SOURCE: "The Taoist Movement," in The Parting of the Way: Lao Tzu and the Taoist Movement, Beacon Press, 1957, pp. 88-97.

[In the essay that follows, Welch discusses the rise of philosophical Taoism, with particular consideration of its connections to medical and scientific beliefs.]

Lists of the world's principal religions usually include "Taoism." We might therefore suppose that "Taoism" was a religion comparable to Christianity, Buddhism, or Islam. We might suppose that like them it could be traced back to a founding prophet—in its case, Lao Tzu—whose followers set up a church—the Taoist church; that various branches of Taoism developed as the church divided into sects; and that the church and its doctrines, originally pure, became corrupted with the passing of centuries until they ended up as the Taoist priests and sorcery of today.

This is almost wholly mistaken. Taoism cannot be traced back to Lao Tzu or any other single man. Its 'principal branches were not offshoots of the Taoist church. Those who set up the church were not followers of Lao Tzu (they turned their backs on almost every precept in his book). The doctrines of Taoism are no more "corrupt" today than they were when it began. And to call it a religion at all is misleading because, though it included a religion, its other elements were equally important.

These other elements were oddly assorted. There was, for example, the science of alchemy; maritime expeditions in search of the Isles of the Blest; an indigenous Chinese form of yoga; a cult of wine and poetry; collective sexual orgies; church armies defending a theocratic state; revolutionary secret societies; and the philosophy of Lao Tzu. Since all these things can properly be termed "Taoist," it is, as you can see, a very broad term indeed, which has proved confusing for students of the Far East and of the history of religion.

No less confusing has been the primary source on Taoism—the Taoist Canon or Tao Tsang. This is a bible in 1,120 volumes—not pages—compiled over a period of fifteen centuries. Many of the books that compose it use an esoteric vocabulary which only initiates were meant to understand, and in some cases the last initiate may have died a thousand years ago. It includes books of divine revelations received by the adept in trance, which are partly or wholly incoherent. Almost no book bears a date or the name of its author. We do not even know the order in which the Canon was written.

It would take decades and whole teams of scholars to make order out of this vast heap of textual material, and more decades to collate it with the related material, even larger in bulk, that may be found in the dynastic histories and collections. The task is so appalling that it is never likely to be undertaken. But until it is, all discussion of the history of Taoism must be tentative.

To find his way through the complexities ahead the reader may want to equip himself with a map. Let him think of Taoism, then, as a river which united four streams. None of the four was bigger than the others, so none can be singled out as the real headwaters. The river simply began where they met. Lower down in its course it was joined by other streams. Only a little lower, as it approached a long delta, it began to throw off branches. Many of these branches can be identified as the same streams that had flowed in higher up. It was indeed a strange sort of river, with currents flowing side by side, half mingling, half separate. Finally as it broadened towards the mouth at which we stand today, there developed a crisscrossing of water-courses, branching off not merely from our Taoist river, but from the rivers of Confucianism and Buddhism which share the same delta. A complicated picture! But it is no more complicated than the facts.

The four streams which were later to converge in the river of Taoism appear to rise into history about the middle of the fourth century before Christ. It was probably between 350 and 250 B.C. that the names of Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and Lieh Tzu became associated with what we shall call "philosophical Taoism"; their books testified in turn to the existence of a "hygiene school," which cultivated longevity through breathing exercises and gymnastics; early in the same period the theory of the Five Elements was propounded by Tsou Yen, whose followers are thought to have started research on the elixir of life; and lastly, along the northeastern coasts of China, ships began to sail out in search of the Isles of the Blest, hoping to return with the mushroom that "prevented death." Notice that the pursuit of immortality is an element common to three of the four streams I have just mentioned. For the Chinese of that time immortality could only be physical. This was because they considered the personality a composite of several complementary souls that dispersed at death.²

Though in history as we have it the appearance of the four streams of Taoism is sudden, clearly each must have had a long period of development. In this development—in the watersheds, so to speak, of the streams—some contribution was probably made by the ancient Chinese shamans who danced and prophesied in trance; by the mediums who represented the dead at funerals; by the anarchistic hermits and agriculturalists mentioned in the Confucian Analects; by men like Yang Chu and Sung Tzu; and by experts in the I Ching, the oldest scripture we have on divination. But just what their contributions were, we can only conjecture.³

