ABSTRACT
As far as Daoism itself is concerned, the term ‘mystical’ has become its inseparable partner, the phrase ‘Daoist mysticism’ representing almost as familiar a twosome as ‘the mystical Orient’. This coupling has a long intellectual ancestry, one that can be traced back to the Jesuits’ attempt to marginalise and denigrate Daoism: for them, Confucianism, suitably reconstructed, represented an enlightened philosophy that could be manoeuvred into a productive relationship with Christian theology, Daoism, though not at that stage meriting the title
‘mystical’, represented for the Jesuits a form of cultural experience which was irredeemably alien to their own way of thinking. Hegel did not explicitly characterise Daoism as ‘mystical’ either, but his insistence on its pre-rational inwardness and lack of universality helped to underwrite the mystical-rational/ East-West binarisms that came into favour in the nineteenth century. And when in 1906 the sinologist Lionel Giles spoke of ‘the rather fantastic vagaries of [Daoist] mysticism’, he was doing little more than confirming what was already a wellestablished habit of mind (1906a: 36). Twentieth-century writings have often continued to subscribe to this way of classifying Daoism. Perhaps the most influential was Max Weber, who characterised Daoist teaching as ‘world-denying mysticism’ (1951: 178-90). Herrlee Creel, whose publications have had an impact well beyond scholarly confines, calls on the authority of Henri Maspero to assure us that ‘Taoism is...a mystical philosophy’, and more recently Benjamin Schwartz has insisted (though with reservations) that Daoism ‘is as mystical as any orientation to which that term has been applied in any other culture’ (Creel 1954: 101; Schwartz 1985: 193; see also Robinet 1997: 33). Moreover, in China itself attitudes towards Daoism’s supposed mystical bent were almost as equivocal as they have often been in the West, and stretch back into ancient history. Mysticism in China probably had its roots in shamanic practices, and the trance-like states that were ritually induced were commonly frowned upon and given a wide berth by the educated élite. As far as so-called philosophical Daoism was concerned, its classic writings were in effect viewed from the third century CE onwards as key works in a mystical tradition and were often dismissed as obscure and incomprehensible; for example, the ‘dark profundity’ of the Daodejing, characterised as such in the writings of the second-first century BCE historian Simaqian, was often contrasted with the clarity and practical good sense of the Confucians. As Stephen Karcher notes, the Yijing itself was suitably cleansed of Daoist mystical intimations in the Han period in order to render it compatible with the new Confucian-based political order (1999: 8).
