CHAPTER 7

Learning Outcomes After studying this chapter, you will be able to do the following:

LO1 Explain the names Daoism, Confucianism, and related terms.

LO2 Outline how Daoism and Confucianism developed over time into what they are today, especially in relationship to each other.

LO3 Explain the essential teachings of Daoism and Confucianism, especially their similarities and diff erences.

LO4 Paraphrase in your own words the main ethical principles of Daoism and Confucianism.

LO5 Outline the way Daoists and Confucianists worship and practice other rituals.

LO6 Summarize the main features of Daoism and Confucianism in North America today.

Encountering Daoism and

Confucianism: Two Views of the

Eternal Way BONNIE VAN VOORST © CENGAGE LEARNING

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155

Your Visit to the Forbidden

City in Beijing, China

A highlight of your tour of China is the Forbidden City, located in Beijing (bay- JING), a city formerly known as Peking. Most tourists to Beijing see at least a bit of it, but because of your interest in

world religions and cultures, you are looking forward to a more in-depth view. The traditional name “Forbidden City” comes from the fact that it was formerly closed to all but the emperor, who was considered the “Son of Heaven,” and his court offi cials. It was sacred to both Daoists and Confucianists. Now it doesn’t

seem at all for- bidding to you, but inviting. The cur- rent offi cial name for this complex, the Palace Museum, also seems more inviting.

The complex consists of an astounding 980 surviving build- ings spread out over an area one mile long and one-half mile wide. It covers 183 acres, which your guide puts in terms you can understand: it’s the size of 166 football fields. It has two parts, both of which you can enter: the outer court, where the emperor ruled the nation, and the inner court, where he and his closest courtiers lived with their families. The complex is

surrounded by a wide moat as well as a wall thirty feet high. As you cross into the Forbidden City through its only entrance at the Tiananmen (tee-YEN-ahn-men) or “Heavenly Peace” Gate, your guide says that it’s help- ful for you to understand more about the history of the area.

Like the yin and yang, Confucianists and Daoists both agreed with each other and worked against each other. Chinese culture was shaped and empowered by this dynamism.

The two main religious and ethical systems of China, Daoism and Confucianism, are trying to reach the same goal by diff erent means.

Strongly Disagree Strongly Agree 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

What Do YOU Think?

< Students demonstrating their tai qi (chi) skills at the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests in the Temple of Heaven complex, Beijing. From 1420 to 1911 C.E., emperors of China came to this temple to pray for abundant crops.

The Chinese have seen dragons as powerful, mostly good- natured creatures from whom people could seek favors.

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156 C H A P T E R 7 E N C O U N T E R I N G D A O I S M A N D C O N F U C I A N I S M : T W O V I E W S O F T H E E T E R N A L WAY

She relates the following: The Forbidden City was built in the early part of the 1400s and was home to two dynas- ties of China’s emperors until 1912. The Ming dynasty, which ruled from 1368 to 1644, fi rst built the palace and courtyard. The Qing (ching) dynasty then governed the area until the last emperor of China left his position in 1912. Religious ceremonies in the Forbidden City ceased in that year. It was designated a World Heritage Site in 1987 by the United Nations.

Many halls in this complex have names with reli- gious signifi cance, because the emperor was the inter- mediary between Heaven and the Chinese people. Today, these buildings are the most ancient collection of wooden buildings in the world. The Forbidden City was made fi t for tourism in the 1950s, and Tiananmen Square in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace was developed into a huge public square. For almost fi ve hundred years imperial China had the largest palace complex in the world, and now Communist China proudly has the larg- est public square. You notice, however, that the guide doesn’t mention how, in the spring of 1989—the year that several Communist governments in Europe fell—a pro-democracy demonstration with thousands of peo- ple took place over several weeks in this square, com- plete with a small replica of the Statue of Liberty, called a “goddess.” In early June, Chinese army units brought in by the government opened fi re on the protestors when they refused to disperse. Estimates of the dead range from fi ve hundred to three thousand, and hundreds were imprisoned. Your knowledge of what happened here in Tiananmen Square makes your attitude about it more somber.

