A Global Dao: Diagnoses and Prescriptions for Artificial Reductive Binaries in The West and The East

by Aaron Amon Greene

Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, University of Washington, 2017 Associate of Arts, South Puget Sound Community College, 2015; Associate of Applied Sciences (Business Administration), S.P.S.C.C., 2015

Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Humanities

in the Simon Fraser University /Department of Humanities Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

© [Aaron Amon Greene] 2020 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY [2020] Approval

Name: Aaron Amon Greene Degree: Master of Arts Title: A Global Dao: Diagnoses and Prescriptions for Artificial Reductive Binaries in The West and The East Examining Committee: Chair: David Mirhady Professor

Paul Crowe Senior Supervisor Associate Professor

Luke Clossey Supervisor Associate Professor

Stephen Duguid Internal Examiner Professor Emeritus

Date Defended/Approved: August 21, 2020

ii Abstract

The arbiters of the subject of Daoism have assumed authority to determine what does or does not merit inclusion through a few select means; either through a circumscribed scholastic lens or via cultural/religious authority typically predicated on established traditions. This thesis attempts to explain the ways in which both approaches tend to minimize relevant or qualifying contributions to a subject of Religious Studies such as Daoism. Deconstructing these reductive approaches requires first exploring them on their own terms, establishing how they narrow the aperture of consideration, and demonstrating their highly limited applicability in forming a more comprehensive understanding. Both the presuppositional tendencies of essentialism in Western academia and traditionalism in Eastern mores serve to create false binaries that can exclude many potential contributors to ongoing discourses. A tool borrowed from business models (the value-added proposition) is offered as a “perceived-value-added” model. It is intended to reopen that aperture, allowing for the inclusion of many otherwise disregarded contributors to ever-expanding world religions. This model allows for the intrinsic as well as extrinsic evaluations of a thought-tradition like Daoism (it only needs to establish the position of the perceiver). The precedence for importing models from outside the field of Religious Studies is well established; offering another is not intended as an entire usurpation of existent ones. The model can be applied alongside other Religious Studies approaches, but its applicability to a thought-tradition like Daoism, which has so permeated the substratum of Eastern cultures, shall become more evident throughout. What was treated once as the disingenuous “Dao of Western imagination” can, with this prescription, now be evaluated on an equal footing with the traditions from which it arose.

Keywords (4-6): Daoism, Religious Studies, Essentialism, Traditionalism, Philosophy

iii Dedication

Dedicated to you the reader. By your engagement with this writing, its existence continues. I deeply appreciate your setting foot on this particular path.

iv Acknowledgements

A single page to express my gratitude is woefully insufficient. To acknowledge everyone who has been instrumental in the processes culminating in this thesis is a task of a lifetime. I must thank my editors Austin D Colburn of the University of Puget Sound and Lucas Waggnor of University of Washington for cleaning up after me. But if I must to single out one person, it would need to be my daughter, Natalia. The continuing lessons of parenthood: patience, persistence, and perseverance were all necessary to shape me into a person capable of seeing this process through. Her profound influence in my life has done more to mold me than any lessons lifted from a page. Dr. Fareed Zakaria once said, “You will never know how much your parents love you, until you have children of your own.” To this I would add, you can never know how much you changed your predecessors, until your progeny has worked the same magic of change upon you.

Thank you for forever changing me Tal-tal.

v Table of Contents

Approval ...... ii Abstract ...... iii Dedication ...... iv Acknowledgements ...... v Table of Contents ...... vi List of Figures ...... viii List of Acronyms ...... ix Preface/Executive Summary/Image ...... x

Chapter 1. Introduction ...... 1 1.1.1. Not Rotting in the State of Denmark ...... 1 1.1.2. Terms and Scope ...... 2

Chapter 2. A Passion for Reduction ...... 7 2.1.1. A Narrow Pass ...... 7 2.1.2. Biological Basis of Binary Reduction ...... 8 2.1.3. The Scientific-Philosophy of Reducibility for Unification ...... 9 2.1.4. Eastern and Western Reductive Dehumanizing ...... 11 2.1.5. Daoists’ Modern Pressures ...... 15 2.1.6. Frameworks for Religious Studies ...... 19

Chapter 3. The Western thought-tradition ...... 22 3.1.1. Thinking in the West ...... 22 3.1.2. Pre-Socratic Greece ...... 23 3.1.3. The Fathers of Western Thought ...... 25 3.1.4. Rome Franchising the Essentials ...... 27 3.1.5. Christendom ...... 30 3.1.6. Dawning of Enlightenment ...... 32 3.1.7. The Existential Way ...... 34

Chapter 4. The Eastern thought-tradition ...... 39 4.1.1. Deep Roots ...... 39 4.1.2. Kingdoms become Dynasties and One Hundred Schools Bloom ...... 41 4.1.3. Establishing Traditions ...... 44 4.1.4. A Way Things Never Were ...... 47 4.1.5. The Return of the Jinshi ...... 50 4.1.6. Invading Pathogens ...... 53 4.1.7. Gold-medal Traditions ...... 56

Chapter 5. The hermeneutic of the perceived-value-added (PVA) model ...... 58 5.1.1. The Way Cannot be Told ...... 58 5.1.2. Practical Considerations ...... 60

vi 5.1.3. Polishing the PVA Lens ...... 61 5.1.4. The Business and Logic of Values ...... 62 5.1.5. Focusing Through the PVA ...... 67 5.1.6. Ideas on the Move ...... 69

Chapter 6. Conclusion ...... 73

References ...... 76

vii List of Figures

Figure 1 Raphael Sanzio's Schools of Athens commissioned by Pope Julius II ...... 31 Figure 2 Le Petit Journal January 16th 1898 “En Chine Le gâteau des Rois et... des Empereurs” English: “China -- the cake of kings and... of emperors” ..... 52

viii List of Acronyms

CCP Chinese Communist Party CDA Chinese Daoist Association GMD Guomindang GUT Grand Unification Theory ISIS Islamic State of Iraq and Syria PEM Principle of the Excluded Middle PNC Principle of Non-Contradiction PRC People's Republic of China PVA Perceived Value Added RAB Religious Affairs Bureau SARA State Administration for Religious Affairs SDA Shanghai Daoist Association

ix Preface/Execu

tive Summary/Image

x Chapter 1.

Introduction

In his 2013 textbook, Louis Komjathy concludes his texts with the statement, “the story of “global Daoism,” at once rooted in and transcending the Chinese source- tradition, is just beginning to be composed” (Komjathy 315). It is vital that those composing global Daoism’s story treat Daoists as fair-mindedly as possible. Simplistic as that sounds, the reductive powers of essentialism and traditionalism can make this more easily said than done.

1.1.1. Not Rotting in the State of Denmark

In 2012, Denmark had the ignoble honor of becoming the 2nd most common exodus site in Europe for Muslim youth leaving for Syria to join the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). A particular small town called Aarhus on Denmark’s East Coast was home to an unusually large concentration of these vanishing youth. Two local policemen, Thorleif Link and Allan Aarslev, were tasked with investigating these disappearances. It would take time before the youths were linked to a particular mosque and a host of panicking families. These absconding, disaffected youth were critical of their elders’ lack of “traditional” Muslim values and the exclusion they experienced from the broader Danish culture for being so “essentially” different. As the “crime prevention unit” for Aarhus, Link and Aarslev decided not to follow the rest of Europe’s example and further ostracize these young men when they returned home. [W]hat sets the Aarhus program apart [was that i]t didn't use force to stop people from going to Syria but instead fought the roots of radicalization, Kruglanski says. “There are strong correlations between humiliation and the search for an extremist ideology,” he says. Organizations like ISIS take advantage of people who, because of racism or religious or political discrimination, have been pushed to the margins of society (Rosin).

The success of their program could be measured by the hundreds of young Muslims they engaged who did not leave for Syria, or (instead of the negative proof) it could be measured by how in 2015 (at the height of ISIS’s expansion) only one young man left to join ISIS. And the heartbreak in that single loss is evident in Link’s voice. “Muhammad… we worked with him for so long…” (Rosin). “Working with him” included attending his wedding the year prior. These policemen did not discriminate by reducing these men to “Muslim-extremists” or decide they were not fit for Danish society because they did not have “traditional” Danish values or culture. Instead, they asked, “what are these men missing” and “what are they seeking out?” By switching their perspectives and seeing where they saw a value being added to their lives in this move, Link and Aarslev were able to offer a similar (and ultimately greater) value to these men’s lives: the value of belonging.

