Unit 8 · Confucianism and Daoism

In museums in Beijing, Taipei and Chicago you can see bronze vessels cast about three thousand years ago. Inside some of them is a text: a record of a gift from a Zhou king to a noble, cast into the metal so the noble’s descendants would remember it. The Zhou dynasty (c. 1046–256 BCE) came to power by overthrowing the Shang. To explain why that was right, Zhou texts said that tian, Heaven, had withdrawn its favor from the last Shang king because of his cruelty and given it to the Zhou.

This idea is called the Mandate of Heaven. In these texts Heaven is not a person with a face and a name like the God of the Hebrew Bible. It is the high moral power that orders the world. The king is the Son of Heaven, but only on condition: he must rule with virtue. Floods, famines and rebellions could be read as signs that the mandate was slipping away. A dynasty that lost its virtue could rightly be replaced. That is different from a claim that a king rules by a divine right that can never be lost.

The early Zhou produced the heroes Confucius admired most: King Wen, King Wu, who defeated the Shang, and the Duke of Zhou, who governed loyally for his young nephew and then handed power back. Confucius held the Duke of Zhou up as the model of the good minister. In the Analects he sighs that he has grown old because he no longer dreams of the Duke. Two collections that preserve Zhou material, the Book of Documents and the Book of Songs, are quoted by Confucius constantly.

Notice what counted as sacred in this world. Kings sacrificed to Heaven and to their royal ancestors. Noble families kept ancestral temples and followed detailed ceremonies. The specialists who preserved and taught these ceremonies were called ru, a word that later meant scholars. Confucius belonged to this class, and his followers were called ru. What English calls Confucianism is, in Chinese, rujia, the school of the ru. The tradition was never named after him at home.

In 771 BCE, invaders sacked the Zhou capital and the court fled east to Luoyang. The king kept his title, but real power passed to the lords of the regional states. Historians call the next centuries the Spring and Autumn period (771–476 BCE), after a chronicle kept in the state of Lu, Confucius’s home. It was followed by the Warring States period (475–221 BCE). Many smaller states were swallowed until seven large ones remained, fighting with iron weapons and armies of conscripted farmers.

The old order of hereditary nobles was crumbling. Ministers pushed aside their lords; lords ignored the king. The great question of the age was how to bring back order. Traditional accounts speak of a Hundred Schools of thought. The Confucians answered with ritual and moral example. The Mohists, followers of Mozi, taught impartial care for everyone and opposed costly wars and funerals. The Legalists answered with strict laws, harsh punishments and a powerful state. Daoists, whom the next chapter studies, answered by returning to the Way. These were not only philosophies; they were also advice offered by traveling teachers to rulers looking for help.

The Legalist answer won first. The western state of Qin, reorganized by the Legalist minister Shang Yang, conquered its rivals and unified China in 221 BCE under the First Emperor. Later Confucian historians told with horror how his government burned privately held books and executed scholars. The Qin dynasty fell within fifteen years of its founding. The Han dynasty that replaced it eventually turned to the ru and their classics, and the rest of this chapter follows that turn.

For a reader, the background matters. The Analects was assembled during this age of argument. When Confucius says that people led by laws and punishments will simply dodge punishment, while people led by virtue and ritual will develop a sense of shame, he is taking one side of a live debate. Nearly every saying in the book is an answer to someone. Reading it well means asking who he is answering.

His name was Kong Qiu. His students called him Kongzi or Kong Fuzi, Master Kong, and Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries turned that into the Latin name Confucius. He was born in 551 BCE near Qufu, in the state of Lu, in what is now Shandong province. His family belonged to the lowest rank of the nobility, and his father died when he was small. Later sources say he worked as a young man keeping accounts for granaries and tending herds. He mastered the six arts of a gentleman: ritual, music, archery, charioteering, writing and arithmetic.

Tradition says he held office in Lu, perhaps as minister of crime, though the details are uncertain. Around 497 BCE he left, disappointed with the ruler, and spent roughly fourteen years traveling from state to state with a band of disciples, offering his services. In Wei, Song, Chen and Cai he found polite interest and no real job, and at least once his party nearly starved. He returned to Lu about 484 BCE, taught, and by tradition edited the old classics. He died in 479 BCE and was buried at Qufu, where the Kong family cemetery and a great temple in his honor still stand.

His teaching had a new feature. He took students without regard to birth, saying that in teaching there should be no distinction between classes, and that he had never refused anyone who came with even a small gift for the lesson. His disciples included Yan Hui, the poor and brilliant favorite who died young; Zilu, brave and blunt; Zigong, a merchant and diplomat; and Zengzi, who carried the school forward. Tradition counts seventy-two close disciples out of some three thousand students.

How did he see himself? In the Analects he calls himself a transmitter and not a maker, one who believes in and loves the ancients. Yet his focus on the inner motive behind ritual was new. He said little about spirits and the afterlife. Later Confucians honored him as the Supreme Sage and First Teacher, and some treated him as nearly divine, while others in the tradition rejected that. Historians read him as a moral teacher and would-be reformer whose real success came only after his death.

