Page 49 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

OVERVIEW 9

by less agreeable elements might result in. The establishment of an externally
verifiable canonical literature; the codification of rituals and priestly standards
in general; the beginnings of monastic foundations of the Buddhist type-all
these represent the creation of a "religion" out of a much looser assemblage
of religious elements, and obviously some sort of unifYing name was neces-
sary. The *Yixia lun (Essay on the Barbarians and the Chinese) of *Gu Huan
(420 / 428-483 / 491) is usually taken as the scene of its first appearance in this
sense, though its presence in the biography of *Kou Qianzhi (365?- 448) in the
Weishu (History of the Wei; trans. Ware 1933, 228-35) may attest a somewhat
earlier occurrence, and an essay by Zhou Yong flU IIlfI to which Gu was respond-
ing already implicitly refers to Buddhism and Taoism as contrastingjiao.
It was, of course, inevitable that the Buddhists should have attempted to
disassemble this construct polemically. Uncertain of their control of physical
sacred space in China, where nurninous places were already cult sites, they
were anxious to deny their newly organized rivals cultural space by imposing a
contrast between the otherworldly concerns of Buddhism leading to nirvaJ:l.a,
and (by analogy with the Indian case of the old Hindu gods) the sublunary
status of all other religious phenomena. Laozi was acceptable as a philoso-
pher, but had had no soteriological intent; pursuit of immortality within this
world was fine (though success was, of course, dependent on karma); even
some forms of religious observance might be tolerable-but not the aping
of Buddhism's grand conception of the cosmos and the human condition.
This attempt at stifling daojiao at birth was frustrated by its clear political
appeal as a religion much more in tune with Chinese imperial symbolism than
Buddhism. On these grounds it garnered widespread support from dynasties
such as the Northern Wei, the Northern Zhou and (most definitively) the
Tang. During the Tang epoch the categories of the Three Teachings (of Con-
fucius, Laozi and the Buddha) proved such a convenient way of ordering the
intellectual interests of the elite-even though they were far from mutually
substitutable equivalents-that at a conceptual level they became an irreduc-
ible part of Chinese culture.
The consolidation of Neo-Confucianism under Zhu Xi *= ~ (II3Q-1200; SB
282-90) affected discourse on daojiao in slightly different ways, as may be seen
from his Recorded Sayings under this heading (Zhuzi yulei *= T ~ ~Jl , Zhonghua
shuju ed., 125.3005-6). He himself generally prefers the Han usage daojia to
refer to everything from Laozi down to the religion of his contemporaries,
and under that term does support the Buddhist charge of plagiarism against
Taoism, mainly with a view to recapturing for Confucians elements of the
state cult of Heaven which had fallen under Taoist control during the Tang.
He evidently treats daojiao as a synonym for daojia, and uses it in opposition
to rujiao {!Mt\[ , "Confucianism," stating that Confucianism may not be too