1 Essentializing religions can lead to objectifying the religious practitioner. This, in turn, can foster gross oversimplifications. It can also drive people further into their respective tribes. This tribalizing is often treated as a “returning to roots,” and has long proven itself to be the claxon call for those who would, “stand athwart history, yelling Stop!” Traditionalism readily fosters intolerance of any social, cultural, or political change that by definition threatens to upset the tribe’s status quo. A complementary reaction for traditionalists, confronted with innovation or progress, is to reach further back in history, to cite deeper, more remote precedence as their justification for thwarting the course of change. For traditionalists, the mutations that come with drift and the progenitors’ dissatisfaction with the answer, “because it has always been so” leads to dismissal of those who are “unfaithful followers” of their shared traditions. There is nothing inherently wrong or corrupt in traditions per se. Traditions exist in paradoxical tension with the ever-continuous living, evolving, and changing nature of human reiteration. I am a fan of Christmas here in North America and its many traditional holiday trappings. But no one wants each Christmas of each year to be an exact replication of the ones that proceeded it (i.e. the same gifts, the same meals, the same guests, the same decorations). In fact, it is novelty, variety, and alteration of details that continue to make the holiday a delight. Traditionalism, in its extreme, seeks to curtail novelty for the sake of unerring replication; to produce some pristine fossilized artifact of what is being replicated, ever-existing and immune to time. Staunch traditionalism is not a “must” feature of the human experience any more than essentialism is a “necessity” in the pursuit of understanding. Each of these presuppositional modes can serve a limited purpose in better comprehending and navigating the world we occupy, but neither provides complete or comprehensive answers, and both can easily foster rudimentary binary reductions. Reduction is not always equal to over-simplification, but over-simplifications are always a product of reductionism. Reducing a phenomenon creates a narrow analysis that elides complex and nuanced ideas, rendering them as tropes, memes, or soundbites. This has serious ramifications, but at the heart of this type of narrow analysis is the danger of narrow conclusions. The proposition “if not A then B” has a driving quality that encourages one to become more absolutist in one’s convictions. Once convinced that phenomena X is in fact not A, it can only be and by necessity must be B. This type of binary reduction is played out in many different fashions and they will be explored in- depth in the following chapters. But the two that will be looked at most deeply are the foundational presuppositional architecture of the Western and Eastern thought-traditions, namely essentialism and traditionalism respectively.

1.1.2. Terms and Scope

Somewhat ironically, one of Western scholarship’s essential requirements is that terms be clearly laid out and defined. In the study of religions this can prove especially challenging; fortunately, Robert Baird has provided a useful approach by looking at what definitions do for us. Essential-intuitive definitions are actually a refusal to put a definition forward, taking instead the “I-know-it-when-I see-it” approach. Lexical definitions describe how words have been used historically; this is what dictionaries provide. Functional/stipulative definitions allow the authority to provide his or her own

2 definition for a finite context. Real definitions attempt to capture the essence of a reality, and are deployed mostly for polemical purposes (e.g., what does it mean to be a “real American?”) (Jones Lect. 1). In his own words, Baird goes on to say, “I am assuming that although definitions may not exhaust reality, terms must nevertheless be defined to indicate to the reader what is intended by their use” (Baird 27). It will be left to others to decide under which category of definitions each of the offered defined terms herein might qualify. Language alters with use and it is therefore important to establish the intended meaning of a few terms here. However, these are not offered to give the false impression that they constitute a final word or “real” definition. For example, it is useful to clearly delineate what is being talked about when most people refer to “the West” or “the East” and how that colloquial understanding coincides and more importantly differs from how it is being used in this text. “The West” is commonly understood as those countries, nations, and cultures owing their modern development to Western European post-Reformation philosophical foundations. It is a catchall term that typically includes those same nations of Western Europe, North American countries, and Oceania. However, it often excludes or neglects South American, Central American, and Eastern European countries despite the fact that cultures/people/societies in these regions have been heavily shaped in response to those Western European cultures, especially in the colonial age. Therefore, when I speak about “the West” I will be referring to the cultures and societies that arose out of the Greco- Roman empires, where the dominant global powers during colonialism and today are, in Russell Kirkland’s words, “the living heirs of the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Romantic era of glorified individualism (Kirkland 6). This will include the Americas, Europe, Russia, Australia, and New Zealand as well as the diaspora of highly Western acculturated regions and occasionally institutions that exist outside the boundaries of these regions (e.g. South Africa, Singapore, or the World Trade Organization). When speaking of “the East,” many in today’s world are referring to areas further East than the Middle East. Vague as this is, it reflects the modern conceptualization of the world. Most might delineate this area as beginning with India preferring to think of Pakistan as included in the Middle East owing to its predominantly Muslim population. “The East” is characterized by those civilizations, cultures, and people who were shaped largely and predominantly by the influences of the Vedic traditions, Buddhism and/or Confucianism. In truth, this region also had long and ongoing intercourse with the nations of the West via the trade routes collectively known as The Silk Roads and the religions of Islam, Manichaeism, and even Nestorian Christianity, all of which were influential in these regions. For my purposes, when talking about “the East,” I will be referring to the cultures, societies and Asian civilizations that took China and India (and to a lesser degree Japan) as the heart of their cultural and civil exemplars. Today these would constitute those who find such intellectual traditions as Confucianism, Hinduism and especially Daoism at much of the heart of their lived experiences. A further complication that will need to be considered is that these “…isms” are often the subject of dispute in the West concerning whether each constitutes a philosophy or a religion. This debate is an endemic consequence of the binary reductionism spoken about previously. Here “religion” is used in its more common parsing but will occasionally be replaced with the term “thought-tradition.” Religions are thought-

3 traditions, as are philosophical schools, political ideologies, and many other conceptual adaptations. To use the term “religion” is often to use heavily-laden language. “Some believers insist that what they believe about the supernatural is religion because it is true and that all competing faiths are pseudo-religions or magic or superstition. Some neatly reverse that approach: what they believe is just the truth and what everyone else has is ‘mere’ religion” (Bruce 108). Despite emic partisanship, the term “religion” stands as a very particular place holder in the minds of most people as being of a certain class of thought-traditions focused on enriching lives above strictly corporeal concerns and the thought-tradition turned to at the most crucial and consequential times in their lives. “World-religion” versus “ethnocentric religion,” is placed in a dichotomy here as this is the current tension being exerted on Daoists. A “World-religion” is one that is recognized as independent from another religion and being attainable by individuals beyond relatively narrow and limited geography and/or strict hereditary lineage (e.g. Buddhism as opposed to Shinto). In the case of Daoists/Daoism, the focus of this thesis, here denotes the “thought- traditions” and communities of adherents that take harmony with the Dao as their primary focus, the practices, and perspectives that accord with this focus, and the corpus of materials generated to serve these ends. Although both Daoism and Confucianism share a primary concern with the Dao, their respective prescribed methodologies for achieving their goals often operate at cross purposes. In discussing Daoism’s transition to a World-religion, inevitably the issue of cultural appropriation is bound to rise. However, Xiao-yan Bu, in his thesis, “An Intercultural Interpretation of Kung Fu Panda—From the Perspective of Transculturation,” makes a compelling case for a transcultural understanding of emerging thought-traditions. “Transculturation” is a term coined by Fernando Ortiz in his study of Cuba and Cuban ethno-identity in the 1940s. It stands in contrast to such ideas as cultural-appropriation, intellectual colonialism, or spiritual colonialism. “In this (his writing on Tabacco [sic] and Sugar) Dr. Ortiz introduces the neologism “transculturation” in place of acculturation, to explain the transmutations of culture that occur when different races come into contact with one another” (Hill 230). This is a fundamental distinction between the valid and invalid adoption of culture, thought, and identity. Transculturation differs from these unidirectional concepts of cultural domineering in that it is a bilateral and continuous dialogue that exists between distinct groups that culturally cross-pollinate and produce hybridity. As thought-traditions globalize, hybridity is inevitable. Globalized and globalizing are limited neither to specific geographies nor to national boundaries. Within a highly interconnected society, pockets of isolation persist. Therefore, when speaking of “globalized” or “globalizing” areas, I will be referring to those regions that are either already within the fold of the interconnected world or are beginning to gain access to global telecommunications technology. Beyond telecommunications, globalized regions feel an ever-increasing interconnectedness to other facets of the global society, including but not limited to: international tourism, economic production chain interdependency, and international scrutiny into their regional issues and/or conflicts. In addition to the terms outlined above (e.g. East/West, religion, globalizing etc…), there are likely to be other contested and contentiously viewed terms offered throughout this text. Here the attempt to head off some of the most obviously

