In Our Time - Daoism

Episode Date: December 15, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Daoism. An ancient Chinese tradition of philosophy and religious belief, Daoism first appeared more than two thousand years ago. For centuries it was the most popular religion in China; in the West its religious aspects are not as well known as its practices, which include meditation and Feng Shui, and for its most celebrated text, the Daodejing.The central aim in Daoism is to follow the 'Dao', a word which roughly translates as 'The Way'. Daoists believe in following life in its natural flow, what they refer to as an 'effortless action'. This transcendence can be linked to Buddhism, the Indian religion that came to China in the 2nd century BC and influenced Daoism - an exchange which went both ways. Daoism is closely related to, but has also at times conflicted with, the religion of the Chinese Imperial court, Confucianism. The spirit world is of great significance in Daoism, and its hierarchy and power often take precedence over events and people in real life. But how did this ancient and complex religion come to be so influential?With:Tim Barrett Professor of East Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of LondonMartin PalmerDirector of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and CultureHilde De WeerdtFellow and Tutor in Chinese History at Pembroke College, University of Oxford Producer: Natalia Fernandez.

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For more details about In-Harm and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.org. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, it's said that on a cold, misty night many years ago, an old man arrived at the western border of Imperial China. He was weary and, keen to get on his way, but the border guard stopped him, recognising him, as the learned archivist of the Chinese royal court. The man in question was Lao Zah, the old master.

And at the request of the guard, he stopped for the night and wrote down some of his wisdom. In doing so, he created what was to become the most revered text of the Taoist faith, the Tao De Ching. According to a Taoist tradition, these nocturnal events took place sometime in the 6th century BC, although today some doubt that such a person as Lao Zah even existed. Taoists thought has been a powerful force in China for centuries. Today, Taoism is a world religion, perhaps best known in the West, by some of its symbols and practices such as the Yin and Yang and the art of Fen Shui. But how did this complex religious philosophy spread,

and what lies at the heart of its teachings? With me to discuss Taoism at Tim Barrett, Professor of East Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, Martin Palmer, Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, education and culture, and Hilda de Viette, fellow and tutor in Chinese history at Pembroke College, the University of Oxford. Martin Palmer, at the heart of diisem is a notion called the Tao.

Can you explain what the word means? Well, the word itself simply means a road or a path or a street. We first come across it probably around about 1,500 BC, when it's carved on oracle bones and the such like. But by the time you get to the Schuching, the book of history, which is probably being compiled somewhere, around about 800 BC, it's beginning to take on a different meaning, in fact, two different meanings. One is a sort of moral path, you know, the right way to go, the right way to behave.

But at another level, it's also being linked with the character for heaven. So it's heaven's way. And with that comes the notion that this is more than just a moral code. It's more than just the proper thing to do, the proper path to follow in a sort of legalistic sense. It's beginning to be, but very tentatively, an idea. that there is a divine element to this that we're being guided by. How it's...

I'm referred to it as religion, but it goes over into philosophy as well, doesn't it? And also touches on myths. So can you give us some idea at the beginning of the complexity of it? Well, the complexity is enormous because at one level, the Tao is used as much by Confucianist writers and philosophers

as it is by the philosophers When you say the Tao in this program, what do our listeners take it to me? Yes, you're quite right. I'm really gone to the heart of it. Essentially, in the way it is used now, it means a notion that there is a universal way, a way of nature, that simply is how nature is. It's not moralistic. It's simply is, it's rather like gravity. This is how the universe operates. and Taoism teaches you that if you go with the flow of nature, with the way that the universe actually is, then you can achieve almost anything. If you resist it or if you go against it, then you will undermine it.

A classic example of this would be that in 2000, the Taoist religion in China, excommunicated people who used endangered animal parts in traditional Chinese medicine. and they did so on a philosophical as well as a practical basis. They said the whole point of Chinese medicine is to rebalance your body between the yin and the yang, these two cosmic forces. If in order to rebalance your body,

you have put the universe out of kilter because you've contributed towards the destruction of tigers or rhinos or such like, then it's not going to work. You cannot abuse the fundamental pattern and harmony and stability of the universe which is the Tao, and expect to succeed. So the Tao becomes this, in Taoist philosophy and then in Taoist religion, it becomes this principle of how the universe actually is, and it's not necessarily divine.