We have already discussed the first of the philosophical Taoists, Lao Tzu. What about his successors, Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu? They are figures almost as shadowy and controversial as he was. The Chuang Tzu was probably compiled during the early decades of the third century B.C. and the Lieh Tzu either shortly thereafter (in the opinion of Western scholars) or in the third century A.D. (according to Chinese scholars). The doctrines that both these books expound are essentially the same as those we have met in the Tao Te Ching: inaction, government by te, the relativity of opposites, the search for Tao through meditation, and so forth. There are differences, however, especially in emphasis. Lao Tzu emphasized humility while Chuang Tzu emphasized the danger of high position. From Chuang Tzu we learn more specifically than from Lao Tzu that the artist creates not by reason, but by intuition, not by the study of books and rules, but by losing himself in what he creates—a doctrine that was eventually to determine the course of Chinese art. Chuang Tzu attacks by name the sainted kings of antiquity and ridicules Confucius, who held them up as a model. Lieh Tzu, on the other hand, emphasizes determinism. He taught that cause and effect rather than fate are responsible for the vagaries of life. One chapter of his book is devoted to the doctrines of a certain Yang Chu, who shocked the Confucians by saying that a Sage would not sacrifice one hair from his body to save the whole world (on the principle that if everyone did this the world would be saved). Yang Chu's heroes were men who devoted themselves to the most stupefying debauchery. The stupefaction of debauchery was an analogue and possibly a precursor of the stupefaction of trance. Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu, unlike Lao Tzu, were the first Chinese thinkers to suggest that the physical world might be illusory. Each of the three, incidentally, has his own special flavour. While Lao Tzu is reserved, Chuang Tzu is exuberant and imaginative, and Lieh Tzu is ironically witty.⁴

I have not yet mentioned their most interesting difference. There are certain passages where Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu allude to magic islands and describe the apparently magic powers of the individual who has perfected himself in Tao. These passages, which have no parallel in Lao Tzu, have been misunderstood, and their misunderstanding has been partly responsible for the development of the Taoist movement. We must give them close attention.

Chuang Tzu tells us, for instance, that on the river island of Ku I there is a Spiritualized Man (shen jen) whose skin is white, who does not eat the five grains,⁵ but inhales air and drinks dew. He can mount the clouds and drive flying dragons; he can save men from disease and assure a plentiful harvest. He is immune to flood and fire.

In many similar passages Chuang Tzu attributes these and other magic powers to his idealized individual, emphasizing particularly the purity of the latter's essence or breath (ch'i). He calls him chenjen (Realized Man), chihjen (Perfected Man), and shengjen (Sage). There are parallel passages in Lieh Tzu. From Lieh Tzu we also hear for the first time about the Isles of the Blest. They lie in an archipelago far out to sea. The most famous is called P'eng-lai. On these islands the buildings are gold; all living creatures are white; "immortal sages" live there, who eat sweet flowers and never die. The word used for "immortal" is hsien.

We are faced here with a choice that will determine our picture of how the Taoist movement developed. Do Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu intend their descriptions of magic powers and island to be taken literally or allegorically? The argument for taking them literally is strong. A few centuries after Chuang Tzu the Immortals, or hsien, took over the center of the stage in Taoism. They became the celestial officials who governed the world from Heaven and, who, though born as men, had won magic powers and immortality through the practice of hygiene. By purifying their breath or essence they acquired immunity to fire and water, could ride the wind, and became immortal; if only the adept could win their favour, they would teach him how to follow in their footsteps.

These later hsien were no longer an incidental feature of the misty Isles of the Blessed. They were the saints and archangels of the Taoist pantheon. But it certainly sounds as though they had originated in the philosophical Taoists' descriptions of the Realized Man and the island of P'eng-lai. To a large degree this is true, but it was not, I think, the intent of the philosophical Taoists that it should happen. There are good reasons for supposing that the magical passages in Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu are really allegorical, and that it was a literalistic misinterpretation of these passages which was responsible for the later union between the "pure" stream of philosophical Taoism and the "impure" streams of the search for immortality. What are these reasons?