4 controversial ones is what is being proffered. Because of the globalizing character of today’s academy, it is possible that a text such as this may be simultaneously read in the Philippines at the same time as being downloaded and consumed in Ireland or anywhere else in the world. The increasingly global and instantly accessible flow of ideas is of greater significance today than ever before. Daoism is an increasingly global phenomenon and as such the thought-traditions of Daoism are evolving in new environments. Because the globalized and globalizing world encompasses such vast expanses and areas, this thesis cannot offer a comprehensive analysis of Daoism writ- large. Even limiting the subject to modern Daoists in globalized/globalizing areas includes far too large a frame of reference for exhaustive examination. Instead, by selecting several exemplars from across many regions (including the Americas, Europe, Australia and of course within Asia) a picture will be developed of how many Daoists around the globe interpret, undertake, and understand (and are understood by others in) their practices, beliefs, and paths. It has been over eighteen centuries since anything remotely resembling ISIS erupted among Daoist practitioners (i.e. the Yellow Turban Rebellion 184-205) and Daoists are currently not under the same global scrutiny as Muslims. Yet the same inclusive/exclusive binary ideas and predilections that recently sparked “Muslim- extremist” ideologies are frighteningly similar to the scholastic and nationalist criteria being brought to bear on Daoism today. Insistence on a Daoism that is “more Chinese” is intellectually appealing to scholars who would reduce what is a World-religion down to an ethnocentric one or enfold Daoism along with other religious practices into just another facet of some other discipline. So long as that Daoism tows the party line, a Daoism that is “Chinese” also appeals to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) nationalistic agenda. Commitment to a cause rooted in nationalism is among the most seductive justifications for just about any action and in Daoists’ case, this includes prescribing how Daoism will be practiced and understood in China. Having only been allowed to exist legally in China for less than fifty years, Daoism’s position among contemporary Chinese is still quite precarious. All of this is not to say that “Daoist-extremists” are imminent, nor is it to reduce a global problem as complex as terrorism down to a couple of simple intellectual root causes. But the same intellectual forces currently ruminating on Daoism are identical in their presuppositional character to the ones applied centuries ago on Islam, on the Protestant sects that spawned the European Wars of Religion following from the Protestant Reformation, and any number of religious thought-traditions (many of which spawned long and bloody terrorist-like responses to attempts at exclusion). A way free from these reductive conceptual traps is forthcoming in chapter five where the perceived-value-added (PVA) hermeneutic model is offered. I believe a tool like the PVA is deeply desired and invaluable to a more complete and inclusive approach to the field of Religious Studies in general and Daoism in particular. The PVA is an adaptation of a similar model developed in the field of Business Studies and derived from Michael Porter’s long-established Competitive Advantage theory. Although Business may seem an unlikely candidate to have anything to offer the field of Religious Studies, it is precisely because it operates at a global scope and because of its inherent ideological agnosticism that it may provide a conceptual framework to “capture more market” (i.e. expand the inclusive criteria) for studying a religious thought-tradition. The underpinning

5 logic of this model will also be explained by relying heavily upon multi-valued logical models including plurivalent logic, and especially Nagarjuna’s catuskoti (tetralemma). The precedence for importing models from outside the field of Religious Studies is well established but this model is designed with the explicit intent to avoid the possibility of reduction. Indeed, it can be an adjunct to existent models and is offered not as an intended usurpation. The PVA could be applied to the study of any religion, but its applicability to a thought-tradition like Daoism, that has so permeated the substratum of Eastern cultures is particularly apt. Like the caravans of the ancient Silk Roads, the journey between the Western and Eastern thought-traditions is long, occasionally circuitous and littered with curiosities, cantraps, and oases along the route. It will begin in chapter two with an examination of how “true/false” binary reduction becomes so familiar to us all (in the West and the East), and the potentially injurious consequences of over-applying this rudimentary logic to complex phenomena. From there, in chapter three we look back to ancient Greece from which the thread of essentialism is traced through history up to the contemporary era. The same process of teasing out the thread of traditionalism in the Eastern thought-tradition is repeated in chapter four. Finally, chapter five lays out the development and application of the PVA and offers examples of how it can be grafted onto existing models of Religious Studies methodologies. The entire journey concludes in chapter six, which reflects back on the major themes examined in this work. At a minimum, I hope that the reader will take away from this work a deeper understanding of their own culturally inherited presuppositional architecture and develop a better understanding of why and how their own reflex assumptions might creep up. At best, the reader will be able to take the hermeneutic tools offered here and apply them to their examinations or reexaminations of the wonderfully complex array of human endeavors. Whether a student of the Humanities, a practitioner or participant in a particular religious thought-tradition or an agnostic curious thinker, it is my hope that everyone who engages with this text will be capable of extracting something that they perceive as adding value into their lives.

6 Chapter 2.

A Passion for Reduction

2.1.1. A Narrow Pass

Of all the cognitive forces that reduce and narrow conceptual thinking perhaps no two hold greater sway than essentialism and traditionalism. Both reduce religions to essentialia, basic components, and/or validating their authenticity entirely on a basis of how well-established particular sub-traditions of the religion are. These cognitive traps eliminate many potential avenues of inquiry surrounding any given religion. In many circles these behaviors have led to inevitable calls for clarification and reifying exactly what is being discussed (i.e. what counts) as a given religion. For example, Russell T. McCutcheon critiques the normative definition offered by Roger Schmidt, “his undefended theoretical assumption of the utter uniqueness of all religious experience, then, is entrenched in, and elaborated by, his method” (McCutcheon 11). McCutcheon’s criticism then is based on the idea that religion cannot be reduced to a devotee's self- understanding. He goes on to point out that many who presume the authority to define religion are actually engaging in an exercise of self-legitimation. Whether or not this is always the case, it is especially obvious within institutions with recognized authority. When protestant church leaders refer to the Mormon Church as “a cult” or when Catholics refer to the Papacy as the “one true faith” they are not only rhetorically elevating their own tradition at the expense of another, they are simultaneously identifying a standard by which any (and conceivably every) religious tradition ought to be measured. Many of these arguments become less relevant as the realities of people's lived experiences leave them spinning, antiquated tempests in teapots. Fewer Mormons today live under the stigmatizing label of “cult” than a few generations ago, and post- Martin Luther (1483-1546), fewer European Christians must accept the Papacy’s once incontrovertible claim. Ascribing the title “cult” to any emerging “heterodoxic” religion was once treated as a normative and determinable descriptor “… a cult is usually defined as a small informal group lacking a definite authority structure, somewhat spontaneous in its development (although often possessing a somewhat charismatic leader or group of leaders) transitory, somewhat mystical and individualistically oriented and deriving its inspiration and ideology from outside the predominant religious culture,” (Richardson 349). Today though, this specious criterion has been mostly rejected and the term in use, merely as a tool to marginalize one group versus another, is now widely more recognized: “given the obvious negative connotations of the term cult … it seems reasonable to suggest that the term “cult” should be severely limited in scholarly or other writings about religious groups” (Richardson 355). What was an essentialized definitional term, appears predicated on traditionalist values seeking to uphold one particular tradition over less established ones. These impulses arise from authentic

7 passions to reduce and legitimate one religion in relation to another whether they are expressed openly or operate on a subliminal level.

