Page 4 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

Foreword

by

T. H. Barrett

Taoism has been for over half a millennium the East Asian religious tradition
most consistently despised and rejected in the West, esteemed if at all for the
wrong reasons, and seldom enough at that. As early as 1569 the pioneering
missionary Friar Gaspar da Cruz, O.P, while at one point conceding the great
respect shown by the Chinese to Taoist priests, avers at another that they live
"wickedly and filthily." This was perhaps due to a simple misunderstanding that
caused him to assume that all Taoist priests were supposed to be celibate. But
to the Counter-Reformation sensibilities of later Jesuits like Matteo Ricci and
his many successors the very idea of a non-celibate priesthood must have been
quite disturbing in any case, so that we subsequently find very little dissent from
this first damning indictment. Even in the nineteenth century the Protestant
missionaries, who often arrived as married couples, continued to heap scorn
upon the Taoists, though now as part of a generally negative assessment of
Chinese culture that contrasted with the positive evaluation of some aspects
of China espoused by those who followed Ricci's missionary strategy.
It is true that one or two ancient texts associated with the Taoist tradition
were in the late nineteenth century clasped firmly to the bosom of Western
theosophy, a cultural movement that manifested a great generosity of spirit
towards Asian wisdom whilst usually denying any validity to the views of
contemporary Asians themselves-the lofty mysticism of a Laozi was held to
be something quite beyond the grasp of his latter day heirs, intelligible only to
illuminati on the theosophists' own spiritual plane. Whether missionaries or
mystics, then, the received opinion in the West would have been that repub-
lished as recently as 1990 in A Confucian Notebook by Edward Herbert, which
first appeared in 1950. In this work we are summarily informed that "Taoism"
beyond those favoured early texts is simply "a synonym for superstition and
imposture." In such a hostile climate accurate knowledge concerning Taoism
was until the very end of the twentieth century remarkably hard to come by.
Matters of tone and judgment apart, a handbook such as Samuel Couling's
Encyclopaedia Sinica of 1917, for example, demonstrates a completely insouci-
ant vagueness on such basic questions as the size of the Taoist canon or the
number of texts it contains.

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