The Daoist Scriptures Are Huge

This is the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, the NRSV, my preferred translation of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. It's a hefty book. At three and a half pounds, I definitely would not want to drop this on my foot. And depending on the font size and the edition, you're looking at around 1,500 pages. And this is the Daoist canon, the sacred scriptures of Daoism. Notice it looks like a pile of Bibles. Depending on the edition, the Daoist canon ranges between 1,000 and 1,500 texts, easily over 100,000 pages. It's huge. But what is the Daoist canon all about? Who decides what counts as canonical or not? And do Daoists believe in scriptures that are the literal word of God? Or should I say the literal word of the Dao, or the gods? Now when talking about Daoist sacred scriptures, you might immediately think about the famous ones, like the Dao De Jing. Composed around 400 BCE, the Dao De Jing is a short philosophical text attributed to Lao Tzu. It's a collection of sayings loosely focused around how harmony with the Dao can form a basis for government or the self-cultivation of virtue. But we can't really call the Dao De Jing the Daoist Bible, because it's part of this much larger body of texts. In English it's simply called the Daoist canon, but in Chinese it's called the Daozong, literally In the context of sacred scripture, a canon refers to a set of texts that a particular religious community views as authoritative. It comes from the Greek word meaning rule, standard, or even measuring stick. So when a text is deemed canonical, it means it measures up to a standard, accepted as part of the official collection of scriptures, and thus holds a special status in the tradition. At least that's how it works in the Christian understanding of the term. It's fuzzier in Daoism, partially because there have been several Daoist canons throughout history. The photograph I showed earlier is the copy gifted to Arizona State University by the Chinese Daoist Association. It's the most recent Daoist canon, consisting of over 1,500 texts, filling 49 volumes. Not exactly something you could leave in a hotel room like what some Christian missionary organizations do with the Bible. That is, if Daoists were at all interested in proselytizing. I would recommend a scholarly English translation for you all, but it doesn't exist. The closest you can get is this book, Stephen Bokenkamp's Early Daoist Scriptures. But even this is just a small sampling from each of the major early traditions. At best, only a few hundred individual texts have been translated into English, and even fewer have been published. You'll find all kinds of different genres. Some are texts you've probably heard of if you've studied Daoism before, like the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. Lesser known works that have been massively important in the history of Daoism include the Baopuzi, a complex text of philosophy, esotericism, alchemy, and magic by the Chinese philosopher Geheng, or the Taipingjing, the scripture on the Grand Pacification, which includes formulas for making the elixir of immortality, but also discussions that read almost like a messianic or apocalyptic text on how to make the perfect utopian kingdom. Technically, we don't even know how many titles are in the Daoist canon, partially because it's difficult to figure out where one text ends and another begins. Other works in the canon are liturgical texts, instructions for meditation and visualization, histories of specific schools of Daoism or important places, and revelations from gods on all sorts of things, from why someone is sick to how the heavens are organized. It also includes prophecies, commentaries, diagrams, maps, biographies of religious figures, as well as alchemical texts on how to make elixirs to achieve immortality. Like most sets of scripture, the Daoist canon formed over time, so the earliest edition is also the smallest, but Daoists continually added to the canon over the centuries. So an example of this would be the alchemical text the Triplex Unity, which dates to the late Han Dynasty. It's included in the canon, along with eight different commentaries. So a philosopher would roll out a new commentary, and the commentary would be rolled into the canon. The very first attempt at compiling a comprehensive set of Daoist texts was undertaken back in the 5th century CE, by a man named Liu Xiujing. Liu was very famous at the time, and the emperor built an abbey just for him where he could access the imperial library. Liu used this access to create a list of all the true scriptures, including dozens of texts that had yet to be revealed, meaning that they existed in the heavens, but they had yet to be revealed by the Lord Lao or some other god to mere mortals. Liu organized the works into three caverns. The Cavern of Perfection, which contained works from the Highest Clarity School, which was a major Daoist school. The Cavern of Mystery, which contained works from Liu's own group, the Numinous Treasure School. And the Cavern of Spirit, which contained works from something called the Writ of the Three Sovereigns. This wasn't a school of Daoism, but a set of talismans and instructions for how to use them. Later compilers kept his Three Caverns system, but then added four auxiliaries as complements to the original system. This allowed for later Daoists to account for new scriptures that had been revealed since Liu's time, or older works that were generally viewed as Daoist, but were not included in his initial list. So Liu got the ball rolling with the Daoist canon, but as we'll see, it went through a lot of changes, with other texts being added, and sometimes almost being destroyed. Twice. We can't go through the entire history, so we'll focus on a few major inflection points. First, the reign of the Song