First of all, the hsien of later centuries acquired immortality, as I have said, through the practice of hygiene. If Chuang Tzu embraced the cult of hsien, we should be able to find people in his book who indulged in that cult's typical pursuits: searching the woods for herbs, living on famous mountains, preparing medicines, retaining and circulating their breath, and practicing gymnastics. And we can find such people. The trouble is that Chuang Tzu unequivocally condemns them. He ridicules those who dwell in solitary places, those who "pant, puff, hail, and sip," who practice "bear-hangings and bird-stretchings" in order to "nourish the body" (yang hsing) and live as long as P'eng Tsu, the Chinese Methuselah,⁶ He contrasts them unfavourably with the true Sage, who attains old age without hygiene or anchoritism. In this respect, at least, the Sage is not a hsien.

The second respect in which he differs from the hsien is in his "lyrical acceptance of death," as Mr. Waley has so well described it. Chuang Tzu's idealized individual not only "offered no resistance to death," but he embraced it with joy. This doctrine, which is implicit in Lao Tzu, becomes explicit in Chuang Tzu and has the highest significance. It is a wholly original answer to the dread that has converted most of mankind to organized religion. Chuang Tzu says that life and death are one, for they are phases of the grand process of Nature in which death can no more be avoided than life and to which submission is the only wisdom. In death the spirit decomposes along with the body, but even physical decomposition is, in Chuang Tzu's view, something wonderful and moving, for new life arises from the materials of the old. Thus it is that the transformations both of living and of dying "afford occasion for joys incalculable.… Early death or old age, beginning or end, all are good."⁷

When Chuang Tzu himself was about to die, his disciples expressed a wish to give him a splendid funeral. He said: "With Heaven and Earth for my coffin and shell; with the sun, moon, and stars as my burial regalia; and with all creation to escort me to the grave—are not my funeral paraphernalia ready to hand?"

"We fear," argued the disciples, "lest the carrion kite should eat the body of our Master"; to which Chuang Tzu replied: "Above ground I shall be food for kites; below I shall be food for mole-crickets and ants. Why rob one to feed the other?"⁸

There is danger of a misunderstanding here. I do not mean that Chuang Tzu was lyrical in accepting premature death. Death was something that should only come in its time. Immortality in Chinese is ch'ang sheng pu ssu, "long life no death." Chuang Tzu does accept the ideal of "long life"; he does not accept the ideal of "no death." The Sage lives long because he models himself on nature, and because he models himself on nature, he has to die.

The third reason we may know the Sage is not a hsien is because at the end of some passages on magic powers Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu take us behind the scenes and either give us a rational explanation of what was apparently magical or say point blank that it was only an allegory. In Chuang Tzu XVII, 7, for instance, we find an example of the former. "He who knows the Tao … is sure to understand how to regulate his conduct in all varying circumstances. Having that understanding, he will not allow things to injure himself. Fire cannot burn him who is perfect in virtue, nor water drown him; neither cold nor heat can affect him injuriously; neither bird nor beast can hurt him. This does not mean he is indifferent to these things; it means that he discriminates between where he may safely rest and where he will be in peril; that he is tranquil equally in calamity and happiness; that he is careful what he avoids and approaches; so that nothing can injure him" (Legge translation).

Lieh Tzu gives a similarly rational explanation of immunity to wild animals, and as to the magic islands in his book, they evidently belong to the same allegorical category as the other magical regions he mentions. Such regions are beyond the reach of mortal foot. "Only the soul can travel so far."⁹ Journeys of the soul are one of the themes of the philosophical Taoists.

Finally, I think that a literal interpretation of these magic powers and islands is simply against good literary instinct. Chuang Tzu was a poet, though he wrote in prose. He is reaching out for the infinite and wishes us, too, to reach for the infinite. To help us, he gives our imagination the shock treatment. He wants to knock the sense out of us, to make us realize that up is down, asleep is awake, and that we are gross and dull compared with those who have lost themselves in Tao. To take him literally is completely to miss the spirit in which he wrote. He no more intends us to believe that his Spiritualized Man actually rode the clouds or avoided cereals than that the p'eng bird was actually many thousand miles in breadth or that Tzu Yü's cheeks were actually level with his navel. Not that I think such fabulous beasts and saints were manufactured out of whole cloth. Probably they were based on folklore that was current at the time. The search for the Isles of the Blest had already begun along the northeastern coast when the Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu were written. To utilize them in allegory was altogether natural.