Open the Analects and you find twenty short books holding about five hundred passages. Most begin the same way: The Master said. The Chinese title, Lunyu, means something like selected sayings. Confucius did not write the book. His disciples and their own students compiled it over the fifth to third centuries BCE, and scholars can see earlier and later layers in it. A passage may be a single aphorism, a short pointed saying, or a brief dialogue with a named student or ruler.

This form demands a certain kind of reading. A treatise explains itself; a record of conversations does not. The reader must ask who is speaking, who is asking and why. In one passage two students ask the identical question, whether they should act at once on what they learn. Bold Zilu is told to consult his father and elder brother first. Cautious Ran You is told to act at once. A third student asks why, and Confucius answers that one needed holding back and the other needed pushing forward.

The English version this course quotes is by James Legge, a Scottish missionary and scholar in Hong Kong who published the Analects in 1861 as the first volume of his Chinese Classics. His translation is in the public domain and still widely read. It uses older spellings, so Zigong appears as Tsze-kung, and it renders key terms in Victorian English: propriety for li, benevolence or perfect virtue for ren, the superior man for junzi. When you meet those phrases, translate them back.

From the twelfth century on, the Analects was read as one of the Four Books, together with the Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean. Apply the toolkit from the start of this course. Author: many hands over generations. Audience: students preparing to serve in government. Purpose: to preserve a teacher’s way of living and to train character. Genre: teaching, in the form of sayings. Like the Gospels or the hadith, it is a record of a teacher kept by followers, but it contains no miracles and almost nothing about the divine.

The Chinese character for ren is written with the sign for person beside the sign for two. Humaneness is what shows itself between two people. When the disciple Fan Chi asks what ren is, Confucius answers that it is to love others. When Yan Hui asks, he is told that ren means mastering oneself and returning to ritual. When Zhong Gong asks, he hears that he should not do to others what he would not want done to himself. As with filial piety, the answer bends toward the questioner.

That last answer is the famous rule of shu, usually translated reciprocity or consideration. Asked for one word to guide a whole life, Confucius offers shu and states it in the negative: what you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others. The Jewish teacher Hillel, some five centuries later, put a similar rule in nearly the same negative form, and the Gospel of Matthew records Jesus stating it positively. Scholars still debate whether the negative form asks less than the positive one or simply protects others from our assumptions about what they want. The disciple Zengzi summarized the Master’s way in two words: zhong, doing one’s utmost, and shu.

Ren is demanding. Confucius rarely called anyone ren, and he declined the title for himself. Ren is not softness, either: he says only the person of ren knows how to love and how to dislike, because that person’s feelings are rightly ordered. Above all, ren gives ritual its meaning. If a person lacks ren, he asks, what has that person to do with rites or with music? The outward ceremony without the inward heart is an empty shell.

Later Confucians built on this. Mencius said ren is simply the human heart. Neo-Confucians of the Song dynasty said the person of ren feels one body with all things. Translators have offered goodness, humaneness, benevolence and authoritative conduct, and none is perfect. The idea to hold is that in Confucian thought the inner root of goodness is a felt care for others, and every visible virtue grows from it.

Book Ten of the Analects reads almost like a stage direction. It describes how Confucius behaved at court: how he bowed, how he lifted the hem of his robe on the steps, how he would not sit on a mat that was crooked, how he did not talk while eating. All of this is li. The word covers the great sacrifices to ancestors, the three years of mourning for a parent, the ceremonies of a royal court, and small things like how to greet an elder. Translators use rites, ritual, propriety and etiquette, and all of them are part of it.

Li is not empty form. When Lin Fang asks about the root of ritual, Confucius answers that in ceremonies it is better to be simple than lavish, and in mourning it is better to feel real grief than to attend to every detail. But the form still matters. When Zigong wanted to drop the sheep offered at the monthly announcement of the new moon, Confucius told him: you love the sheep; I love the ceremony. In the Confucian view, practicing the form trains the feeling. Li is where a person actually does ren.

Li also governs. Confucius says that a leader who governs by virtue is like the north star, which stays in place while the other stars turn around it. The character of a ruler is like wind, he tells a powerful minister, and the people are like grass that bends under it. Asked how he would begin to govern, he says he would start with the rectification of names: making words match reality. A ruler must act like a ruler, a minister like a minister, a father like a father, a son like a son. When titles and conduct come apart, order fails.

It helps to compare. In its reach into daily life, li resembles halakhah, the Jewish way of law, and Hindu dharma. But li is not commanded by a god in a revealed scripture. Its authority comes from the ancient sages who shaped it and from its proven effect on human character. Confucians today debate how much of the old li still applies. Few observe three years of mourning, yet the idea that form shapes feeling remains central to the tradition.

Return to the story that opened this chapter. Four students asked about xiao, filial piety, the respect, care and deference a child owes to parents and, beyond them, to ancestors. In the Analects the disciple Youzi calls filial piety and respect for elder brothers the root of ren. An early text compiled by Han times, the Classic of Filial Piety, opens by saying that our bodies come from our parents and that not harming them is where filial piety begins. In this view, you first learn to care for others at home.