In your study of Daoism and Confucianism, you’ll be introduced to these unique, sometimes puzzling features:

● Some scholars hold that almost all Chinese people in the world today are Confucianist in some signifi cant sense just by virtue of being culturally Chinese, whether they self-identify as Confucianist or not. This is true, these scholars say, even if they don’t think of themselves as “ religious.”

● Many Chinese who see themselves as either Daoists or Confucianists practice some elements of the other religion, and many are Buddhists as well, in some aspects of their lives. This makes it diffi cult to estimate how many followers of these faiths, the “three traditions” of China, there are today.

● Confucianism is traceable with certainty to a historical founder; Daoism is not. Daoism grew out of various religious and philosophical traditions in ancient China, includ- ing shamanism and belief in the most ancient gods and spirits. This difference in beginnings has proven to be one important factor in mak- ing Confucianism a more coherent system than Daoism.

● Confucianism is a thoroughly Chinese tradi- tion, but its infl uence has spread widely in East Asia beyond China, especially to Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan. It has some infl u- ence in south Asian countries such as Malaysia

and Indonesia. The reach of formal, organized Daoism hasn’t been as long; it is mostly contained in China and Taiwan.

In a scene from the 1987 fi lm The Last Emperor, made in part in the Forbidden City, the boy emperor Pu Yi appears in a ceremony.

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“If you google

‘Confucius,’ you [get]

page after page of

‘Confucius says’ jokes . . .

before you arrive at

any actual quotations.”

—Stephen Prothero

Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.

 

 

157T H E N A M E S D A O I S M A N D C O N F U C I A N I S M

● Both Daoism and Confucianism have been widely misunderstood in nonacademic popular settings in the Western world, perhaps more than any other world religions. Daoism has been misrepre- sented as “just doing what comes naturally.” The wisdom teaching of Confucius is often trivial- ized in popular culture, from fortune cookies to the Internet. For example, as Stephen Prothero remarks, “If you google ‘Confucius,’ you have to wade through page after page of ‘Confucius says’ jokes . . . before you arrive at any actual quota- tions from the man himself.”1

In this chapter we’ll make a slight change in our treatment of world religions. Since Chapter 3, we’ve examined one religion per chapter. Here, we’ll consider together the two main religions of China: Daoism and Confucianism. The benefi ts of discussing them together outweigh the downsides, especially if one is careful to keep them separate. Confucianism and Daoism are similar in that they have affected, and been affected by, Chinese culture; they differ in that they have been competing formal traditions in China, with two views of the Way and how to live in it.

LO1 The Names Daoism and Confucianism Before we discuss the names of these religions, we must explain the two common systems used for render- ing Chinese into English, the older Wade-Giles and the newer Pinyin (PIN-yin). Some key Chinese words in religion are spelled the same in each system, but other words are spelled dif- ferently. For example, the Wade-Giles system spells the d sound in Chinese as t; the newer Pinyin system spells it as d. So the more traditional spell- ing is “Taoism,” rather than the Pinyin system’s “Daoism”; both are pronounced DOW-ihz-um.

1 Stephen Prothero, God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 101.

Wade-Giles spells the Chinese word for classic book as “ching,” but Pinyin has “jing.” As a result, Wade-Giles spells the name of the main Daoist scripture “Tao Te Ching,” and Pinyin spells it “Daode Jing.”

Popular usage in the West stays mostly with Wade-Giles. For example, on February 20, 2011, a Google search for “Tao” returned 92 million hits, whereas a search for “Dao” returned 58 million. Nevertheless, the Pinyin system is increasingly used in scholarship. It’s usually closer to the way Chinese is pronounced, which makes it easier for beginning students of Chinese religions to pronounce Chinese terms correctly. This book uses the Pinyin spelling but occasionally refers to a signifi cant Wade-Giles spelling the fi rst time a word appears.