It gets a divine patina with all kinds of deities and gods and rituals and magic, but at its heart it is a fundamental philosophical proposition that the universe has its path, and if you flow with it, you're do okay. If you don't, you could run into a wall. You actually use the word flow twice, and the idea of flowing water is one of the strong images in the Taoism. It's a very strong image indeed,

and it's often called the water course way, because you could argue that there have always been two traditions within China as to how you approach a problem. One would be the sort of legalist, to some extent, Confucianist approaches, there's a boulder in the way, you remove it. the Taoist approach would be you flow underneath it, you flow around it

and in a couple of thousand years it'll be a little pebble and get washed away so there is that sense of the inevitability of the Tao over against as it were the confrontational dimension and one of the heart of Taoism is this belief in Wuwei

in action that actually by not action is in action Doing nothing is probably the most positive thing you can do. And in the Tao De Ching, the book you just referenced from the 6th century BC, the sage who does nothing and the people do not even realize he's ruling them, but they are ruled according to the Tao is the highest ideal. An emperor or a ruler who brings in laws, he's failed. I'm going to use that as my model for the rest of the programme, too.

But nevertheless, we'll go on. Can you go further into the origins of Daoism, Tim Barrett? Yes, well, I think we have to go back to your introduction and to the supposed creator of Taoism or the man who is said to be responsible for this text, which means just the old master. So there have been doubts about his identity for as long as people have talked about.

him. And the earliest account we have of that story goes back to perhaps the end of the second century BC. Louza is already a slightly puzzling figure in that

on the one hand he is said to be an older contemporary of Confucius which of course would put him into the 6th century BC who was consulted by Confucius about ritual which sounds a bit surprising. But certainly in the accounts we have, Confucius is extremely impressed and says,

Laoza, he's like a dragon, which is the highest compliment you can pay a person, I should think, in those days. On the other hand, he is also said to have been the man who 150 years later at least predicted the rise of the first emperor. Now, if the same figure is both teaching Confucius, and predicting the rise of the First Emperor. He knows something that we don't because he would have lived for a very long time. So there's already a mystique about him right from the beginning. And the story you told about his exit from China,

having perceived that the dynasty was in decline, it says. I don't know quite how that was. Maybe he was asked to make efficiency savings in the archives or something. But certainly he decides to quit his choice, and the earliest example of a brain drain head westwards. That story probably goes back at least 100 years or so before it's actually in the form that it's recorded. And again, that gives him a mysterious end as well as a mysterious beginning because he's never seen again. This causes no end of confusion later on when Buddhist ideas start to come into China from the West.

because, as we may explore later, the question then is, is Buddhism perhaps a confused account of Lao Tzu's teaching filtered through non-Chinese minds? Or is it perhaps a counterfeit attempt to recreating Taoism in India? But on the whole, what we're talking about, is somewhere between the 6th century BC

and the 2nd century BC, a person or persons unknown or a movement began something which became Taoism and started to exercise influence and bring together a collection of rules, laws, books and so on. And then moved perhaps west. Well, that's fair enough, except that really all we have from early times is the Dowder Jing and some other literature that we'll... How we dated those accurately? Well, I wish we could.

The earliest manuscript evidence we now have goes back to the 4th century BC, but it's fragmentary and it's very recently that we've discovered it at the early 1990s. What's mysterious about it is that there are the three

manuscripts that were found together in the 1990s give us parts of the doubting, including one or two overlapping bits, but they don't give us the whole of it. And that raises the question as to whether it existed as a larger text from which these parts have been excerpted, or whether perhaps the whole thing is like a collection of proverbs that have been gradually brought together in an accepted form.

And that's certainly a hypothesis that many people. find appealing. Hilda DeViat, it has a relationship with Confucianism and one of the myths or whatever, whether it's a factor of myth, you don't seem to be sure, no, you don't see to be sure, was his relation with Confuciism and that Confucius was a pupil of. Now, can you tell us about that relationship between the two? Well, on the face of it, Confucianism looks like a very different kind of tradition, And as Martin was saying earlier, Daoism is a tradition that focuses on the way as the foundation for individual, social and political life.