Xiao is not blind obedience. Confucius says that a son who sees his parents doing wrong should remonstrate gently, and if they will not listen, should remain respectful and not complain. Later Confucian writers went further and said a son who never remonstrates is not filial at all. The tradition also faced hard cases. A governor boasts of a man who reported his own father for stealing a sheep. Confucius answers that in his region uprightness looks different: a father shields his son and a son shields his father. Legalists rejected that answer, and ethicists still argue about it.

From the family, Confucian thought moves outward through the five relationships: ruler and minister, father and son, husband and wife, elder brother and younger brother, friend and friend. The book of Mencius attaches a virtue to each: duty, affection, distinction, order and trust. Four are between unequals and one is between equals. Each side has obligations: the ruler must be humane, not only the minister loyal. Historically the tradition placed women under the authority of fathers, husbands and sons, and the Han scholar Ban Zhao wrote a widely read guide to a woman’s proper conduct. Modern Confucians and their critics debate how much of that belongs to the core of the teaching.

The concept here is sometimes called role ethics. A person becomes good by filling roles well, beginning with the closest ones. The Great Learning lays out the chain: cultivate yourself, regulate your family, order the state, and bring peace to all under Heaven. Compare the commandment in Exodus 20:12 to honor father and mother. Both traditions place honor for parents near the center, but the Confucian version makes the family the training ground for every other virtue.

The word junzi literally means a lord’s son, a nobleman by birth. Confucius kept the word and changed its meaning. In the Analects a junzi is a person of moral nobility, contrasted again and again with the xiaoren, the small person. The junzi understands what is right, yi; the small person understands profit. The junzi is broad-minded and not a partisan; the small person is a partisan and not broad-minded. The junzi looks for the cause of failure in himself; the small person looks for it in others. Legge called the junzi the superior man; modern translators prefer gentleman or exemplary person.

How does one become a junzi? Through learning, xue, which is more than reading. In the most personal passage of the book, Confucius describes his own life as a series of stages: bent on learning at fifteen, standing firm at thirty, free of doubts at forty, knowing the decrees of Heaven at fifty, and able at seventy to follow his heart’s desire without overstepping what is right. He warns that learning without thinking is wasted, and thinking without learning is dangerous. Poetry, ritual and music each play a part: the Songs awaken a person, ritual establishes him, and music completes him.

Above the junzi stands the sage, and Confucius denied being one. Self-cultivation never ends. Standing by a river, he is recorded as saying that things pass on like this, never ceasing day or night. He also insisted that people enlarge the Way, not the Way people: goodness depends on human effort. That is why the tradition later put such weight on teachers and schools.

The concept behind all this is what philosophers call virtue ethics. Character is formed by practice, the way a musician is formed by playing, rather than by following a list of rules. Buddhists also describe a path of self-transformation, but the goal differs: Confucians aim at harmony among people in this world, not release from the cycle of rebirth. Keep that difference in view when a later unit compares the traditions.

Imagine, says Mencius, that you suddenly see a small child about to fall into a well. Anyone at all, he argues, would feel a jolt of alarm and compassion, not to win the parents’ thanks or a good reputation, but simply because that is what human hearts do. Mencius (Mengzi, c. 372–289 BCE) lived a century after Confucius and became the tradition’s second great voice. From that scene he drew his central claim: human nature is good. The feeling of compassion is the sprout of ren; shame is the sprout of yi; deference is the sprout of li; approving and disapproving is the sprout of wisdom. These four sprouts need tending, like seedlings, but they are already there.

Mencius said human nature tends to good as water tends to flow downhill. Bad people are like Ox Mountain, once forested and stripped bare by axes and grazing until visitors assumed it had always been barren. He took the Mandate of Heaven seriously and read it through the people: Heaven sees as the people see. He said that of the three parts of a state, the people matter most and the ruler least, and that a king who abandons humaneness and rightness is no longer a king but a mere fellow whose overthrow is not the killing of a ruler. Like Confucius, he never found a ruler who took the advice.

Xunzi (c. 310–c. 235 BCE) disagreed sharply. Human nature, he wrote, is bad, or at least crude and self-seeking; goodness is the product of deliberate effort. People become good the way warped wood becomes straight, by being steamed and pressed against a frame. The frame is ritual, teachers and study. Xunzi also treated Heaven as the regular course of nature rather than a moral judge, and said rituals exist for the good they do people, whether or not spirits attend. Two of his students, Han Feizi and Li Si, went on to become leading Legalists, which later Confucians held against him.

For a while Xunzi’s realism was the more influential. In the long run Mencius won: the Song dynasty scholar Zhu Xi made the Mencius one of the Four Books, and the tradition called Mencius the Second Sage. Yet Confucians kept reading both. The disagreement shows something worth remembering about every tradition in this course: a living teaching contains arguments, and the arguments are part of what it hands down.

