Abstract

Daoism (Taoism) has been called China's indigenous high religion, and stands alongside Confucianism and Buddhism as one of the Three Teachings (sanjiao) of that civilization. While many readers in the West may possess at least a passing familiarity with classical texts such as the Daode jing (Tao Te Ching) and the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), Daoism as a religious tradition remains largely terra incognita in the public consciousness, not to mention seemingly indistinguishable from broader “Chinese” or “Eastern” world views. Indeed, due to various circumstances attendant upon the intersecting intellectual histories of China and the West, generations of observers have tended to denigrate Daoist ritual, healing, and exorcism as degenerate superstitions fallen off from a supposedly pristine, but in fact wishfully imagined, philosophical core. Even those sympathetic to Chinese medicine may unwittingly inherit such longstanding ideological biases in embracing only specific techniques (acupuncture, herbology) or abstracted principles that conveniently mirror certain idealized sensibilities (harmony, balance, holism), while rejecting traditional forms of ritual practice, pantheons, or cosmologies as just so much cultural baggage. Closer study of the historical, textual and ethnographic record relating to Daoism reveals, however, the contours of a complex religious tradition with distinctive views of the body, illness, and healing.