Confucianism, on the other hand, focuses on proper behavior as the key to individual fulfillment, social harmony, and political order. And it analyzes proper behavior within the context of a set of social and political relations, the kinds of relations that characterize good family relationships, relationship between father and son, husband and wife, or among siblings. There's also a strong political dimension to Confucian Fudd, and that's embedded within the relationship between ruler and ministers. There is some difference of opinion amongst confusions as to whether such proper behavior is the outcome of natural inborn capacities

or whether it's something that needs to be learned. But by and large, and here perhaps there is a similarity, between Taoist and Confucian thinking. Confucians would believe that we are programmed to practice its core values so that whereas Taoists would claim that moral conventions are artificial. They're not in conformity with the Dao. Confucians would say the exact opposite. They think that we are actually naturally programmed to practice the kind of core moral values that they advocate.

But it's perhaps also worth keeping in mind that the story about Confucius is probably not entirely fictional. in the sense that interactions between the texts and perhaps the thinkers that we've come to associate with Confucianism and Daoism are as old as these texts and the thinkers themselves. So that is to say that Confucian and Taoist ideas and practices developed in relationship to each other from the very beginning. These relationships were of different sorts. They were conflicted with each other. They intermingled with each other. And they also coexisted. But Martin Palmer pointed out in his opening remarks that there was a difference.

If there was a boulder in the stream, Confucianism would say remove it. And the Taoist would say let the water run around it underneath it and eventually, A, the water will keep going. And B, the boulder will be eroded anyway. So is this the difference between the idea of effort and effortlessness between a hierarchy in action and inaction? Is that something that's there near the beginning? And is it seen as such? It is certainly seen as such. And Drong's, one of the key text within the Taoist tradition, brings up that criticism early on.

He sees Confucian moral conventions as artificial, as not in conformity with the way. They're impositions that people have come up with. But it is sort of worthwhile, perhaps also, to look at this from the Confucian perspective. And that they would say, well, actually, that's not necessarily the case. one of the perhaps strongest advocates of this Confucian position is Menchus, who was contemporary roughly of Duon's a fourth century philosopher who claimed that the core values of Confucianism such as humanness or ritual behavior, the idea that people will cooperate voluntarily through sets of rules of etiquette, that these ideas are embedded within our hearts and minds. and all we need to do is to cultivate them. So they are there. We need to make some effort, but it's not something that we have come up with.

Tim has proposed a tantalizing proposition or possibility that a form of Taoism went west from China into India and came back into China as Buddhism. What do you make of that? And what briefly is the relationship between Buddhism and Taoism? Perhaps it's sort of defining the concept to start out with. on the face of it again, Buddhism is a radically different tradition from Taoism. Perhaps one of the core ideas in Taoism, the idea that we can prolong life by conforming with the way

illustrates us most effectively that for Buddhists avoiding life, escaping life is the goal, whereas for Taoists it actually prolonging life is a key objective. It is indeed. At the same time, it's worth keeping in mind that when Buddhism was first introduced in China, they felt that Taoist concept were perhaps most useful in trying to render ideas that were foreign to a Chinese audience intelligible to their audience. A good illustration of that is the idea of nirvana,

the idea of the extinction of the self within Buddhism, was something that wasn't really a good equivalent for in Chinese thought. But some early translators thought that actually perhaps this idea of Wu Wei, of effortless action, could be one that we can capitalize on to explain to a Chinese audience what we're all about. Now, even though those attempts were made, it is worth keeping in mind that this was a controversial idea, that for some Buddhists was an effective way of rendering ideas to find a similarity within a Chinese tradition. Some felt that this was a corruption of the original. Martin Parma

This Dow J. Jing My number is written in six century centuries one day and a bit later is the most influential text Can you, we're supposed to be about 5,000 words Can you tell us what it says And why it was so influential? Well, its influence is in various ways

What it is is exactly as Tim said It's primarily it probably is a collection of proverbial sayings, of oracles and explanations that were collected together. It's often described as a manual of leadership, but a manual of leadership which in a sense contradicts the normal assumption of leadership. It's much more the sense that the most skillful leader is the leader who is invisible, who nobody knows is actually leading.

But it's also a very profound theological book at certain points, although there is no real consistency. It's more as though somebody hits, sort of chopped up the Bible and scattered bits of it together and then stuck it together and you had to kind of work out from that what the philosophy was. But for example, in chapter 42, you have the nearest thing to a Taoist creed that there is, which says that the Tao, this natural way of the universe, gives birth to the origin, to the beginning of everything, the one.

