahs in itself the elements of substance, appearance, wisdom, strength, dispersion and cessation. Yet it would be a mistake to call it by any of these names.”
Lieh-Tzu Book

Being the source of everything, the original Tao cannot be pinned down by words — or by mathematical symbols — and Lao Tse begins his great work by saying just this :

“The Tao that can be named is not the original Tao.”

How do we know that it exists at all ?  In two ways, I suggest. By reasoning somewhat as follows. Firstly, there must be an origin to the world we see and feel and an origin that is not wholly contained within the physical world but lies beyond it, though, according to Taoism, it penetrates it also. The Tao is this origin and, unless we want to involve ourselves infinite regress, we halt here. I do not find at all plausible the argument advanced by Russell and others, that whatever lies at the origin of this world itself needs an origin. There is a qualitative jump here from a ‘world’ which seemingly requires something beyond it and a ‘something’ which contains all that is, at least in potential. Even if there are many universes as in the multiverse system, these universes must have all come from something.

But this is just reasoning. The original Tao, though unknowable directly, can, for all that, be known. How and why ?  Because it is present within us as a memory that cannot be extinguished; indeed this memory, which belongs to the domain of  experiential not theoretical knowledge, is the most fundamental sensation we have. Mystics in all eras have borne witness to this feeling, but even ordinary people, provided education has not made them ashamed of it, retain  a dim, but surprisingly tenacious, sense of what lies at the origin of all life : this is the main reason why the ‘ignorant’ majority  stubbornly cling to some form of belief in a beyond, notwithstanding the increasingly violent attacks of rationalism and scientism. “We feel and know that we are eternal”, as Spinoza put it.

We may equate ‘Earth’ with what we today call the physical universe. ‘Heaven’ is a term deliberately left vague in Taoist and Confucian thought, and which originally signified ‘everything that is independent of human control’. We can include under this title all non-physical entities, supposing there are such, as for example the divinities worshipped by the various religions, but also Plato’s Ideas, Jung’s archetypes, basic mathematical formulae, physical ‘laws’ and so on. But both these domains, Heaven quite as much as Earth, are no more than passing manifestations of the eternal Tao; they have no independent existence or validity. The Tao is, as it were, a sea and all these things are passing ripples on the surface of the water. All possibilities exist within the Tao though only a certain portion of the Tao can, of necessity, be manifested at once.

The original Tao itself is not a static perfection, for if this were so, it could never have given rise to anything at all. There is, then, seemingly an inherent tendency within the original Tao itself towards materialisation, a natural overflowing from the nameless and formless into the world of shape and separate identity. And there is a corresponding returning movement, an impulse away from the specific back into the formlessness and apparent nothingness of the Origin. In terms of human  psychology, this instinct to return manifests itself as nostalgia for a lost paradise, a profound longing to  merge our separate existence into the greater existence of the whole and thus return to that state of unity with the source which we can all dimly remember. For Taoism, death, at any rate if it comes at the right time and in the right circumstances, is not an evil : it is a return to our place of origin, not a step into the unknown. Rather it is birth which is a terrifying (but also fascinating) adventure :  “Into the dangerous world he leapt” as Blake puts it.

Some two thousand years before Darwin Chuang-tzu  suggested  that everything originated in tiny objects the translator A.C. Graham renders as ‘germs’. These ‘germs’ go through endless metamorphoses, becoming water-plantain, frogs, beetles, butterflies, fireflies, eventually animals. But Chaung-tzu is not at all interested in the chronological sequence of events (as we are) but only in the perpetual possibility of one thing turning into something quite different and yet remaining in some sense the same because both share the same origin. This process is not leading anywhere in particular, be it Paradise, Nirvana, the ideal human society, Nietzsche’s Superman, the Omega Point of Teilhard de Chardin or the universal computer of modern SF fantasies.   “The leopard gives birth to the horse which gives birth to man”, writes Chaung-tzu.   Well, what then?   “Man in due course goes back to the germs. The myriad things all come from the germs, all go back into the germs.” And this is how it should be.

Sebastian Hayes