2.1.2. Biological Basis of Binary Reduction

There is nothing inherently wrong with passion nor reduction. Arguably, both binary and reductive thinking are ingrained elements the human brain that serve a pro-survival function: “The binary function is located at the junction of the superior temporal and inferior parietal lobes” (Newberg Lect. 17). This function sets apart perceived opposites which is invaluable in ascertaining simple “yes/no” evaluations. For example, an interrogatory thought such as, “can I drink this liquid,” is most satisfied with a simple affirmation or negation and need not necessarily even rise to a liminal level. The parietal region is connected to self-orientation and the temporal with linguistic and conceptual thought. Quick positive or negative feedback to such daily monotonous inquiries (e.g. is the next step there, or will this table hold this weight?) is vital for navigation through our daily lived existence. Yet the ease with which this type of thinking is deployed becomes a seductive enticement to then apply the same binary analysis to more complex questions or ideas. “The causal, abstract, binary, holistic, and reductionistic functions of the human brain all help us to process the enormous amount of data coming into our brains from the external world. Relying on these functions, the brain is able to construct a reality that works for us as humans” (Newberg Lect. 17) but their ability to render a more complete understanding may be hampered if we find ourselves relying too heavily on one brain function to the exclusion of others. This is especially true when the functions are not of our more “default” settings. Reducing complexities to simplicities is first-order thinking. Evidence of this can be seen in the young child that ceaselessly asks “why” and/or “how” about every phenomenon in their new environment. This quest for answers seems most readily satisfied with credulous simple responses. Of course, those “answers” may spark further inquiries and it seems that the mind processes a proverbial “emergency-brake” to stop us from spiraling into an infinite regression. At some point, the binary-reductionistic functions of the brain are interrupted by the holistic function of the brain. “The holistic function appears to be partly related to right-brain function and may be related to the blocking of sensory information that occurs during practices such as meditation or prayer” (Newberg Lect. 17). This “blocking” function is what also brakes the child’s inquisition from deteriorating into infinite regressions. The holistic function is not as readily active but instead seems to activate under more intentional directed stimulus. In other words, it is not a default setting but an induced one. Thus, it becomes apparent that people will find one mode of thinking more reflexive and easily accessible, while the other may be more elusive or only occurs in fits-and-starts. As with most childhood questions (e.g. “why is the sky blue?”), the answers are far more complex than satisfactory pithy replies (“so we know where to stop mowing the lawn). That being said, it does not negate the occasional (and limited) value in binary and reductive analysis. Take for example a patient who presents at a hospital with signs of embolism. The physician who begins their analysis with a psycho-social well-being evaluation, in order to develop a more holistic approach to treating this patient, will very likely have a dead patient within a matter of hours. Narrowing down the analysis

8 (reducing) and making an immediate positive or negative determination (this is an embolism) allows that physician to commence treatment with a specific immediate goal (saving the patient’s life). However, in the much wider array of signs, symptoms, and conditions that exist in the broader population, this narrow approach is far from adequate to address the vast spectrum of human diseases. Medicine has become more aware of its inadequacies in this regard in recent years and as a result, a large number of clinicians now practice as part of Integrative medical teams. Having been afforded the opportunities to participate in some of these Integrative medical settings, I can attest to the often-found climate of cooperation and self-reflection that are predominant in these environments. It was in such a setting that I was introduced to the maxim, “when your only tool is a hammer, every problem becomes a nail,” as a guiding principle for appreciating the concept of scope-of-practice. In other words, the human phenomenon is complex, and in turning to the sciences those complexities are often reduced to quantitative measurements fit for the scope-of-practice of a given discipline. Recognizing the limits of one’s perspective encourages inter-disciplinary dialogue to more adequately address the complex human under examination.

2.1.3. The Scientific-Philosophy of Reducibility for Unification

Reductionism has often been tantamount to the actual goals of the sciences. Otto Neurath (1882-1945) was among one of the first “evangelists” for reducibility of all the sciences into the terminology of physics. He famously paraphrased James Clerk Maxwell’s (1831-1879) ship analogy as a justification for this pursuit. We possess no fixed point which may be made the fulcrum for moving the earth; and in like manner we have no absolutely firm ground upon which to establish the sciences. Our actual situation is as if we were on board ship on an open sea and were required to change various parts of the ship during the voyage. We cannot find an absolute immutable basis for science (Neurath 4.1).

This idea that science requires a systematic reducing of redundant and non- intersubjective language and theories is not universally held as orthodoxy. However, it is the presuppositional basis for the interests in such scientific pursuits as the Grand Unification Theory (GUT) which seeks to reconcile all scientific theories under a single ubiquitous standard. Unification has become synonymous with Einstein, but the enterprise has been at the heart of modern physics for centuries. Isaac Newton united the heavens and Earth, revealing that the same laws governing the motion of the planets and the Moon described the trajectory of a spinning wheel and a rolling rock. About 200 years later, James Clerk Maxwell took the unification baton for the next leg, showing that electricity and magnetism are two aspects of a single force described by a single mathematical formalism (Greene 21).

Greene is not the evangelical-proselytizer for reductionism that Neurath was or like John Bickle, author of Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Reductive Account, is. The basic idea is simple. Molecules can only administer a limited number of direct effects and can only be affected by a limited number of direct causes. Molecules respond only to other molecules (or the biochemical and biophysical

9 entities and processes that constitute them). Thus to the extent that we have explained some “higher level” phenomenon as a sequence (linear or cyclic) of molecular steps, we know that the only way for another “higher level” process to employ it—to “plug into” it causally—is via molecular (or lower) mechanisms. There is no other way, short of appealing to spooky, mysterious, nonphysical forces (Bickle 232).

Bickle reduces all “spooky, mysterious, nonphysical forces,” particularly consciousness, to merely another epiphenomenon. Greene is not so dismissive of all nonphysical forces, but he clearly states that unification has been the “enterprise at the heart” of the quintessential science (i.e. physics) for centuries. Unification necessitates at least a reduction of terms, if not a wholesale compromising of the target subject concepts (e.g. psychology and behaviours) to the base subject’s terms (e.g. physics and particular motion). Unsurprisingly, few specialists in the sciences are overly enthusiastic at the prospect of having their field subsumed by another “higher” science. If this reductionism is contentious within the sciences, it can only prove to be more so if it is introduced into the humanities. When the reductive scientific agenda is injected into a human phenomenon like religion, the results cannot possibly provide a full accounting of any given religion. Yet the move to understand Religious Studies as a science, in contrast to the theology and scholasticism of old, persists. The next chapter will explore in greater detail how this agenda dominated earlier Religious Studies scholarship. Here it is sufficient to say that in the repositioning of Religious Studies, as science rather than theology, scholars found themselves falling prey to the same reductionist tendencies that were, and occasionally still do dominate other scientific fields. In its fervor to be taken seriously in academia as a science, Religious Studies erected yet another false dichotomy: one was either a scholar of religions (an academic) or a religious scholar (a theologian). Charles Jones points out this oddity in the opening to his lecture series Introduction to the Study of Religion, “You’ll sometimes hear scholars of Religious Studies say, almost as a mantra, ‘I teach about religion; I don’t teach religion’” (Jones Lect. 1). He goes on to point out that the same is never said in virtually any other field of academic inquiry. The distinction being made here is in the attempt of the scholar to set themselves apart from their subject. But why must a scholar be independent of their subject? You would never hear a professor of any other field in the humanities utter the same sort of refrain. “I teach about music; I don’t teach music” is an absurdity. The same would be true for literature, poetry, history, or philosophy. Even in the sciences, this statement is suspect; “I teach about math; I don’t teach math” is a preposterous notion. So why the embarrassment or animus about teaching religions? Likely the self-conscious refrain of “teaching about” instead of “teaching” is due to the long history of “teaching” a religion much for the diminishment and subjugation of others. Missionary proselytizing was one of the key hallmarks of Western colonialism from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth century. In attempting to move Religious Studies away from theology, the polemic elements of those earlier scholastics’ offerings were being sought out for elimination. Couching Christian promotion in the wrappings of scientized intellectual armor had been one of the most pernicious facets of colonialism. Yet by the late nineteenth-century, the chinks in that armor and the overall failures not to mention atrocities of colonialism were starting to be appreciated more

10 broadly. Timothy Fitzgerald is an adamant voice in his indictment of the colonizing aspect of Religious Studies. On the contrary, one central aim of my argument is to show how religious studies, as an agency for reproducing a mystifying ideology, attempts to construct a decontextualized, ahistorical phenomenon and divorce it from questions of power. In the process, I hope to show how the modern concept of religion, as part of western ideology, has been exported to non-western countries in the context of colonialism (Fitzgerald ix).