Daoism, the religion of the natural Way, refers to diverse but related Chinese traditions that have

infl uenced East Asia for more than two thousand years and have had an infl uence on the Western world since the nineteenth century. The word Dao roughly translates as “way,” “path,” or “road,” and by extension “way of life.” Scholars often divide Daoism into “reli-

gious” and “philosophical” branches. A leading scholar of Daoism, Livia

Kohn, has more carefully divided it into three categories: (1) philosoph-

ical Daoism, the oldest branch, based on the texts Daode Jing and Zhuangzi (JWAHNG-zee; in Wade-Giles, Chuang Tzu); (2) religious Daoism, a collection of formal, organized religious movements originating from the Celestial Masters movement around 200  C.E.; and (3)  folk Daoism, the widely diverse Chinese indigenous local reli-

gions taken up into Daoism after 200 C.E.2

Confucianism (kun-FYOO- shuhn-IHZ-um) originated as a Western term, not a Chinese term. Its fi rst use was in the 1500s C.E. by Roman Catholic missionar- ies in China. They bypassed the

2 Livia Kohn, ed., Daoism Handbook (Leiden: Brill, 2000), xi, xxix.

Confucius in a traditional pose

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158 C H A P T E R 7 E N C O U N T E R I N G D A O I S M A N D C O N F U C I A N I S M : T W O V I E W S O F T H E E T E R N A L WAY

most common Chinese term for this tradition, “the Scholarly Tradition,” a name that stresses the role of offi cial scholars in Confucianism. The mis- sionaries added ism to the Latinized form of Kong Fuzi, Confucius (kon- FYOO-shuhs), to make

Confucianism. Some scholars, Lionel Jensen among them, have argued that Kong Fuzi and Confucius as formal names are Western inventions and that we should keep to what Chinese tradition calls him, most commonly Kongzi (KONG-zhee) or Fuzi.3

3 Lionel Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).

Symbols of Daoism and Confucianism Daoism and Confucianism don’t have offi cial symbols of their faith. The Chinese character for Dao, “Way,” is sometimes used as a symbol of both Daoism and Confucianism. Each of these two religions follows its concept of the Way. However, for people who can’t read Chinese, this symbol doesn’t hold a lot of meaning, so it is not widely used as a sym- bol of either Daoism or Confucianism.

The most common sym- bol of Chinese religion is the yin-yang, also called the Taiji or “Great Ultimate,” as a Chinese symbol of religion. This symbol is used mostly by Daoists and sometimes Confucianists to represent their faiths, and it is used so far beyond these two formal religions that it has become one of the most often-seen symbols in the world. The circle formed by the yin and yang represents the universe, both matter and spirit, that encircles all things and holds them together. The light and dark areas inside it represent the balance of the two opposite powers in the universe. If the line between them were straight, it would suggest motionless stability between the two areas of the circle. In fact. the line is deeply curved to show that they move and that their motion and change are constants in the cosmos. When they move with

each other, not against each other, life is peaceful and productive. When they conflict with each other, confu- sion and disharmony result. The ideal harmony between these two is suggested in most depictions of the symbol by a small circle of light in the dark area, and vice versa. The task of life is to live according to this balance in the symbol.

What do the two parts of the yin-yang symbolize?

• Yin represents what is feminine, soft, yielding, underneath, nurturing, cool, calm, passive, and dark.

• Yang represents what is masculine, hard, powerful, above, guiding, warm, energetic, active, and bright.

Although a gender-oriented understanding of yin-yang is possible—that all aspects of yang are masculine and yin feminine—this isn’t necessary, nor was it the only view in the Chinese past. Another view has the yin primarily representing aspects of the night and yang aspects of the day, which may arise from its likely original meaning of the sunny side of a hill (yang) and shadowed side (yin). Most interpretations of the yin- yang do hold that it is hierarchical, agreeing with the general Chinese cultural preference for hierarchy: the yang side and its aspects are superior to yin. One mean- ing it doesn’t have is a moral dualism—it should not be understood in terms of good and evil. In the traditional Chinese view shared by both Daoism and Confucianism, life is good. Only when the balance of natural and super- natural forces symbolized by the Taiji goes into decline does evil result.

A Closer Look:

Dao

Yin-yang

yin-yang [yihn yahng] Cosmic forces such as passivity and activity, darkness and light, and other opposing pairs

Taiji [TIGH-jee] The “Great Ultimate,” another name for the yin-yang symbol

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