The Han emperor Wu (reigned 141–87 BCE), advised by the scholar Dong Zhongshu, made the Confucian classics the basis of official learning and founded an Imperial Academy in 124 BCE to teach them. The curriculum was the Five Classics: the Book of Songs, the Book of Documents, the Book of Rites, the Book of Changes and the Spring and Autumn Annals. Han Confucianism blended these with theories of yin and yang and the cycles of nature, so that a ruler’s conduct was believed to affect harvests and eclipses.

The civil-service examinations began under the Sui dynasty in 605 CE and grew under the Tang and Song into the main road to office. Candidates worked through county, provincial and palace levels; the highest degree, jinshi, could take decades and most never earned it. From 1313 the tests were based on the Four Books with the commentaries of Zhu Xi. Women could not sit the exams, and wealthy families could afford the years of tutoring, yet in principle almost any man could try, and some poor candidates did rise. Korea adopted similar examinations in 958 and Vietnam in 1075. China abolished them in 1905, after thirteen centuries.

Zhu Xi (1130–1200) also reshaped the philosophy. His Neo-Confucianism explained the world through principle, li, written with a different character from the li of ritual, and vital energy, qi. He set the Four Books above the Five Classics and turned self-cultivation into a disciplined program of study and quiet sitting. The Ming thinker Wang Yangming (1472–1529) answered that moral knowledge is innate and that knowing and acting are one. Neo-Confucianism became the ruling teaching of Joseon Korea (1392–1897), influenced Tokugawa Japan and shaped Vietnam.

In the twentieth century the tradition was blamed for China’s weakness. Reformers of the May Fourth era around 1919 attacked it, and during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) Confucius was denounced and temples were damaged. Since the 1980s the Chinese government has revived ceremonies at Qufu and named its overseas language institutes after him. Scholars debate how much of that revival is philosophy and how much is politics. Either way, the sayings of a jobless teacher from Lu remain state business twenty-five centuries later.

Early in April, families across China, Taiwan and Chinese communities abroad, including in Chicago, drive to cemeteries. They pull weeds from a grave, set out fruit and cooked dishes, light incense, burn paper offerings and bow. This is Qingming, the Clear and Bright festival, which falls about fifteen days after the spring equinox. At home many families keep an ancestral tablet, a wooden plaque bearing an ancestor’s name, on a shelf where offerings are placed on death anniversaries and at the New Year.

Ancestor veneration is older than Confucius, and he did not explain it so much as fold it into filial piety. Asked about serving the spirits of the dead, he replied that one who cannot yet serve the living cannot serve spirits, and asked about death, he said that one who does not understand life cannot understand death. He said to respect spirits while keeping them at a distance, and to sacrifice to the ancestors as if they were present. The Doctrine of the Mean sums up the Confucian view: serve the dead as you served them living. Xunzi added that rites give form to human feeling whether or not any spirit attends.

The practice grew institutions. Lineages in southern China built ancestral halls holding rows of tablets. Every county seat had a temple to Confucius himself, where officials offered sacrifices in spring and autumn before tablets of the Master and his disciples. Taiwan marks his traditional birthday, September 28, as Teachers’ Day with a dawn ceremony. Since the 1980s the ceremony at Qufu has been revived on a large scale.

Is this worship? The question is old. In the seventeenth century Jesuit missionaries in China argued that the rites to ancestors and to Confucius were civil customs that Catholic converts could keep. Dominican and Franciscan missionaries disagreed and called them idolatry. In 1704 and 1715 the pope forbade converts to take part, the Kangxi emperor restricted Christian missions in response, and the ban was not lifted until 1939. This Chinese Rites Controversy shows that whether Confucianism counts as a religion has been argued for centuries, and the answer has had real consequences.

At the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, a Chinese diplomat presented a long paper on Confucianism alongside speakers for Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Its presence raised a question: did a tradition with no creed, no priesthood and no clear god belong at a parliament of religions? Chinese had no exact older equivalent of the Western word religion. The modern term zongjiao took on that meaning through Japanese in the late nineteenth century. Before that, Chinese spoke of jiao, teachings, and of the three teachings: Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism.

The case for calling Confucianism a philosophy or an ethic is strong. Its focus is this life and human relationships. It makes few claims about gods, has no church or congregation, and seeks no converts. The case for calling it religious is also strong. It speaks of Heaven and Heaven’s mandate. It prescribes sacrifices to ancestors and to Confucius, keeps sacred texts and temples, and offers a path of self-transformation that some modern Confucian scholars describe in religious terms. Some scholars split the difference with the phrase religious humanism.

Governments have answered differently. Indonesia lists Confucianism as one of its six officially recognized religions. In mainland China the government classes it as culture and philosophy rather than as one of the five recognized religions. In South Korea, where Confucian family rites called jesa are still widely performed on death anniversaries and at the harvest festival Chuseok, many people who perform them identify as Buddhist, Christian or nonreligious. Vietnam’s Temple of Literature in Hanoi, founded in 1070 to honor Confucius, is both a monument and a place where students still come before exams.