It is my own opinion,¹⁰ therefore, that though the word hsien, or Immortal, is used by Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu, and though they attributed to their idealized individual the magic powers that were attributed to the hsien in later times, nonetheless the hsien ideal was something they did not believe in—either that it was possible or that it was good. The magic powers are allegories and hyperboles for the natural powers that come from identification with Tao. Spiritualized Man, P'eng-lai, and the rest are features of a genre which is meant to entertain, disturb, and exalt us, not to be taken as literal hagiography. Then and later, the philosophical Taoists were distinguished from all other schools of Taoism by their rejection of the pursuit of immortality. As we shall see, their books came to be adopted as scriptural authority by those who did practice magic and seek to become immortal. But it was their misunderstanding of philosophical Taoism that was the reason they adopted it.

I have given so much space to this question of magic versus allegory not only because the Western reader is in danger of going astray if he should turn to certain pages of Chuang Tzu or Lieh Tzu, but also to support the thesis that the four streams of Taoism—philosophy, P'eng-lai, alchemy, and hygiene—were separate when they flowed into history in the middle of the fourth century B.C. Expeditions were by then sailing out in search of the mushroom of immortality, but I do not think Chuang Tzu or Lieh Tzu would have advocated either joining the expeditions or eating the mushroom. In both of their books there is opposition to hygiene and in neither of them is there reference to alchemy. As for Lao Tzu, he does not allude to magic islands or to alchemy. Whether he alludes to breathing exercises is uncertain, but if he does, they are exercises undertaken as a part of meditation leading to union with Tao, not as hygiene leading to immortality. Lao Tzu does refer to immunity from wild beasts—a standard privilege of the later hsien—but the first reference is presented as hearsay and the second as a simile.¹¹ Immunity in the Tao Te Ching is of the same nature as immunity in Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu.

So much for the philosophical Taoists. So much for the hygiene school, there being little we can add to our knowledge of the school at this early period beyond what we have noted in Chuang Tzu.¹² There is still something to be said about the other two currents of early Taoism: alchemy and P'eng-lai.

The works of Tsou Yen, to whom the origin of alchemy is usually traced, have been lost. But from quotations and discussions of his works we know something of his theories. He believed that the physical processes of the universe were due to the interaction of the five elements of earth, wood, metal, fire, and water. In that order they destroyed one another, and dynasties, each governed by an element, succeeded one another. Tsou Yen was also one of the first geographers. He regarded China as only a small part of the world. In none of this is there anything specifically alchemistic.

Tsou Yen flourished about 325 B.C. A little before 200 B.C. magicians appeared along the northeastern coasts who "transmitted his arts without being able to understand them." Specifically, they "practised the Tao of recipes and immortality (fang hsien tao). Their bodies were released, dissolved, and transformed. They relied on serving ghosts (kuei) and spirits (shen)."¹³ … They were known as fang shih, or "recipe gentlemen."

The magic they practiced is no evidence that Tsou Yen was an alchemist or, for that matter, that they were alchemists. Alchemy, in China, was the search for a chemical elixir of immortality. Their elixirs may have been herbal. Furthermore, we do not know whether they compounded them in spite of or because of their "misunderstanding" of Tsou Yen's arts.

By 100 A.D., however, Tsou Yen had come to be regarded as an alchemist. This is clear from a reference in the history of the Early Han dynasty, which was complied about that time. I think we can conclude that, although Tsou Yen gradually acquired alchemistical stature, he himself knew nothing of the art. It was probably developed by those of his followers who became interested in physical experimentation with the Five Elements. The first elixir they developed was cinnabar, or mercuric sulphide. Arthur Waley has pointed to the use of cinnabar as a pigment on early grave ornaments and suggested that it was thought to have "life-giving" properties. This might have been the germ of the theory that, when properly purified and eaten, it confers immortality. It is actually a poison.