It is undeniable how affected the Eastern nations (especially China) were by the avarice and greed of colonial powers. But to conflate a field of inquiry with an entire enterprise of imperialism is a bit hyperbolic. While it is true that normative ideas informed much of Religious Studies early inquires, Eastern cultures’ resilience are being underestimated by Fitzgerald. Despite (and indeed due to) gunship diplomacy, subjugation, and a century of humiliation, scholarship on China (and the East in general) has been increasingly sensitized to the traumas that were endured. The Chinese self-examination and the search for self-identity generations underwent in the wake of Western imperialism, consumes today’s self-reflective academics.

2.1.4. Eastern and Western Reductive Dehumanizing

European designs on the East in general and China, in particular, were buoyed by essentializing rationalism that was being inserted into fields like economics, political sciences, and broader imperialism. These machinations were in the guise of “free trade,” and in more genuine cases as abject white supremacy. The West was determined to bleed China dry in retribution for the perceived centuries of China having done so to them. The bleeding of Western treasure Eastward had a long history. China had long been the uncontested leader on the global stage before the Modern age, thanks in no small part to its economic might. Originally the major vein of its commerce had been the Silk Roads; by the early fifteenth century, much of that trade had shifted to maritime routes that enriched the coastal regions of China disproportionately to the inland empire (a pattern that persists to this day). For centuries the West had coveted Eastern goods. In 77 C.E. Rome Pliny the Elder records in his Historia Naturalis book 12 accosting the Senate saying, “[a]nd by the lowest reckoning India, China and the Arabian Peninsula take from our empire 100 million sesterces every year-that is the sum which our luxuries and our women cost us;” (Parker 73). By the eighteenth century, those luxuries included not only silks but porcelain, steel, lacquerware, and above all tea. European demand is only half the story. Without Chinese demand for European silver—and the fluke discovery of the Americas that gave Spain tons of silver to feed their appetite for China’s exports—Europe’s social and economic transformation (and the colonization of the Americas) would not have happened at the same speed, or in the same way (Wilson Lect. 17).

Silver poured into Chinese coffers and out of European ones. In 1793 when Lord George Macartney (1737-1806) landed in the Emperor’s summer retreat in Tianjin as an ambassador for King George III, he arrived under the pretense of a “Tribute-bearer from England” there to honour the Emperor Qianlong on his eightieth birthday. In truth,

11 Macartney was there to reorient the silver flow. However, the encounter went less ideally than expected. “Macartney managed to persist in his refusal to prostrate himself full- length on the ground before the emperor in the ritual kowtow, agreeing instead to bow on one knee to Qianlong as he would to King George” (Spence, The Search for Modern China 122). Despite this uncivilized behaviour, the Emperor received Macartney graciously, and sent him home with an imperial edict for King George stating, Our dynasty’s majestic virtue has penetrated into every country under Heaven, and Kings of nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufacturers (Cheng 105).

In other words, thank you for your interest, but China has no further interest in you. This dismissal would prove a grand strategic mistake. The East/West pathways later known as the “Silk Road” had functioned as migration routes for eons, and from roughly 200 BCE to 300 CE a “cultural exchange took place on an unprecedented scale among all the key players of Eurasia: the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans; Indians, Kushan, and Iranians; and Greeks Romans and Celts” (Benjamin Lect. 14). In other words, China had a long history of engaging with Westerners and in point of fact had many precedents for doing so. The Chinese empire had enjoyed a long history at the very axis of this vast cosmopolitan exchange. For the most part, they had enjoyed a prerogative of selectivity; for most of its history it integrated or expelled “foreigners” more or less at its pleasure. However, this was not without exceptions and China had been ruled by foreign invaders on multiple occasions. Foreign rule was always a sensitive issue for the Chinese as it belied the myth of their monolithic cultural dominance. The Qing were indeed foreigners and, in their drive to be feared and respected by the Han majority, the Qing dynasty had made several miscalculations. When they had come to power, the foreign Manchurian invaders had ordered that all men were to wear their hair in a queue (a long ponytail with the forelocks shaved). This seemingly trivial imposition had actually created a telltale sign of menial obeisance to the Manchu Qing dynasty’s legitimacy to rule. In 1768 it proved to be a spark of strange mass hysteria in the form of “soul-stealers” cutting off queues to steal people’s “cloud-soul” (hun ). This strange event was brief in duration, but it was oddly prophetic and rose through the Qing legal system to the eventual attention of the Emperor himself. “Qianlong was more concerned that queue-less wanderers were clipping queues. Worse yet, some frightened locals were cutting off their own queues to prevent sorcerers from stealing their souls” (Wilson Lect. 19). The number of queue-less people in China was growing. With expanding maritime trade, more and more “Chinese” were refusing to comport to the expected norm of wearing a queue. The Qing primarily attributed this growing disloyalty to the pernicious influence of outsiders but perhaps self-consciously they had begun to question their own behaviours. Qing emperors were Manchus, a semi-nomadic people from northeast Asia who poured into China in 1644. Qing warriors picked up the pieces left by the fall of the Ming dynasty and created a vast multi-ethnic empire that included China, Tibet, Taiwan, Manchuria, Mongolia, and large stretches of Central Asia (Wilson Lect. 20).

12 In the swirl of all these ethnic influences, the Qing had begun to wonder if they were ruling in a Chinese-enough fashion so as to assuage misgivings about their dynastic rule? Ultimately the answer would prove to be no. China’s elite had long understood China as the center of civilization and therefore there were only two other types of people out in the world. Those who were proximally civilized (i.e. those that stood in awe of China and adopted its culture to a greater or lesser degree) and “foreign devils,” barbarians, or those who existed outside China’s civilizing influence. While some “foreign devils” had some culture and value of their own (e.g. India had supplied Buddhism), many were considered too dismissal or peripheral to the “middle-kingdom” to be worth consideration. Merchants figured very low in the Confucian Chinese social order in part because of how much interaction they had with foreigners. The riches of coastal China under the current maritime trade were only another symptom of corrupting influence. And rich they were becoming, “While South China wasn’t a particularly good market for British woolen wares, the British Empire was a huge market for tea. At the time of Macartney’s visit to China, silver bullion accounts for between 80 and 90 percent of the value of foreign cargoes landing at Canton” (Wilson Lect. 20). The Chinese merchants wanted (and needed) nothing from the foreign traders except silver, while the Western traders were desperate to figure out something (anything) that the Chinese would buy from them. They also saw the Qing restrictions on foreign trade as a protectionist action, designed to keep them from profiting on their trades (which they were). Macartney had arrived to “balance the scales” in European estimations. Yet to the Qing, that they would arrive at China’s front door with the audacity to expect concessions from China was beyond unthinkable. It was the height of demonstrating just how backward and “uncivilized” these “foreign devils” really were. Macartney was equally unflattering and underwhelmed by his audience with the emperor. In his own words, The Empire of China, he wrote in his journal, “is an old, crazy, first-rate man-of- war, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers has contrived to keep afloat for these one hundred and fifty years past, and to overawe their neighbors merely by her bulk and appearance.” But with lesser men at the helm, Macartney added, China would slowly drift until “dashed to pieces on the shore.” China's opposition to British goals was ultimately futile, wrote Macartney since it was “in vain to attempt arresting the progress of human knowledge,” as the Qing were doing. “The human mind is of a soaring nature and having once gained the lower steps of the ascent, struggles incessantly against every difficulty to reach the highest (Macartney 340).

Macartney’s assessment was, unfortunately for the Chinese, quite apt. China would endure much pain and degradation at the hands of not only the British but the entire Western world for years to come. Still, China’s view of itself was not all hubris. For centuries one could say that China had been somewhat justified in taking this position to foreign relations. China’s sin was one of reduction, which was to reduce all people to one of two categories, “in-group” or “out-group” and the criteria for being “in” was how closely people and nations hewed to Chinese traditions. This social more cut both ways for the late imperial Chinese. The Qing dynasty’s early success in establishing dynastic rule was directly proportional to their ability to become sinified, that is to be

13 made more Chinese in character or modified by Chinese influence. In the latter part of the Qing, with the West encroaching, sentiment turned sharply against the Qing establishment. Anti-Manchu sentiment grew rampant throughout the nation. Triad organizations arose claiming “oust the Qing and restore the Ming” (Spence 169) as their guiding mandate. Others became more ardent in their resistance and xenophobia toward the Qing. Zou Rong (1885-1905) wrote in his The Revolutionary Army (1903), I do not begrudge repeating over and over again that internally we are the slaves of the Manchus and suffering from their tyranny, externally we are being harassed by the Powers, and we are doubly enslaved. The reason why our sacred Han race, descendants of the Yellow Emperor, should support revolutionary independence, arises precisely from the question of whether our race will go under and be exterminated (Jung 122).