No one can count Confucians, because there is no membership to count. What can be said is that Confucian ideas about family, education, respect for elders and public service shape hundreds of millions of lives, including many in Chicago’s Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese communities. The lesson for a student of religion is about the lens itself. The category religion was shaped in the West around creeds and churches, and some of the world’s great traditions do not fit it neatly. The next chapter meets one of them, Daoism, which the same families often practice at the same time.

The earliest account of Laozi comes from the historian Sima Qian, who wrote his Records of the Grand Historian around 100 BCE. He says that Laozi, the Old Master, was named Li Er and kept the archives at the Zhou court. Confucius once visited him to ask about ritual and came away comparing him to a dragon, a creature no one can grasp. Seeing the Zhou in decline, Laozi left for the west. At the border pass, the gatekeeper Yin Xi asked him to write down his teaching first. Laozi wrote a book in two parts of about five thousand characters, then departed.

Sima Qian himself was unsure of the details. In the same passage he mentions two other men who might have been Laozi, and he notes reports that the Old Master lived more than 160 years. Modern historians treat the story as legend: a traditional account whose details cannot be confirmed. Many doubt that a single author wrote the book at all. Its short chapters look like sayings gathered, edited and arranged over time, and the book names no people, places or events that would date it.

Archaeology has sharpened the picture. In 1973, two copies of the book written on silk were found in a tomb at Mawangdui, sealed in 168 BCE. In 1993, bamboo slips found in a tomb at Guodian, sealed around 300 BCE, turned out to hold passages matching about a third of the book’s chapters, sometimes in a different order. So much of the text was circulating by about 300 BCE, and its shape was still changing. The version most people read today, in 81 chapters, follows the edition of the scholar Wang Bi (226–249 CE).

For many Daoists, the story carries meaning beyond dates. Religious Daoism came to honor Laozi as a divine being, Taishang Laojun, the Most High Lord Lao, who appears in many ages to teach. Historians read the name as a label attached to a book. Both groups agree on the book’s influence. Apply the toolkit from the start of this course: the author is uncertain, the audience seems to be rulers and seekers, and the purpose is to point toward a Way that words cannot fully hold.

The whole Daodejing fits on a few pages: about five thousand Chinese characters in 81 short chapters. The first 37 chapters are traditionally called the Dao section and the rest the De section, and the title joins them: dao, the Way; de, virtue or power; jing, classic. Most chapters are rhymed verse, dense and compressed. Unlike the Analects, it has no named speakers, no students and no stories. A voice simply speaks to the reader, often holding up the sage, the wise ruler, as a model.

The book teaches through paradox, statements that seem to contradict themselves but point to something true. The soft overcomes the hard. Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know. The sage puts himself last and so finds himself first. Returning, the book says, is the movement of the Dao. A paradox stops a reader who is moving too fast and forces a second look, which may be exactly its purpose.

Compressed classical Chinese allows many readings, so translations differ widely. The Daodejing is among the most translated books in the world, with hundreds of English versions. This course quotes James Legge, whose version appeared in 1891 in the Sacred Books of the East, the series edited by Max Müller. Legge spelled the key word Tao and put in parentheses the words he added where the Chinese leaves meaning unstated. Those parentheses help a careful reader: they show where the translator is interpreting.

Spelling needs a note. Older English books wrote Tao, Tao Te Ching and Lao-tzu, using the Wade-Giles system of romanization. Today most scholars use pinyin, the system adopted in China in the 1950s, which gives Dao, Daodejing and Laozi. The Chinese words are the same; only the English letters differ. You will also see Daoism spelled Taoism. Both spellings name the same tradition, and in both the first sound is close to an English d.

The word Dao means a road or path, and by extension a method or way of doing something. Confucius used it for the Way of the ancient kings, the right way to live and govern. The Daodejing pushes the word much further. Its Dao is the source from which heaven, earth and all things come, and the pattern they follow. The book calls it the Mother of all things and admits it does not know its true name. It calls it Dao, it says, only because it must call it something.

That is why the book opens by warning that the Dao that can be spoken of is not the lasting Dao. Words divide the world into this and that, high and low, good and bad. The Dao comes before those divisions. Chapter 42 gives a compressed account of how things arise: the Dao produces one, one produces two, two produce three, and three produce all things. Commentators have read the one as the undivided whole and the two as yin and yang, though the text itself does not say.

The Daodejing often points to the Dao through emptiness. Chapter 11 observes that thirty spokes meet at a wheel’s hub, but the empty center is what makes the wheel useful. A clay pot is useful because of its hollow, and a room because of its open space. What is there brings benefit, the chapter concludes, but what is not there makes things usable. In the same way, the book describes the Dao as empty yet never used up, like a bellows or a valley.

The partner term is de, often translated virtue but closer to power or potency, the way people once spoke of the virtue of a medicine. De is the Dao at work in a particular thing, the power it has when it follows its nature. Scholars sometimes compare the Dao with Brahman in the Upanishads, studied earlier in this course. There is a difference from the God of the Hebrew Bible and the Qur’an: the Daodejing does not describe the Dao as a personal being who commands, judges or makes covenants.

