Page 184 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TAOISM VOL. I

expressed in the Huahu jing was a powerful one. Yet ultimately the Buddhists
at least by the early sixth century had begun to articulate a relationship which
was not even coordinate or "separate but equal," as in the distinctions between
nei i*J, "esoteric," versus wai y~, "exoteric," but clearly involved the subordi-
nation of Taoism (with Confucianism) as "worldly," rather than "beyond this
world" (chushi III jlt), in its implications. Thus, as in the case of Zongmi *
~: (780-841) and other prominent Buddhists of his day like the poet BaiJuyi
El m ~ (772-846), a place could be found for Taoism insofar as it was content
to be considered a this-worldly teaching, but the assignment of this relative
value cannot be said to amount to syncretism.
Little has been done to assess the Taoist perspective on the relative value
of Buddhism, but those who have examined for example the use of the Heart
Sutra in *Quanzhen Taoism have not thereby concluded that within that move-
ment non-Taoist elements were perceived in a completely coordinate rather
than subordinate way. In the long run, perhaps, there were shifts here also:
the resolute Chineseness of Chan Buddhism, for example, may have undercut
the ethnocentric strain in Taoist anti-Buddhism, while the essentially Indian
scholastic distinction between the worldly and the otherworldly may have
become muted in Chan rhetoric, with its emphasis on the elimination of all
dichotomies. This could explain why, for example, a handbook included in
the supplement to the Ming canon, the *Soushenji (In Search of the Sacred),
includes Buddhist cults as such, in the form popularly practiced, not as recon-
textualized within Taoist circles. And formerly, where Taoist and Buddhist
meditation schemes had always looked similar (whether through contact,
or through convergence on universal psychological norms), the eventual
language of *neidan practice, from the start a multivalent kaleidoscope of
images as much as a technical system of descriptive language, absorbed Bud-
dhist terminology in such a way as to render late texts like the Secret of the
Golden Flower (*Taiyi jinhua zongzhi) at the very least religious hybrids much
more challenging than any reformulation of Buddhism within the Lingbao
corpus. Once again, however, this last case may involve institutional factors
as well: where Buddhist and Taoist notions of self-development had, because
of the late Ming rise in a print culture, become very widely available to any
literate person without the mediation of religious professionals, the market
expected no less than the most exciting that both traditions had to offer in any
new publications.
The preceding two or three paragraphs have inevitably been more specula-
tive than is usual in a work of reference. For we have hardly marshalled all the
historical evidence necessary to understand the interaction between Buddhism
and Taoism, yet any general statement concerning their relationship must
move beyond mere recitations of fact to look at the broader patterns that