The one then gives birth to the two, which is the yin and the yang. And these are cosmic forces. They're not divine forces. They're just forces of the universe. And the two give birth to the three, which in traditional down,'s thought, is heaven, earth, and humanity, because humanity's role is to hold a kind of tension between these two vast forces, which are yin and yang. And then you have all this gives birth to the myriad things, to everything that exists. So you have a sort of creedal statement, but that's about it. There isn't a great deal of explanation beyond that.

philosophically it's very profound, it's very thought-provoking, it's not terribly funny, unlike an awful lot of the other Taoist material, which we'll come to later, it's fairly dry, and it has been treated as a deep philosophical text. However, it's also been used for exorcism. If you chop up bits of it and burn it on yellow paper and mix it with water, you can give it to people to get rid of demons and evil spirits. and I've even seen copies of my own translation into English, which have got English and Chinese texts and a nice picture on the cover,

being used for magic and stuck under the back of a pregnant woman to help childbirth. So it's a book that has accrued around it, not just philosophical readers, it's not just a sort of educated text. It has actually shaped a magical, mysterious world, including the founder of religious Taoism, Chang Da Ling, who claimed that he'd been given it, along with a magical sword by Lao Tzu, in order to drive demons from the world.

You want to develop that timber? Yes. We've come on to the point where people are claiming Lao Tzu as an inspiration. Clearly, at that point, we're really talking about the middle of the second century AD now. he's seen as a superhuman figure. There must be said that by that time people thought very high-lived Confucius too. So he has become,

Lousa has become the kind of counterbalance to Confucius as the alternative sage figure, especially if one didn't feel comfortable with Confucian ideas. And there was a certain rejection of Confucian ideas during that century,

the second century AD, because the empire, that had elevated Confucius was falling apart. So it's probably natural that people should have looked for alternatives, should have looked at lous or for inspiration, should through this figure of Zhang Da Ling and others have looked for an alternative to empire. And where they found it was in the unseen world of the spirits.

we have to, rather than try and impose our own ideas about religion on China at this time, remember that the most basic division in the Chinese worldview was between the seen world and the unseen world in which spirits lived. And there, if the empire of the visible world was descending into chaos, the invisible world was probably descending into chaos too, and needed someone with a mandate to restore order or quell demons, as Martin said. And this individual, Zhang Daling, certainly claimed that mandate. He wasn't the only one to compete in this sense.

But this becomes the root, perhaps, of the organised religious tradition. But right from the start, it has to be something that governments are kept, cautious about because it's based on the idea of empire. And even today in China, I think religions are viewed with a certain suspicion because they are seen as having a principle of organisation that is equivalent to empire. Martin, you briefly want to go in. A very important point that Tim brings up is these two worlds, and that takes us back to another force quite apart from the philosophical that flows into Daozoan,

which is shamanism, and the early religion of China, particularly right up until the power of Confucius to sort of control and determine what is order, is the shamanic world in which people go into trances, visit the spirit world, and the spirit world is brought in to heal or to answer problems, but it's also an anarchic world. It is not controlled by us.

We are controlled by that word. And I think Tim's absolutely right. That's why Daoism, in particular, of all the religions in China, being seen as the most subversive. It ultimately says reality does not lie here. Hilda, can I ask you about the Zhuang Saar? It's another important text. It's a handbook on leadership. How effective was that? And who took any notice of it? Well, the Twyantz is both the name of a text. A text that was compiled roughly between the 4th century B.C.E and the second century B.C.E. It's also an appellation for one of the offers of the text.

Literally it means Master Duang. Now, we don't know a whole lot more about Master Zhuang. than a few fragments that we find both in the text itself and in some contemporary historical records. He was a minor official called Zhu in one of the small states in which China was subdivided during this period and time. The text itself is quite different from the way in which the Da Da Da Di Ji Jing has been characterized and that it's perhaps more limited in the kinds of applications in a religious context than the Da Di Jiying. one of the core characteristics perhaps of the person behind it as well as the text, certainly within the context of fourth century China, is that it has no explicit interest in government.

A lot of the texts in this time period are concerned with how can we create a unified empire, this term has come up before, how we can put to the rest kind of social and political problems that characterize this period in time. At the core of this text is an approach to individual happiness. because it's less concerned about the social and political dimensions of creating a peaceful society. It is concerned with the individual primarily. So how can we sort of discover the road to individual happiness from Zhuang's perspective? Well, we'd say that there's both a positive and a negative answer to this question.