A strong swimmer caught in a current does not fight it head on; she swims across it and lets it carry her toward shore. The Daodejing names this kind of effortless effectiveness wu wei, literally not-doing or non-action. It does not mean laziness or doing nothing. It means acting without forcing, grasping or showing off, so that things are accomplished the way plants grow, steadily and without strain. The book says the Dao does nothing, and yet nothing is left undone.

Wu wei belongs with ziran, naturalness, literally self-so: the way things are when left to their own course. A related image is pu, the uncarved block, wood before it is cut into tools. The book praises simplicity, few desires and contentment. In its view, the harder people strive for wealth, fame and cleverness, the more they lose their natural balance. Chapter 33 says that the person who is satisfied with his lot is rich.

The idea has a political side. Much of the Daodejing is addressed to rulers, and it advises a light touch. Chapter 60 says that governing a great state is like cooking a small fish: stir it too often and it falls apart. The book warns that the more laws and prohibitions there are, the more poverty and theft appear. The best rulers, it says, are those the people barely know exist; when their work is done, the people say it happened naturally.

Compare the Analects. Confucius also admired rule by example: the ruler as the north star, the people as grass bending in the wind. Both books reject government by force alone. But Confucius wanted more ritual, learning and deliberate effort, while the Daodejing criticizes humaneness and rightness when they are preached as programs and asks readers to let go instead. Historians often describe Chinese scholar-officials as Confucian in office and Daoist in retirement, holding both books at once.

Return to the hollow in the temple step. Water is the Daodejing’s favorite image of the Dao. Water benefits all things and does not compete with them. It flows to the low places people avoid. Chapter 78, in paraphrase, says that nothing in the world is softer or weaker than water, yet nothing is better at overcoming what is hard and strong. The weak overcomes the strong and the soft overcomes the hard, the chapter adds; everyone knows this, yet no one puts it into practice.

Water teaches several lessons at once. It teaches yielding: it gives way to whatever it meets and takes the shape of any container, yet it is never destroyed. It teaches lowness: according to chapter 66, rivers and seas rule the hundred valleys because they lie below them, and so a sage who would lead the people places himself beneath them. It teaches persistence: drop by drop, it cuts canyons. And it teaches stillness: muddy water, left alone, slowly becomes clear.

The book pairs water with other soft things. A newborn is soft and supple; the dead are stiff and hard. Green plants bend; dry ones snap. So, chapter 76 concludes, the stiff and hard are companions of death, and the soft and yielding are companions of life. Readers have taken this in many directions: as advice for rulers to avoid war, as a call to personal humility, and later as a principle of martial arts that meet force by giving way to it.

Other traditions also use water, and comparing them shows how one image can carry different meanings. In the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Amos calls for justice to roll down like waters, a force that sweeps wrong away. In the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks of living water, meaning spiritual life. In the Daodejing, water’s power lies in its softness and its willingness to go low. The same image, read in each tradition’s context, teaches something different.

Look at a hill in the late afternoon. One side is in shade, the other in sun. That is where the words come from: yin first meant the shady side of a hill and yang the sunny side. In Chinese thought they became names for two complementary forces present in everything. Yin is linked with darkness, cold, the moon, water, rest and receiving; yang with light, heat, the sun, fire, movement and acting. Traditional thought also paired yin with female and yang with male, a pairing many modern readers question.

Yin and yang are not good and evil. Neither is better, and neither can exist alone, just as a shady slope needs a sunny one. They are complementary, each completing the other, and they turn into each other: noon passes into evening, winter into spring. The familiar black-and-white circle, the taijitu, shows this. Each half swells as the other shrinks, and each holds a dot of the other at its heart. That diagram became common only in later centuries, but the idea behind it is far older.

Yin and yang belong to all Chinese thought, not to Daoism alone. The Book of Changes, the Yijing, one of the Five Classics honored by Confucians, builds 64 figures called hexagrams from broken yin lines and solid yang lines, and uses them for divination and reflection. Han scholars joined yin and yang to the five phases, wood, fire, earth, metal and water, to explain seasons, medicine and politics. Daoists gave these ideas a central place in meditation, medicine and ritual.

The pattern also runs through the Daodejing’s paradoxes: being and non-being produce each other, difficult and easy complete each other, high and low depend on each other. Compare the dualism in Zoroastrian teaching, where a good spirit and an evil spirit struggle and the good is expected to win in the end. Yin-yang thinking looks for balance rather than victory. A healthy body, a good government or a well-lived day, in this view, keeps the two in harmony.

Zhuangzi, Master Zhuang (c. 369–286 BCE), is the second great Daoist voice. The book named after him has 33 chapters. Scholars generally treat the first seven, the Inner Chapters, as closest to Zhuangzi himself and the rest as the work of later followers; the scholar Guo Xiang, around 300 CE, edited the version that survives. Where the Daodejing speaks in terse verse, the Zhuangzi tells stories: talking trees, giant birds, disabled men wiser than kings, and Confucius himself, sometimes mocked and sometimes speaking like a Daoist.