Emperor, Huizong. He was a huge fan of Daoism, and ordered a major expansion of the Daozong. But he decided that they should try this not-exactly-new technology called printing. See, it's one thing to print the 49 volumes of the Daoist canon today, with modern technology, but back then, all copies were made by hand, which was a colossal undertaking since by the year 1016, the canon had grown to fill over 4,300 scrolls. Now many Chinese scholars viewed printing skeptically, despite the fact that Chinese Buddhists were printing scriptures for at least 300 years by then. The father of Neo-Confucianism, Zhu Shi, famously believed that using printed texts made students Which, ironically enough, is how the internet was talked about back when I was in middle school in the early 2000s, so some things never change. Now you've probably heard about Gutenberg and his printing press, and how it changed Europe forever, which is true. But Gutenberg invented his press around 1440. The Chinese had been printing since the late 600s, but instead of movable type like in Europe, they used woodblocks. The Daoist monks of the Qingyonggong Temple in south-central China still print scriptures A carver takes a long flat board and cuts out the negative space around each character. Then the printer takes the board, spreads ink over the raised characters, lays a piece of paper on it, and runs a roller over it. Lift up the paper, and voila, the printed word. There are about 20,000 blocks in the Qingyonggong library, but by comparison, about 70,000 blocks were cut for Huizong's Daozong, which corresponds to 140,000 pages. It would have been amazing to see. And I say would, because this was never completed. A confederation of semi-nomadic peoples called the Jurchens swept down from the northeast and conquered the top half of China, and carried away the entire imperial court, including Emperor Huizong. So canon cancelled. A later emperor had a soft spot for Daoism as well, and ordered a new canon to be compiled in 1192. But then, in 1281, Kublai Khan got tired of needing to referee fights between Buddhists and Daoists, and ordered the entire thing to be burned. Books, blocks, all of it. Kublai Khan's book-burning campaign ensured that a lot of texts were lost, but pieces of various canons and independent copies of texts still managed to survive. Not long after the Ming dynasty consolidated their power, the emperor ordered a new Daoist canon. This is the Zhengtong Daozong, named after the era it was compiled in. You'll sometimes see it just called the Ming Canon. This canon was used from 1444 all the way down to 2003. The official copy of the Ming Canon was destroyed during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when gunfire destroyed the temple where it was held. That's the second time the Daoist canon was almost destroyed, if you're keeping score. The canon would have been lost entirely had not a secondary copy been later located in Shanghai. By the 1920s, only two or three copies of the Ming Canon survived. But thanks to a renewed effort to reprint the canon, and thanks to another fancy technology called photolithography, the Daoist canon was made widely available to the public for the first time in history. So the Ming Canon was the longest-lasting Daoist canon, until 2003. That year the Chinese Daoist Association released a new edition, called the Zhonghua Daozong. One of the advantages of the new edition is that it included texts discovered in tombs and document stores in Duanhuang, China. This means that even though it's the newest version of the canon, it contains the oldest versions of the Dao Dejing and other historically popular texts. This was a big deal because, practically speaking, the Daozong did not have any new texts added to it since 1607. This doesn't mean that Daoists stopped writing scriptures in 1607, it just means that these texts didn't make it into the canon. More than likely, these texts were simply written later, or produced by less than influential at the time schools, or produced by schools that were farther from the capital, and thus not known to those who were compiling the canon. By now you've probably caught on who decided what was in and what was out. Handpicked groups of eminent Daoists working under the authority of the Emperor. Daoism does not have a single source of authority. Individual schools and lineages do have hierarchies as a matter of administration, but the head of a school or a lineage is not the Dao's representative on earth, or anything like the Pope in Catholicism, nor do they convene councils to unify doctrine, because that's not really critical in a religion that teaches multiple valid methods to aligning oneself with the Dao. So ultimately it was the Emperor that declared something officially scripture, by authorizing the production of a canon, and distributing that canon to specific temples. Practically speaking though, the texts were chosen based on their age and general popularity. Older texts were more likely to be agreed upon as essential, as were texts recognized as important to tradition. Which is how ancient, yet decidedly non-Daoist works made their way into the canon, like the Motsu, an ancient Chinese text representing the teachings of the philosopher Motsu. Even Buddhist-style sutras and tantric rituals made their way into the Daoist canon. The scholar Jeffrey Kotick notes that a lot of the texts in the Daoist canon are not strictly Daoist in character, including general works on astrology or magic. Many texts are not even religious, like ones focusing on mineralogy. The scholar Christopher Shipper says the Daoist canon was the product of a prolonged negotiation, and part of that negotiation was with the other religious and philosophical systems of China. This brings us full circle to one of our first questions. Do Daoists view the canon as revealed scriptures, like Christians with