The negative part of the question, we've already hinted at it, and part it involves a critique of moral conventions, confusion, morality. But there's another dimension to this, that we haven't really touched upon yet. And that is the idea that argumentation, rhetoric, isn't quite helpful in helping us understand reality either. Perhaps this is somewhat of a contradiction within the tradition

and that Twangze writes beautifully about this aspect. But if we see it within its context, there was a clear reason for this, that there were logicians out there who felt that they could demonstrate how reality was structured. And they thought this wasn't enough, that logic was not enough.

Drang's the thought that logic in some ways leads us away from the Tao. That we need to experience the Tao, and that's the only way in which we can really prove it. Yes, it's interesting. That's another question. Can you just give us a summary, Martin? People have been listening to this. I trust as intently as I have.

But where are we in about the second or third century 80? How many, what proportion of the population? Does it have buildings? Does it have, where is it going? Are these ideas floating around between archivists and scholars and philosophers, or have they extended into a more general population and other congregations? Can you just give us an idea of where it is in the era? Okay. By the end of the second century AD, you have an organised religious structure

which to a certain extent parallels diocese and parishes within Christian Europe, in that, as Tim mentioned, Chang Dao Lin becomes this very charismatic figure who teaches, and he's around the middle of the second century AD, teaches that he now has the power to forgive sins, that he has the power to... So they had sins? Oh, they had sins. You can have sins in inaction. No, I think you get sins through action, but I think that's fairly normal, actually, Melvin.

Inaction doesn't often need to sin. But they had... Is that discuss? That's another program. I meant to keep silent for them. There you go. And indeed his movement is called the five bush or the five sort of baskets of rice movement because you paid this fee on an annual basis.

And on the basis of that, you were then provided with essential sort of exorcist, magical, healing practitioner, your parish priest, if you like, your local Taoist priest, priest would take care of you and I'm sorry to be so brutal about this, but this is all over China at that time. Is it localised? Is it small? It's not as big as Confucianism? Not at all. Confucianism is an official policy of the empire.

Taoism essentially at this stage is a series of small sects who are growing very powerful, exactly as Tim said, because the imperial world is collapsing. This is the time in which the old Han dynasty that had been ruling often on for about 400 years is finally reaching its end.

And so, for example, you get the yellow turbans revolt, which is a Taoist-inspired revolution against the imperial forces, and they wear yellow turbines to show that this is a new era, a new era of heaven. And they actually take up arms. You get a Taoist republic being created, which actually functions for something like 30 years, based on Taoist principles like the Dao-Dai Ching.

and then has the wisdom to actually kind of hand over power to the next emerging kingdom. And then you've got charismatic spiritual figures. It's a bit like Pentecostalism in Christianity. It pops up, unregulated, uncontrolled, nobody is in charge. It's based very much about magic. But it also has, Hilda, Hilda, Divia, also has things to say about how people should live their daily lives. Can you briskly tell us about what you should do to be a good Taoist or what it tells you to do to be a good human being?

Is it good thereafter or living long thereafter? We can find some indications and perhaps as another way of reading the Tao Jardine that it was in part also sort of a self-help guide. We find in the Daugating one of the earliest descriptions of meditative practices in Chinese culture. Meditation is one of the ways in which Taoism became embedded. What are you meditating for?

To get in touch as somebody to calm yourself down? What are you doing it for? In order to find that unity with the Tao, to the flow that we talked about in the beginning. There's a variety of other reasons, but perhaps it's worth focusing on some of the aspects of meditation. It's not just

mental concentration. Dias meditation also included dietary restrictions or dietary practices. Breathing exercises. Certain grains should not be eaten. Certain grains could be eaten and so forth. Physical exercises. We have an early text

from the third, second century that pictures, the kind of of physical exercises, it can help someone focus on the doubt and not get, and this is the logic behind a lot of these practices, they seem like a wildly varied amalgam, but the logic behind is that such practices can help the individual focus. It moves us away from indulging our senses, auditory, visual, our appetite for food, for sex, and so forth. Tim Barrett, can I come to what's perhaps best known to the general public about this, which is the yin and the yang? How does that place?

out in the early days and then how does it become so strongly established? Well, it's actually something that appears only gradually. In the Dadajing itself, it's only mentioned once. Martin has also mentioned the cosmological chapter in the Dadajing where the one produces the two, the two produces the three. And the two, the commentators say, are the yin and the yang. And that's probably the case. I'm not sure about the three.