The best-known story ends the second chapter. Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly, fluttering happily, with no idea he was Zhuangzi. He woke, and there he was, Zhuangzi. But he could not tell whether he was Zhuangzi who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming it was Zhuangzi. The story calls this the transformation of things. It unsettles the sharp line between one self and another, and between waking and dreaming.

In the third chapter, Cook Ding carves an ox for a ruler. His knife moves to a rhythm like a dance, and the carcass falls apart as if by itself. He explains that at first he saw only the whole ox. Now he follows the natural joints and hollows and never hacks at bone. A good cook changes his knife every year and an ordinary cook every month, he says, but his has lasted nineteen years and is still sharp. The ruler says he has learned from this how to nourish life.

Both stories carry the Daodejing’s ideas into daily life. Cook Ding is wu wei in action: skill so complete that it no longer strains. The butterfly questions the fixed categories the Daodejing warns about. Zhuangzi also enjoyed arguing with his friend Huizi, a logician. Watching fish in a river, Zhuangzi remarked how happy they were. Huizi asked how he could know, since he was not a fish. Zhuangzi asked how Huizi could know what he knew, since Huizi was not Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi gets a clever last word, and readers still argue over who won.

When Zhuangzi’s wife died, the story goes, his friend Huizi came to offer condolences and found Zhuangzi sitting on the ground, drumming on a basin and singing. Huizi was shocked. Zhuangzi explained that at first he grieved like anyone. Then he reflected that before her birth she had no life, no form and no breath. Within the great mix of things a change produced breath, breath produced form, and form produced life. Now another change had brought death, like the passing of the four seasons. To keep wailing, he said, would show he did not understand fate.

Set that beside the Confucian rites of the last chapter, with three years of mourning for a parent. Confucians saw careful mourning as the proper expression of love and a support of social order. The Zhuangzi pokes at ritual that has become mere form and treats death as one more transformation in nature’s endless changes. Neither view dismisses grief; they differ about what grief should become. Chinese families have often drawn on both, and on Buddhist rites, at the same funeral.

Zhuangzi also questions the value of being useful. In one story a carpenter passes a huge, gnarled oak that crowds admire and he ignores: its wood is worthless for boats, coffins or doors. That night the tree appears in his dream and asks whether he would rather it be useful, like fruit trees whose branches are stripped and broken every year. Its uselessness is what let it grow so large and live so long. Zhuangzi pushes readers to ask whose purposes usefulness serves.

The book’s ideal is free and easy wandering, the title of its first chapter. Its heroes include the hermit, the craftsman and the oddball who has stepped outside the race for office. When messengers from a ruler invited Zhuangzi to take high office, he supposedly replied that he would rather be a live turtle dragging its tail in the mud than a dead one honored in a palace shrine. Many readers found in these stories a freedom that shaped Chinese poets, painters and hermits for two thousand years.

In 142 CE, according to Daoist tradition, a man named Zhang Daoling was on a mountain in Sichuan when Laozi appeared to him as the divine Taishang Laojun and made him the first Celestial Master. Zhang organized communities whose members gave five pecks of rice a year, confessed their wrongs and sought healing through ritual. The movement, the Way of the Celestial Masters, is the root of organized Daoist religion. Its leaders passed the title through Zhang’s descendants, and in 1949 the Celestial Master of the day moved to Taiwan.

Scholars once sharply divided philosophical Daoism, the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, from religious Daoism, with its gods, priests and rites. Many now find that line too sharp. Religious Daoists read the Daodejing as scripture, and in 166 CE the Han emperor Huan offered sacrifice to Laozi in his own palace, after sending officials to Laozi’s reputed birthplace the year before. New revealed scriptures followed in the fourth and fifth centuries from schools such as Highest Clarity and Numinous Treasure. Under the Tang dynasty, whose emperors claimed descent from Laozi because they shared his surname Li, Daoism enjoyed imperial favor.

Two main orders exist today. Zhengyi, Orthodox Unity, descends from the Celestial Masters; its priests may marry and live at home, performing rituals for families and communities. Quanzhen, Complete Perfection, founded by Wang Chongyang in the 1160s, is monastic: its monks and nuns are celibate, avoid meat and alcohol, and live in temples such as the White Cloud Temple in Beijing. A daoshi, a Daoist priest, leads rituals of offering, purification, healing and funerals, often with chanting, drums, incense and embroidered robes.

The Daoist Canon, the Daozang, collects the tradition’s writings. The standard edition, printed in 1445 under the Ming dynasty, holds about 1,400 works: scriptures, commentaries, ritual manuals, medical and alchemical texts and histories. Like the Buddhist canon, it is less a single book than a library. In the twentieth century Daoism suffered heavily, especially during the Cultural Revolution, when temples were closed and priests sent home. Today it is one of the five officially recognized religions in the People’s Republic of China, and it is active in China, Taiwan and overseas.