Zou’s argument is against the Manchus and the Westerners, yet he grounds the Han people as descendants of the Yellow Emperor. An interesting rhetorical choice: why not the Song or better yet Emperor Gaozu (r. 202 - 195), one of only two men to rise from peasant to Emperor in China’s history, and a representation of the very fountainhead of Han achievement? His argument is not based entirely on ethnicity (although it certainly harbors xenophobic tones): “I began grinding my teeth and swore that I would take revenge to wipe out this humiliation and restore the freedom of our race” (Jung 18). It is an appeal to cultural heritage; in truth it is an appeal to tradition. Zou lived at a time when the hyper-traditionalism of China was eroding alongside its empire’s sovereignty. Yet despite this erosion, the deeply ingrained Chinese predilection for traditionalism was being appealed to by citing deeper, more remote precedence as a justification for resisting the “outsiders.” Homegrown resentments towards “foreign-devils” were given extra fuel with injections of Western ideas, ideologies, and academics. It was in this setting that Kirkland’s “Confucian/Protestant collaboration[s]” (Kirkland 4) began to thrive. However, instead of complete erasure, this turned out to be a dialectical process. Scholars like James Legge (1815-1897) undertook some of the first English translations of Chinese classics. Simultaneously, many Confucian literati were being introduced to Western textual traditions, including the keenly debated theory of evolution put forward by Charles Darwin (1809-1882). In 1871, he published The Descent of Man a follow up to his revolutionary 1859, On the Origin of Species. Darwin’s evolutionary theories provided particularly powerful insights into the Chinese growing discontent and malaise: “The flip side of evolution’s promise of progress was fear of what would happen if natural laws were distorted: “degeneracy” and social decline” (Liulevicius Lect. 13). This fear of regression seemed to encapsulate the late nineteenth-century trajectory of the Chinese civilization. It also put their grievances with their impotent imperial rulers into stark new terms, those of “social Darwinism.” “Social Darwinism inevitably led the Chinese to ponder problems of race and racial strength, and many Chinese combined the new theories from the West with the writings of seventeenth-century anti-Manchu nationalists like Wang Fuzhi” (Spence 301). The Chinese were not inferior nor unfit for survival, it was the Manchus that represented the “weak link” in the Darwinian framed social struggle. The East/West culture clash amounted to a real-life example of what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object or in Han Feizi’s (c.280-

14 233) words, “what was to become the standard Chinese term for contradiction – mao dun , ‘spear-shield:’ A weapons maker, advertising his wares, boasts of making both a spear that could pierce anything and a shield that nothing could pierce” (Moody 115). Though in this case, it might be better characterized as “when a self-righteous force meets a self-centered object.” China’s self-centered “shield” of tradition was being pierced by the self-righteous “spear” of Western empirical-rationalism. The wounds endured through this process would scar the Chinese psyche for generations. Despite the self-evident answer of the time (i.e. the superiority of the Western powers) China’s contemporary rise of influence in the world coupled with the waning influence of the West may necessitate a reevaluation of the long-term effects of this real-life-experiment in paradox. Although the Qing found their rule mortally wounded in this passion play, Chinese traditionalism did not succumb so easily under the glaring light of Western tutelage. Whether China found self-government in national-republican ideals or Marx’s Communist manifesto the laity of China retained their vigilant faith in traditionalism, even when those traditions were being spun out of whole cloth. Mao Zedong (1893-1976) stepped into the power vacuum left by the end of the Chinese empire, and with a virtuoso’s skill juxtaposed the affinity for traditionalism with the current clamoring for progressive modernism. More will be said concerning Mao and the Communist Party’s rise and wielding of power in the following chapters but for now, the question arises “what were the implications for Daoism?” in this modern period.

2.1.5. Daoists’ Modern Pressures

The Republican period (1911–1949) was marked by the collapse of the imperial social order, the construction of a modern state in a context of civil and international war, ideological polemics, and campaigns for cultural reform, which had differing effects on the various forms of Daoism. The newly introduced concepts of “religion” (zongjiao ) and “superstition” (mixin ) had a profound impact, creating a new standard of orthodoxy for Daoism (Palmer 10). Under the communists, Daoism endured far worse than stigmatized reductions. “The priests and ritual specialists fared little better under the land reform campaigns and later during the collectivization of the late 1950s, in which they were accused of engaging in “feudal superstition” and ordered to engage in “productive” activity” (Palmer 11). Less than a decade later during the “Cultural Revolution (1966–76), in which even the Daoist Association was dissolved and the monasteries closed or converted to secular uses” (Palmer 11) many Daoist were relegated to social pariahs. Daoist ideas had no place in modern thought (i.e. science or Western-style academia) nor any “legitimate” place in Chinese tradition. This was just another opiate of the masses peddling in superstition and preying on people’s ignorance. Not until Mao’s death in 1976 would China make itself once again amenable to the study, teaching, and practice of Daoism. By this point, many of those versed in the Daoist thought-traditions had gone abroad to Taiwan, Hong Kong, South East Asia, Oceana, North America, and Europe. What was resurrected in China (and what emerged to the wider world) had been unquestionably changed from the

15 thought-traditions that ancient China had birthed. For example, some “attempts typically draw heavily on scientism, reformulating Daoist ideas in scientific terms and repackaging self-cultivation regimens into rationalized body cultivation technologies, thereby claiming that Daoism not only has scientific validity but is itself a form of science that goes further in piercing the mysteries of the universe than the mechanistic methods of the West” (Palmer 14). Still, others held out for a traditionalism free of the influence/interference of China’s nationalistic agenda. “Many seniors of long-established local Daoist families have discouraged their grandsons from attending the Daoist College in order to avoid pointless political conflict and to express their resentment toward the leading SDA politicians” (Palmer 62-3). The Shanghai Daoist Association (SDA) represents a local arm of the larger PRC’s State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA), which oversees all sanctioned religious activities within China. What causes conflict with Daoists is their insistence on homogenizing and circumscribing a Daoist priest’s “training” in such a way as to render it acceptable, reproducible, and minimal levels, relative to the traditional master/apprentice-style training Daoists had employed for generations. “These constraints strictly circumscribe or even completely conceal the individuality of each teacher during their engagements with students” (Palmer 65). Instead what is left in this reduced curriculum is, in the words of a seventy-four-year-old priest teaching at the Shanghai Daoist Association’s (SDA) Daoist College, [A] joke! How could an apprentice have his own time? How could they expect to learn Daoist crafts simply by spending only eight hours a day in classroom and then fool around everywhere away from masters’ supervision? Only a master can enjoy a private life. Apprentices, by definition, are not qualified for it! Honestly speaking, even masters don’t have the kind of private life as what they say today (Palmer 66).

So, today’s teachers of Daoist apprentices are so disenchanted with their newly imposed pedagogical structure that they see little or no authentic development in the acolytes who attend their college. Daoist families are actively discouraging their children from participating in a state-sponsored Daoist façade. This cannot be the form of Daoism Kirkland qualifies as the “real” Daoism: Perhaps an American today can indeed become “a Taoist.” But if so, how and where can that really happen? Not, certainly, in an American bookstore, library, or classroom. I would say that if one travelled, for instance, to the Abbey of the White Clouds in Beijing, and underwent the spiritual training necessary to practice Taoism in the living tradition of “Complete Perfection,” then a person of our society might be justified in claiming to “follow the Tao” (Kirkland 14-5).