But the yin and the yang are defined in the earliest sources we have as the difference between light and shade, the sunny side of a hill versus the side that is in shade. And it's only gradually that it comes to be seen as a term that embraces two forces that are constantly interacting in the wider world. of whatever we like to call it nature. And it was a term, however,

that because it embodied the idea of constant interaction, if you think of the symbol of yin and yang, the circle divided between black and white, that also has a little spot of white on the black side and a little spot of black on the white side and a wavy line between them, I think this implies that this is not a static division between two separate things,

but a constantly moving balance of forces. And this idea proved immensely productive, not simply for readers of the Tao Te Ching, but all early Chinese thinkers from at least the third century BC onwards. And indeed Confucians would have been perfectly happy to see the universe in those terms too. As I understand it...

Sorry, do you want to go? Now, as I understand it, Martin, a lot of the teaching comes through fables. Can you give us some example of that, please? Oh, that's the joy of Taoism, frankly. And I mean, Hilda's already mentioned Twang Tsur. Twang Zha has this wonderful story of how he says, you know, last night I dreamt I was a butterfly. I was a wonderful time.

It was flitting here and there, and had no idea I was Twang Sir. And then I woke up. And then he goes, or am I actually a butterfly? who thinks he's Twang Tsar. And you get that wonderful twist, but also, and Hilda has also mentioned

that Twang Sir was not terribly impressed by officialdom. There's a story when one of the local kings sends two emissaries to see him a kind of Rosent of Crans and Guildenstern of the 4th century BC, and they come and they say, you know, the king would like you to come and be the prime minister, and Twang Zer is sitting by the stream

with his feet in the stream, and he says, Tell me, in the great temple of your king, there is hanging on the wall, garlanded, protected, venerated, the shell of a tortoise that's 3,000 years old, that is used for sacrificial and for oracle reasons. And they go, yes, and you can see them kind of thinking, oh dear. And then he says, now, do you think that tortoise wanted to be killed so that its shell could be venerated for 3,000 years, or do you think it would have preferred to just continue swimming? around in the mud. And of course, these poor courtiers have to once and say, well, probably think it just wanted to swim around in the mud. And Chuang-so, and I'm going to use a very polite phrase. It's not polite phrase in the Chinese, says, well, shove off them and let me continue to

swim around in the mud. But then you also have these wonderful stories of the eight immortals, the sort of fairy figures, the fighters for justice. And the best one there is Tikwai Li, who is incredibly handsome and virile, and decides to become an immortal so that, you know, women can see him forever and enjoy him. And he goes off and studies and he gets to a stage where he can astrally travel for seven days. He goes off, he leaves his body with the disciple.

His disciple gets caught to see his dying mother, so he burns his body. Tiqui Lee whizzes back, can't find his body, has half an hour to find a body before his spirit disappears, leaps into the first body he finds, and he spends the rest of eternity in the body of an aged, crippled,

hunchbacked, hideously deformed beggar. It's that sort of gameplay that Daoism so enjoys. Hilda, the D, I'm told, in the Da De Jing means power. So given that we're talking about effortless action and so on, how what part did power play in Taoism? She mentioned that power is one of several translations. We have difficulty rendering this concept in English because it is so many different things at the same time.

Yet it was a core part of Daozen from the very beginning. The Da Da Diu Jing originally was separated into two books. At least one of the early manuscript has it as the Da Qing, the book about the Da Qing, the book about power, potency, virtue, or a variety of ways in which it has been rendered. So some flat clarification is perhaps in order. If we see the Dao as sort of universal pattern of change, of development, that applies to just about anything we can think of,

we can see the do as our individual instantiation of the da. That is to say that the do is our individual link with the way. So everything develops. There's a cycle through the seasons. There's a cycle in our own lives. But every individual does not go through these cycles with the same vigor. And perhaps, and maybe some disagreement about this,

but I would venture to say that what we see here is perhaps a slight move from a philosophical description to a normative ethics, that as individuals, we also have to strengthen that link with the way. So we have to cultivate the way in which the DAO is within ourselves. But power in our English translation also connotes political power. And this raises an important question. And I think one that is at the core of the dodgeting as well, and perhaps shows a different dimension to this text. But perhaps one of the reasons that is a reason since why it has been part of the Chinese tradition. Did the Taoists have anything to offer in terms of a solution to practical political problems?