Chinese paintings often show the Eight Immortals, a band of figures who each carry a symbol, such as a fan, a sword, a gourd, a flower basket or a flute. They are xian, immortals or transcendents, people said to have perfected themselves until they no longer die in the ordinary way. Stories of xian living on far mountains or islands are older than organized Daoism, and emperors sent expeditions to find them. According to Sima Qian, the First Emperor of Qin sent a large party across the sea to seek the elixir of immortality.

One early method was outer alchemy: preparing elixirs from minerals such as cinnabar, which contains mercury, and from gold. The practice produced real chemical knowledge; Chinese alchemists are often credited with the experiments that led to gunpowder. It also caused deaths, and historians believe several Tang emperors died from elixir poisoning. Over time many Daoists turned the language of the furnace and the cauldron inward.

Inner alchemy, neidan, treats the body itself as the laboratory. Through breathing exercises, visualization, diet and meditation, the practitioner refines three treasures: jing, essence; qi, vital energy or breath; and shen, spirit. Qi is a central idea across Chinese thought: the energy that flows through the body and through all of nature. Teachers of inner alchemy describe the goal in different ways, from a long and healthy life to the birth of an immortal spirit body. Quanzhen made inner alchemy the core of its monastic practice.

How should a student read these claims? As with any tradition, describe what practitioners believe and do, and attribute it. Some Daoists understand immortality literally, others as a symbol of union with the Dao, and many ordinary temple visitors seek health and blessing rather than immortality. Compare other traditions’ hopes about what lies beyond death: resurrection in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, moksha in Hinduism, nirvana in Buddhism. A later unit of this course returns to that comparison.

Walk into a busy temple in Taiwan and you may find, on different altars, the Buddhist bodhisattva Guanyin, the sea goddess Mazu, the red-faced general Guandi, and Laozi. Worshipers move from altar to altar with incense sticks, bow, drop a donation in a box, and ask for help with exams, health or business. Some drop a pair of crescent-shaped wooden blocks to receive a yes or no answer. This is Chinese popular religion: the everyday practice of most Chinese people through history, with no single founder, scripture or membership.

Popular religion pictures an unseen world organized a little like the old imperial government. At the top sits the Jade Emperor. City Gods act as local magistrates of the spirit world. The Kitchen God, whose picture hangs by the stove, is said to report on the family to heaven just before the Lunar New Year, so families offer him sweets. Daoist priests often serve as ritual experts for this world, Buddhist monks commonly chant at funerals, and Confucian ideals shape the family’s ancestor rites.

The three teachings, met in the last chapter, grew together over centuries. When Buddhism arrived from India in the first centuries CE, translators borrowed Daoist words to explain it, and scholars see Daoist influence in Chan Buddhism, called Zen in Japan. Emperors sometimes favored one teaching and restricted another, yet a common saying held that the three teachings are one. Scholars call such blending syncretism. A traditional painting subject, the vinegar tasters, shows Confucius, the Buddha and Laozi around a jar of vinegar, each reacting differently.

Chinese communities abroad carry these practices with them. In Chicago’s Chinatown and in Chinese, Taiwanese and Vietnamese homes across the United States, families light incense at home altars, celebrate the Lunar New Year and honor ancestors. Surveys have trouble counting Daoists for the same reason they cannot count Confucians: most practitioners do not think of themselves as belonging to one religion. The question a scholar asks here is less which religion are you, and more which practices do you keep, and why.

In Fan Kuan’s Travelers Among Mountains and Streams, painted around 1000 CE in the Song dynasty, a great cliff fills most of the silk. Near the bottom, so small you might miss them, a few travelers drive their mules along a path. Landscape painting, called shanshui, mountain-water, pictured human beings as a small part of a vast, living nature. Many such painters were scholar-officials painting in their leisure, and the empty space in their work, mist and sky, echoes the Daodejing’s praise of emptiness.

Traditional Chinese medicine grew from the same ideas. Its classic text, the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic, compiled in the Han era, describes health as a balance of yin and yang and a smooth flow of qi along channels in the body. Practitioners use herbs, acupuncture, diet and exercise to restore balance. Hospitals in China often offer it alongside modern medicine. Researchers continue to test which treatments work, with mixed results so far, so a careful student describes it as a healing tradition and lets evidence judge specific claims.

Tai chi, taijiquan, is a slow, flowing martial art now practiced by millions for health. Its movements shift weight between empty and full, soft and firm, in the pattern of yin and yang. Legend credits a Daoist of the Wudang Mountains, Zhang Sanfeng; historians trace the known styles to the Chen family village in Henan in the seventeenth century. Either way, the art applies the Daodejing’s teaching that the soft overcomes the hard: a skilled practitioner yields to force and redirects it. The Wudang temples are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Daoist words have also traveled into English, sometimes far from their roots. Yin and yang appear in advertisements, and the Tao of this or that is a common book title. A careful student notices when an idea is being borrowed and asks what it meant at home. In parks from Beijing to Chicago, people practice tai chi each morning, many of them without any religious commitment. The practice shows how a tradition’s ideas can live in art, medicine and movement well beyond its temples.