Let us be clear, the White Clouds Abbey is no more immune to the corruption or interference of the SARA than is the SDA Daoist College. Arguably, being nearer the heart of the PRC’s capital, Daoist institutions in Beijing sects fall prey more readily to the pressures to constitute their practices in ways that serve better as a tool in support of nationalism. What Kirkland is giving voice to here is the Western reductive essentialism. Real Daoists are essentially culturally “Chinese” Daoists. Daoism, like many other thought-traditions, is a creature of the environment in which it is practiced. So, if Daoists’ practice in China has suffered from the compromises among their institutions, then has Daoism been compromised everywhere in the world? It

16 would seem the real question here is, is “compromised” synonymous with “corrupted?” If so, then never was there an “uncorrupted” Daoism anywhere. Instead what can be seen is a continuous evolution of the Daoist thought-tradition. After Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, the Ching Chung Taoist Association based in Hong Kong began to franchise abroad. “In addition to its headquarters in Hong Kong and a branch in Singapore, the Association has established temples in Australia (Brisbane, south Sydney) and in the Chinatowns of San Francisco and Vancouver. In each case the temples have assumed the title of Evergreen Taoist Church” (Crowe 135). Yet they often came to areas like Northern California only to discover existing Daoist temples. The Bok Kai Temple (Beixi miao) in Marysville, California boasts of being the oldest continuously servicing Daoist temple in North America. The original temple was built in 1854 and catered to the migrant Chinese workers. After being destroyed in a fire the current temple was rebuilt in 1880 and continues to host annual events and regular sacrifice and worship services. Yet another, “group that appear to have made the transition out of Hong Kong in a way which has successfully crossed the cultural boundaries is Fung Loy Kok Taoist Temple, also referred to as Fung Loy Kok Institute of Taoism” (Crowe 136). Over the last few decades, this new “Taoist Tai Chi” (Taijiquan ) has proliferated across Canada, the U.S., and Oceania. Daoism being married with self-improvement practices such as Taijiquan is not new. Inner alchemy practices surged in popularity in the early twentieth century. “In the new world of ’survival of the fittest’ among the nations, a healthy and strong body was viewed as the abode of a sound mind” (Palmer 155). This was one avenue for the continuation of Daoist practices and among the early exports of Daoism to foreign audiences. However, under the new pressures of modernity, some Daoists practitioners began to “scientize” their interpretations of these old neigong exercises. A good example is Chen Yingning’s 1947 text “Learning Immortality Will Succeed” (Xuexian bicheng ) in which he “incorporated concepts from the fields of physics and biology of his time in explaining the fundamental ideas, procedures, and methods of traditional Daoist inner alchemy” (David A. Palmer 165). This is representative of an entire evolving strain of Daoist thought which was emerging at the time. This new “scientific” Daoism, “value[d] experiments instead of impractical talks, reality instead of classic works, and research instead of worship” (Deyuan 211). A self-cultivation market propagated Daoist ideas and practices through a few variant transmissions “self- cultivation books, masters, and communities active in late imperial and Republican Beijing” (Palmer 125) but spread from there to the rest of the world. The mobility of ideas, communities, and practices increased in the modern world. What had once been a highly localized phenomenon was now making its way around the globe. By adopting channels of diffusion other than the traditional ones, by opening up to the world at large, through adaptation and reinvention, and through spontaneous diffusion outside China, Daoism lives again. Moreover, whereas one hundred years ago Daoism could hardly be called a world religion, it now can begin to claim this status (Palmer xi). One of the more interesting ways Daoist ideas have spread is through the sub & intertextual relationship it has developed in mass consumer entertainment media. From Bruce Lee to Jacky Chen [sic], Chinese martial arts—kung fu seems to be a great selling point of movies to attract western audience. The kung fu movies, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008), The

17 Forbidden Kingdom (2008), to name but a few, all performed well in box office (WU & Chan, 2007; LIU, 2009). This genre of movies has already been the window of outputting Chinese culture. (Xiao-yan 881).

Within many of these films, Daoist ideas are presented with lesser or greater prominence. Jackie Chan’s antics are reminiscent of the tales of the “drunken immortal” Li Bai (701–762) who was notorious for, “aggressively flaunt[ing] rules and conventions, to the occasional consternation—and frequent delight—of his audience” (Wilson Lect. 8). Although Chan is not a self-identified Daoist, the aesthetic he adopts in many of his films draws from the Daoist tradition and as such acts as a transmission vector for Daoism throughout the world. Likewise, Li Bai never claimed a Daoist identity, but was certainly operating in the tradition of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove who were exemplars of a Neo-Daoist countercultural movement. One of the Sages Liu Ling (221-300) who was notorious for drinking and lounging naked around his home. “When someone visited him and upbraided him for it, he replied: 'The universe is my home, this room my pants and robes. What, sir, are you doing in my pants?'” (Barmé). Although the allusions and similarities might be lost on audiences not familiar with these historical Chinese figures, the spirit and style of Chan (in for example his 1978 classic Drunken Master) still resonates with audiences worldwide. Martial arts and Daoist ideas were at the vanguard of Daoism’s global dissemination. Bruce Lee (1940-1973) remains one of the most recognized figures in the world. His famous refrain from a 1971 Canadian television interview to “be water, my friend” gave many their first glimpse into Daoist thought in action. A more avant-garde figure in the host of Daoist thought propagators is Alan Watts (1915-1973). Often a controversial figure in philosophical circles, Watts nonetheless introduced (and his writings continue to introduce) Daoism to scores of receptive English speakers. In his essay, An Aesthetic Appreciation of Alan Watts author Bryan Garrett- Farb defends Watts’ life as a lived tribute to Eastern ideals. Though often criticized for his “poor” scholarship, Watts asserted that scholarship was never his goal. It is as if Watts knew how to criticise his own methodology long before any commentator attempted to do so” (Coupe 40). Watts sought out those from whom he could learn how to incorporate things of value into his own existence. This included Daoism but also Zen Buddhism and Hinduism. “The mysticism that he espoused did not die when he did, and accordingly still has room to grow” (Garrett-Farb 60). All of the above-mentioned diplomats of Daoism have done a great deal to foster the spreading and flourishing of Daoist thought, yet they fail Kirkland’s “real” Daoism test. As such, they are often overlooked, dismissed, or derided as only so much “fatuous fluff.” Yet despite essentialists’ and traditionalists’ disapprovals, Daoism has traveled throughout the world; in texts, practitioners, aesthetic sensibilities and vicariously in the subtexts of many forms of Daoist-inspired media. An expansion of Daoism should not be so contentious; a central teaching of Daoism is to reframe conflict from a position of passivity and acceptance. Self-described Daoist inspired author Ursula K. Le Guin (1929- 2018) captures this perfectly when she wrote: Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in

18 any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing (LeGuin 123).

Although Daoism has been long steeped in definitional and identity conflicts, perhaps conflict is not the only story Daoism has to offer the world. The history and sociology of modern Daoism thus largely intersect with the story of how an array of containers of the tradition have appeared, evolved, and been categorized in changing sociopolitical contexts, in the form of different types of social groups, configurations of practices, and conceptual and symbolic formulations. (Palmer 19)

Daoism maybe mostly Chinese at its roots, but the flourishing branches are not obliged to remain so. Like most religions, with broader dissemination inevitably comes drift, hybridity, and alteration.