And the answer would be, yes, it does quite clearly. Many of the fragments are specifically addressed to rulers of state. Can you, Tim Barrett, what part does the spirit will play in their power politics of Taoism to take on Helders' point and to bring up something that Martin mentioned earlier, the spirits? Can you give us a... Yes, obviously. because the spirit world was eventually seen as an invisible empire, it was very important for the ruler to show that they had that empire

brought into harmony with their own temporal power. That's when Taoist priests became important to rulers. To my mind, the really significant development there, was one that seems purely accidental from some points of view that in the 7th century a family came to rule China whose surname was Lee. It's a very common Chinese surname. Most people would know a Mr. Lee if they have Chinese friends.

It just so happens that Lao Tzu's surname also is said to have been Li. So this dynasty therefore, given that he was a a superhuman sage figure in later thinking, they naturally claimed dissent from him. Therefore, they could reinforce their temporal power with the assertion that they also had good connections with the unseen world. Since this dynasty lasted about 300 years,

this leaves a pattern of connections between the Taoist priesthood and the imperial power, whatever that was in China. In that everybody saw it as important

before this event but especially afterwards to try to claim that the ruling dynasty was as it were the one that the spirit world would have wanted to have seen

on the throat. Martin, can you give us a curve now because unfortunately we're coming towards the end of the programme? I just like the listener to have some idea, we've talked about its origins, you've talked about what it stood for, how it set out and so on. Gangis Khan comes into play and then we have to... But can you give us some idea

over the parabola from then, from what we call the Middle Ages, to now, where it was, how it disappeared, how it came back. It's a big, it's a tall order, but there you go. Yes, I mean, by the time you get to the time that Tim is talking about, the 7th century in the Tang Dynasty, Taoism is pretty much spread across most of what was then China and spreads out beyond that into the areas that are newly conquered. And it has established a parish-based system with local temples and big temples and sacred mountains and pilgrimage and rituals and so on and so forth.

It still is considered a bit suspicious by the imperial powers. And certainly is it... Because they prefer to confusion. Because they prefer Confucianism and also because it had this ecstatic dimension, which meant that people didn't necessarily do what they were told and didn't do it in the right order. And also, as Tim's very clearly pointed out,

they were dealing with the spirit world. So, for example, so I'll take you through because essentially Taoism, to some degree, kind of goes to sleep for quite a long period. There are no major new movements. You get poets who use it. You get scholars who use it. but it doesn't produce any major thinkers,

and major activists and new schools, really, after about the 12th, 13th century. And it becomes very much the folk religion. It's not the powerful religion of Buddhism. It's not the powerful structure of Confucianism. So by the time you get to the revolution in 1911, when the last empire falls and the Republic comes, the Republic basically takes over probably something in the region

of about 50 to 60 percent of Daris temples, throws out the pre-Embergues. and turns them into schools or turns them into colleges or turns them into useful places. And then, of course, communism comes and Taoism in particular is seen as just superstition. They really hammer it. And by the time you get to the cultural revolution and the aftermath of that, our estimates would be that there were probably no more than about four or five hundred Taoist priests left functioning. And yet it's changed radically, hasn't it, in fact, for today?

Yes, I think it's always possible to understand. underestimate Taoism because it tends to take a low profile. 26,000 as I understand it. 26,000 temples now. Yes. So is this a comeback? It is a comeback. It's more than a comeback.

Although the great communicators have always been Buddhists in China, they have learned from the Buddhists certainly how to organize a religious tradition in the modern world. to the extent that what amazes me, I mean, Martin will probably be able to tell you how they are operating in China now. But to me, what is extraordinary is that Taoist texts that were hidden away in the canon in times past are now freely available on the internet. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Hilda DeViet, Martin Palmer, and Tim Barrett. Next week will be the first of two programs on the Industrial Revolution in this country, 1750 to 1850, the most influential revolution. of all, thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast,

why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.co.ukh, forward slash radio four.