Taoism
The Eastern philosophy that became style
Description
Taoism is the most quoted and least practiced of the major Eastern traditions in the West. The Tao Te Ching, attributed to Laozi and composed sometime in the late fourth or early third century BCE, is one of the most translated books in the world, with hundreds of English versions in print. Its lines are quoted on coffee mugs, in self-help books, in tech founder essays about strategy, and in the occasional movie about water and stones. What does not travel as easily is the long, complicated tradition of practice, ritual, and institutional history that grew up around the text in China across two and a half thousand years, most of which the English-speaking reader almost never encounters.
This is partly because Taoism comes in two forms that have an uneasy relationship with each other. There is philosophical Taoism, associated with the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi, which presents a non-mystical, almost literary meditation on the nature of things. And there is religious Taoism, with its temples, priesthood, elaborate cosmology, alchemical traditions, ritual practices, and pantheon of gods and immortals. The first traveled to the West and became a familiar reference. The second, with a few exceptions, did not.
The result is a tradition that exists in the Western imagination mostly as an aesthetic mood water flowing around obstacles, sages on mountains, the idea of effortless action. The mood is genuinely Taoist in a sense. But it is a thin slice of what Taoism actually is in the places where it has been practiced continuously since the second century CE, and the gap is worth being precise about.
The question we're asking: what Taoism is, where it came from, and how it became, in the West, more atmosphere than practice.
What we'll see: Laozi and the foundational texts, wu wei, the philosophical-religious split, and the Western adoption.
Table of contents
01Laozi and the founding texts
The conventional account holds that Taoism began with Laozi, an older contemporary of Confucius, who served as a court archivist in the late Zhou dynasty before retiring westward, leaving behind the eighty-one short chapters of the Tao Te Ching at the request of a border guard who refused to let him pass without writing something down. The legend is almost certainly wrong about the biography. Most scholars now think the text was compiled over time from multiple sources, reaching its received form somewhere around the late fourth or third century BCE. Laozi may not have been a single historical person at all.
What survives, regardless of authorship, is one of the most distinctive philosophical works in any tradition. The Tao Te Ching presents itself as a guide for rulers and sages, but its ostensible political advice runs through a set of cosmological and ethical claims that go much deeper. The tao, conventionally translated as the way, is the underlying pattern of reality, prior to any name or distinction. Te, conventionally translated as virtue or power, is the manifestation of the tao in particular things. The text repeatedly insists that the tao that can be spoken is not the eternal tao, which is a straightforward way of warning the reader that the book they are reading should not be confused with what it is pointing at.
02Wu wei
The concept that has traveled best out of Taoism, and been most consistently misunderstood, is wu wei. The literal meaning is non-action, but the term does not refer to inactivity. It points at a way of acting in which the action arises from the situation rather than from forced effort, in which the agent does not impose themselves on what is happening, in which the result emerges with the same kind of inevitability as water finding its level. The standard examples in the texts are skilled craftsmen the cook cutting up an ox so that the blade never wears, the wheelwright whose hands know what cannot be communicated to his son.
Wu wei is the part of Taoism that contemporary management writing keeps trying to extract. The advice runs roughly: stop forcing things, stop overplanning, get out of your own way, allow the situation to develop. This is not entirely wrong, but it tends to leave out the precondition. The cook in the parable is not improvising. He has been cutting up oxen for nineteen years, and the blade has not been sharpened because he has learned to find the openings in the joints. The skill that makes wu wei look effortless takes a lifetime. The contemporary self-help version often reverses this wu wei as a way to skip the long apprenticeship rather than its eventual fruit.
03The philosophical-religious split
Most surveys of Taoism distinguish between daojia, the philosophical school, and daojiao, the religious institution. The distinction is partly artificial historical Taoism is a single phenomenon with multiple aspects but it captures something real about how the tradition developed. The philosophical works of the Warring States period gave way, by the second century CE, to organized religious movements with priests, temples, scriptures, and elaborate ritual practices. The Celestial Masters tradition, founded by Zhang Daoling around 142 CE, was the first such institution. Many others followed.
Religious Taoism developed an enormous cosmological apparatus over the next eighteen centuries. There were realms of immortals to be cultivated toward and cosmic emperors to be invoked. There were internal alchemical practices aimed at transforming the body, and external alchemical practices aimed at producing elixirs of immortality, some of which periodically poisoned Chinese emperors who took them. There were ritual sequences for funerals, the protection of communities, and the management of relations between the living and the dead. The Daozang, the Taoist canon, runs to over fifteen hundred volumes.
04The Western adoption
Taoism arrived in Western intellectual life through translations of the foundational texts, beginning with James Legge's nineteenth-century renderings and accelerating with the more poetic versions of Arthur Waley and Witter Bynner in the early twentieth century. By mid-century, the tradition had become a reference point for figures looking outside the Western canon. Aldous Huxley invoked Taoist sources in The Perennial Philosophy. Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China made the case for Taoism as a counterweight to the Confucian tradition.
The figure who did most to popularize Taoism in the English-speaking world was Alan Watts, whose books and lectures from the 1950s through the early 1970s introduced a generation to a particular reading of the tradition Taoism as a non-dualistic, anti-puritanical, joyful philosophy of going with the flow. Watts was a serious student of the texts, though his version was distinctly his own and tended to underplay the religious dimensions. Ursula K. Le Guin produced her own translation of the Tao Te Ching late in her career, and her novels particularly The Dispossessed and the Earthsea sequence are saturated with Taoist sensibility.
05Conclusion
Taoism in its full form is a religious tradition with a sophisticated philosophical core, a long ritual practice, an elaborate cosmology, and a continuous institutional history that includes temples, priests, alchemical schools, and the daily devotions of millions of practitioners across East Asia. Taoism in its Western adoption is a literary and ethical mood drawn from the philosophical core, useful for thinking about strategy, attention, and the limits of forced action, and largely silent about everything else. Both are real, and the difference between them is worth holding in mind.