We come finally to the magic island of P'eng-lai, not as a feature of allegory, but as the object of serious maritime expeditions. Ships were sent out as early as the reign of Duke Wei of Ch'i (357-320 B.C.). By the time of Ssu-ma Ch'ien, whose history alludes to these expeditions, the magic islands were no longer thought of as inaccessibly remote, but nearby in the Gulf of Chihli. They might just as well have been remote, however, for everyone who approached them was either blown away by headwinds or found the islands upside down in the water. Nonetheless, because P'englai had "the drug that prevented death … there was not one of the feudal lords who would not like to have gotten there."

The origins of the P'eng-lai cult are as obscure as the origins of alchemy. But it may have begun like the legends of other maritime peoples. Traders and fishermen are blown out to sea, land on terra incognita, and, when they get home, spin a good yarn about it. Eventually it develops into the Isles of the Hesperides or Prospero's Bermuda. We have no right to scoff at a civilized people like the ancient Chinese for taking such things seriously. There is a parallel here and now in the cult of flying saucers. Other planets take the place of magic islands. Their inhabitants take the place of the Immortals. Already these "Masters" are making their presence known to the adepts of today. I suppose we shall soon have books of revelation, dictated to the adepts by our interstellar visitors in remote and secret places. That, at least, was the way it developed in China.

Notes

² This is further explained on p. 112.

³ For a good discussion of the origins of philosophical Taoism, see the Introduction to Arthur Waley's The Way and Its Power.

⁴ Complete English translations of Chuang Tzu have been made by James Legge and Herbert a. Giles. Fung Yu-lan has translated the first seven chapters. Extensive selections will be found in Lin Yutang's The Wisdom of Lao Tzu and in Arthur Waley's Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China. There is a nearly complete translation of Lieh Tzu in two volumes of the Wisdom of the East series: Taoist Teachings and Yang Chu's Garden of Pleasure by Lionel Giles and Anton Forke respectively. I recommend Chuang Tzu to the attention of readers who do not know him. From a literary point of view his book is superior to the Tao Te Ching, and perhaps to any other book in Chinese. Mr. Waley's translations are excellent.

⁵ Rice, millet, wheat, barley, and beans. Lists vary. This passage is from Chuang Tzu 1, 5.

⁶Chuang Tzu, XV, 1.

⁷Chuang Tzu VI, 6 (tr. Legge).

⁸Chuang Tzu XXXII, 14 (tr. H. A. Giles).

⁹Lieh Tzu II, A.

¹⁰ In contrast to the opinion of Henri Maspero, the great French Sinologist, who took Chuang Tzu literally. See his Le taoisme, pp. 201-218. I have been encouraged to find that H. G. Creel agrees with me on this and other conclusions. Indeed there are such close parallels between his paper What is Taoism? and my nearly simultaneous paper Syncretism in the Early Taoist Movement that I take this opportunity to say that neither of us was aware of the work of the other. I cannot help feeling that similar conclusions independently arrived at are likely to be right.

¹¹ See pp. 74-75.

¹² See p. 92.

¹³Shih Chi, 28/l Ob.

Works Cited

Creel, H. G., Chinese Thought (Chicago, 1953).

Creel, H. G., The Birth of China (New York, 1937).

Creel, H. G., "What is Taoism?" Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 76, No. 3, July-Sept., 1956.

Fung Yu-lan, Short History of Chinese Philosophy (New York, 1948).

Fung Yu-ian, History of Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, 1937, 1953).

Legge, James, The Texts of Taoism (London, 1891).

Maspero, Henri, La Chine Antique (Paris, 1927).

Maspero, Henri, "The mythology of modern China," in J. Hackin et al., Asiatique Mythology (London, 1932), 252-384.

Maspero, Henri, "James R. Ware, "The Wei shu and Sui shu on Taoism,"' Journal Asiatique, 226:313-317 (1935).

Maspero, Henri, "Les procedes de nourir le principe vital dans la religion Taoiste ancienne," Journal Asiatique, 229:177-252, 353-430 (1937).

Maspero, Henri, Le taoisme (Paris, 1950).

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