ABSTRACT
The long slow decline of Daoism in China is synchronous with its long slow rise in Western consciousness. When Europeans first acquired detailed knowledge of the Chinese civilisation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, it was Confucianism rather than Daoism that attracted their notice and which they came to identify as that nation’s heart and soul. Daoism was accordingly largely ignored or, at best, refracted through the reducing lenses of the Confucian literati, the official custodians of the Chinese cultural legacy. As the historian Lionel Jensen observes, for the Jesuit missionaries and their European readers ‘Confucius was, in effect, China’, and not only did this lead to an optical occlusion of Daoism in Western eyes, but more broadly has long prevented commentators on China from fully appreciating the rich and dialectical diversity of Chinese intellectual and religious culture (1997: 123, 267).1 Indeed this Confucian-saturated construction has been perpetuated by the Chinese themselves, and even up to recent times Chinese intellectuals have tended to portray Daoism as an embarrassing throwback to a superstitious and reactionary past. As late as 1961 C.K. Yang wrote that to include Daoism in an account of Chinese religious history was a ‘humiliation’, for ‘its activities have not benefited the nation at all [but] have repeatedly misled the people by their pagan magic’ (1961: 5; see also Zhang 1998: ch. 6). The modern fate of Daoism is undergoing some interesting transformations within the Chinese world itself, and reports of its demise, circulated equally in China and in the West, can now be seen to have been exaggerated. But our main task here is with its fate in the West, and the aim of this chapter will be to recount in outline the ways in which, from the Enlightenment period onwards, Daoism has been digested and redigested within the insatiable maw of modern
Western thought. What will become apparent is the sheer complexity of this hermeneutical phenomenon, parallel in this respect too to its career in its ancestral land, a cultural odyssey which is still unfolding beneath our inquisitive gaze.
