Page 202 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

TAOISM AND CHINESE SOCIETY

Taoism and the state

The late-twentieth-century rise in historical research on Taoism has had its
most radical impact on our understanding of the relationship between Taoism
and the state. While in the past the words would probably have conjured up
images of *Zhuangzi refusing to become a bureaucrat, now, thanks to the
works of Anna Seidel (1938--91), a strong conceptual link between Taoism as
a religious tradition and bureaucracy is accepted as fundamental to our un-
derstanding of its role. Specifically, we now know that the rise of bureaucratic
state organization in preimperial China soon started to affect conceptions of
the unseen world of the spirits, so that by the second century CE, when the
imperial bureaucracy began to lose its hold on a troubled and restless society,
it was to this unseen empire that intermediaries like the Celestial Masters
(*Tianshi dao) started to appeal, using the terminology of bureaucratic writ-
ten communications. Despite the undoubted presence of an anti-imperial,
anarchic strain within the Taoist tradition from preimperial times, the tension
between religion and the state at this point, as at many later points, arose not
from a radically different vision of society, but from an identical alternative
based on the better ordered empire of the gods. Though images of royalty
and empire are not uncommon in other religions, Taoism is unique in extend-
ing its imagery from the highest levels of rulership to embrace the ranks of
officialdom and the culture of scribal administration.
This explains an even greater tension, first noticed by Rolf A. Stein (1979),
between Taoism, often as an ally of bureaucracy, and local religion during the
Six Dynasties. This tension has been traced into the Tang and even the Song
by Judith M. Boltz (1993a) and others, though thereafter it became muted as
popular religion itself to a large degree absorbed what has been termed the
"imperial metaphor." But the Tang-Song period of alliance against local cults
only became possible once official doubts about the priesthood's capacity
to supplant them had been allayed. This happened in the early fifth century,
when the alternative policy of leaving them alone, either at the risk of seeing
their organizations fall prey to religious adventurers (the cause of serious
rebellion in South China, 399-4II; see *Sun En) or so as to forego their value
in the reorganization of an agrarian society already devastated by war (as in
the North), was abandoned.
It was this period that saw Taoism emerge as an organized, state-recog-

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