the Bible or Muslims with the Quran? Some might say that the Daoist canon is like the Bible for Daoists, but this isn't quite accurate. Religious studies scholars call comparisons like this the square peg round hole fallacy, because different religious traditions have different internal logics. So yes, the Daozong is technically a sacred set of scriptures for Daoists, like how the Bible is the sacred set of scriptures for Christians. But the internal logic of how the Daozong functions in Daoism doesn't really match how Christians understand the Bible. For example, consider the idea of divine inspiration. Many Daoist scriptures do contain headers saying that they were received by revelation from the Lord Lao, the deified Lao Tzu. This is especially true with the earliest scriptures in the celestial masters, upper clarity, and numinous treasure traditions. So at least some of the texts could be called revealed scripture. But scholars don't really call Daoists scriptural literalists, like certain evangelical Christians. Daoists understand that even texts that claim divine origins have passed through human hands, who edited and shaped them. Nor do they believe that their scriptures are free from mistakes, and they don't expect them to harmonize together to create a coherent whole. Daoists don't really get caught up in these sorts of debates because there are multiple pathways to capital T truth. Multiple pathways to achieve union with the Dao, or to achieve immortality. Some methods may be easier, or faster, or more effective under certain circumstances, but all methods will eventually get you to the same place. Moreover, many scriptures can be interpreted either metaphorically or literally. For example, consider the shift from external alchemy to internal alchemy. External alchemy involves what we traditionally think of when we talk about alchemy, combining various substances like herbs, minerals, and metals, and following specific formulas and procedures. While internal alchemy is a ritual practice that focuses on purifying and transforming the internal energy of the body, through practices like meditation, it's more of a metaphysical counterpart to the physical process of external alchemy. This whole shift was made possible, in part, because scriptures are often interpreted metaphorically. Of course, underpinning all of this flexibility is the Daoist understanding that human language and comprehension are inherently limited. Remember the opening line of the Tao Te Ching? The way that can be spoken of is not the true way. Another difference we can draw between the Dao Zong and other sacred scriptures is how they're used. Given its size and very broad scope, most Daoists will never come close to reading the whole canon. Rather, they'll select individual texts that are relevant to their own lives and focus on those. Devotees of a particular deity will read a scripture from that deity as an act of devotion. Those interested in longevity and health will study texts on dietetics or circulating qi. Ritual specialists, like priests, are particularly familiar with liturgical texts, so they can perform those liturgies. The most observant might memorize hagiographies and teachings of a certain school or master. And lesser observant Daoists might never read any of the canon, and only hear key scriptures as they're chanted during major religious events or on holidays. Of course, this also reflects the multiplicity of ways to achieve harmony with the Dao. Have I mentioned how flexibility is an important aspect of Daoism? I've made that clear, right? So to review, Daoists do have a canon of scripture, but it's a lot more than just the famous ones like the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi. They are part of it, along with 1,500 other texts. With the exception of the first canon, all of this was done by groups of prominent Daoists working under the authority of the government. They aimed to be faithful to earlier copies of the canon while correcting mistakes and including new material. But they never tried to harmonize any of the texts into a coherent whole. There isn't really a need to do that, because Daoism doesn't teach a singular path to return to the Dao. This vast and continually evolving collection underscores the flexibility of Daoism, illustrating how the tradition has absorbed and integrated a wide array of texts and practices over the centuries. If you'd like to learn more about Daoism, I'm super excited to invite you to our upcoming Religion for Breakfast class, Fact and Fiction about Lao Tzu and his Tao Te Ching. It'll be taught by the main researcher and writer of our Chinese religion series, Dr. Jennifer Buscio. She's an expert in the history of Chinese religion, and she's an expert in medieval Daoism in particular. So the Tao Te Ching is attributed to the philosopher Lao Tzu, which literally just means Old Master. But a lot of scholars don't think he's historical, and you'll come across words like semi-legendary or quasi-historical when describing him. What's that all about? Well, in our class, Dr. Buscio will talk a bit about the historicity of Lao Tzu the person, as well as the textual history of the Tao Te Ching. The class will cover the most well-known parts of the work, as well as the phenomenon of fake Lao Tzu quotes circulating around. The class will cost whatever you want, starting at $1, and I'll be hosting it on Zoom on August 28th at 9 o'clock p.m. U.S. East Coast time. I'll also be moderating the Q&A session after Dr. Buscio's lecture. Now, if you're not able to make the class live, don't worry about it, we'll be recording the class and sending the recording out to everyone who registers. To sign up, head on over to religionforbreakfast.eventbrite.com or click the link pinned in the comments below. Again, that's religionforbreakfast.eventbrite.com. Thanks again, and I hope to see you there.