2.1.6. Frameworks for Religious Studies

With this in mind let us return to the idea that within the humanities there exists some pristine crystalized version of the subject under scrutiny. Where does one turn to in order to discover “the study of history” as such, or “the study of religions” as such? The subject “as-such” does not exist but that does not mean it is without existence in the practiced world. The English language too, “as-such” is nowhere to be found. Even the most extensive dictionary only provides a snapshot of a large portion of the English language at a given time. Prescriptive approaches to language always run into friction with the preponderance of English speakers as they apply the language. Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) expanded on this idea in his Course in General Linguistics (1916): “His distinction between langue (a language in itself such as English or French) and parole (individual acts of speaking) opened a new way of understanding the relationship between culture and cultural acts, and gave scope for once again bringing the native voice into a theoretical framework” (Jones Lect. 16). This was of monumental consequence to the field of Symbolic Anthropology but its implications for Religious Studies are equally profound. There is an interesting parallel between language and religion. Both are human endeavors, both can be studied prescriptively or descriptively, and both exist, do not exist (as such), both exist and do not exist, in a certain sense, and neither exist nor do not exist. This is a real-world example of the catuskoti or tetralemma. Yet the insistence of binary reduction to rudimentary logic persists in the discourse surrounding religions in general, and is very much the case with Daoism in particular. Many linguists, by contrast, have come to a much more pragmatic conclusion on their subject of choice. In his book, linguist John McWhorter argues that the job of linguists is to understand how language evolves through use so as to better understand how a word like ‘literally’ can come to be used as an emphasizing contronym to mean ‘figuratively’ in modern parlances. And in his The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language, he cautions against the allure of consigning to the blackboard what is an inadequate representation of a thing (language) that moves, “After all, writing obscures things absolutely central to expression: context and intonation” (McWhorter 109). So, if it is possible to still have rigorous and lucid discourse on languages without a necessary fossilized specimen

19 pinned to a proverbial corkboard, the same could certainly be true for something as similarly fluid as religion. It can feel as if the reduction of religions is inevitable, desirable, and necessary for there to be any format for their discussion. This type of reduction hinges on the distinction between what “is” and what “is not” religion. A true/false binary choice process so familiar to our rudimentary logic that it appears inescapable. However, outside of rudimentary logic exists forms of logic that rupture this binary categorization. There exists a variety of multi-valued logical models including plurivalent logic and the tetralemma mentioned above. These formula choices need not become binary; “all we need to do is make value into a relation instead of a function” (Priest 3). I will have a great deal more to say on this subject later, for now, it is enough to say that the trap of binary logic is neither insurmountable nor absolute. For many in the field of Religious Studies being accused of reductionism is a charge that hangs like an albatross around their necks. This reductionism is only exacerbated when it is validated by the traditionalism inherent within a given thought- tradition. Reductionist interpretations occur when the scholar adopts a particular point of view (e.g. the cultural anthropologist’s) and collapses the subject of religion down to nothing more than another facet of that particular discipline (i.e. religion is simply another cultural phenomenon). Some scholars such as Fitzgerald, argue in favor of this type of collapse, citing how the institutions and participants in Religious Studies are perpetuating a self-sustaining, self-aggrandizing agenda at the expense of authentic scholarship and research. “The problem here, if my analysis is correct, is that the concept of religion already has built into it an ideological semantic load that distorts the field of research in an a priori way” (Fitzgerald 8). Perhaps, but that does not preclude the possibility of off-loading some of these a priori presumptions or better yet, reframing the “semantic load” to understand that it is that very weight that demarcates someone’s conception of their thought-tradition as a “religion” is what is communicating the value they perceive from it. At the opposite end of the spectrum are scholars that adopt an entirely phenomenological approach. This methodology treats reporting participants' subjective experiences as the final word on a subject and seeks meta-structures that bind those experiences. “His [the phenomenologist’s] ultimate aim is an inclusive formulation of the essence of religion. Such a definition is the crowning of the whole work” (Baird 24). While this approach can render a more illuminating account of the participant's experience, it may fail to capture objective data. And as the quote above indicates, it seeks to essentialize religions. Within the field of Religious Studies, a phenomenological approach can easily lend itself to unconstrained relativism. For example, theologian Paul Johannes Tillich (1886-1965) defined religion (or faith) as being “the ultimate concern” in one’s life; in contrast to the mundane and profane concerns of ordinary life. By this open, phenomenological interpretation, in as much as everyone has some “ultimate concern” everyone can thereby be said to be religious; even if their expressed “ultimate concern” is to disabuse others from religious beliefs. Paradoxically religious, irreligious, and antireligious claims are to be treated with the same “ultimate concern” validity, but this dismantles Tillich’s definition. It fails to illuminate with any greater clarity what religion is or is not; nor does it offer a better foundation for the study of religions.

20 As stated before, a way free from this reductionist’s trap is forthcoming and I believe deeply desired and invaluable for a more comprehensive and inclusive approach to the field of Religious Studies. In chapter five that approach will be outlined in the perceived-value-added (PVA) model. However, in Hume-like-terms, before embarking on an “ought” it is incumbent upon me to cast back to what “is” and has been. True to Hume, no attempt will be made to derive an “ought” from history’s “is,” but context and intonation will be offered any “ought” that follows will be justified on its own merits. The Western academic thought-tradition did not emerge out of a vacuum, examining its roots and evolution will help make sense out of the presuppositionless character it has developed. What will be examined in the next chapter are the ancient Greco-Roman roots of essentialism, the later propagation of Protestant bias, and finally how these came together to form the modern penchant for essentializing reductionism.

21 Chapter 3.

The Western thought-tradition

3.1.1. Thinking in the West

This chapter focuses on how essentialist tendencies have become so prevalent in Western thought-traditions (from ancient to modern times) and its intended and unintended consequences. As stated earlier, essentializing is the attempt to determine all necessary and sufficient conditions for a subject to meet a definitional standard (specifically a purported “real” definition). What is essential for a polygon to be a triangle is three sides and three angles. In very real terms, the essential components of a triangle and “a triangle” are identical. However, this abstract idea of a triangle has no actualized equivalent in the real world. No object exists that is so flawless, so completely free of imperfections as to “be” a triangle. Essentials are almost exclusively in the abstract and are therefore most appropriately applied to abstract concepts. Essentialism ought to be a very narrowly applicable tool for examining processes. It attempts to calcify what are in reality fluid and changing phenomena. Assigning “essential” characteristics leads to authenticity based on adherence to some pristine a priori form. Evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins refers to essentialism as “scientifically confused and morally pernicious. It needs to be retired” (Dawkins). He decried it as the most outdated scientific presupposition. He contends that essentialist thinking shoehorns what are in fact processes into fossilized “categories.” This ossification fails to recognize the constant shifts and changes that occur over time. His is a compelling argument, especially coming from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist. Although Dawkin’s argument derides essentialism in the sciences, his points seem all the more applicable to the Humanities, where empirical data is subordinate to other methodological approaches such as critical analysis, conceptual elucidation, or the synoptic method. A process as continuous evolving as a religion ought to be disabused of “the tyranny of the discontinuous mind” (Dawkins). Never was there some pristine form of “Daoism,” only a process of the ever-shifting discourses and practices seeking harmony with the Dao. Holding essentialism culprit for reductive flawed analyses (of thought-traditions in general, and Daoism in particular) necessitates that its development and impacts be thoroughly unpacked. The history of Western philosophy is often divided by the pre-Socratic thinkers versus the post-Socratic ones. Reflections on Socrates' place as foundational to Western thought had occupied thinkers for centuries. More will be said on this later. For now, the focus will be on some of the pre-Socratic thinkers and their respective contributions to establishing the substrate terms and concepts of the Western thought-traditions. Broadly this group of philosophers might be divided into what could be considered inductive rationalists and deductive empiricists. Both were addressing questions regarding the metaphysical makeup of the world around them. Inquiries into the ontological nature of

22 the world and the epistemological means by which to undertake their investigations dominated many of these early discourses. For the rationalists, the human senses were obviously inadequate and fallible. Two observers might well come to widely variant conclusions about any number of possible subjects, therefore a more trustworthy way was needed.

3.1.2. Pre-Socratic Greece

Pythagoras (~570-495) may well have been the first “philosopher” in world history and was the quintessential archetype of a rational empiricist. Pythagoras was a polymath, a metaphysician, a rather unsuccessful politician, and a more successful cult leader. “At Croton Pythagoras founded a society of disciples, which for a time was influential in that city. Yet in the end, the citizens turned against him, and he moved to Metapontion (also in southern Italy), where he died” (Russell Western Philosophy 30). Most readers will be familiar with Pythagoras for his theorem a2 + b2 = c2 but the implications of this dictum and its like extended far beyond the confines of middle school geometry classrooms. For Pythagoras, and the Pythagoreans who followed him, this eloquent expression of an absolutely irrefutable principle was only one among the many principles that pulled back the veil of the ontological certainties. Here was an epistemological method of investigation that was apparently not susceptible to the faults of human subjectivity. No instrument, no matter how well-rendered, no matter how precisely tuned could ever produce an absolutely perfect equilateral triangle. Yet the mathematical principle of what constitutes an equilateral triangle is sound. For Pythagoreans, mathematics was the key to unlocking maxims of reality. “Based on numerical relations, harmony was an unchanging ideal, a pure form in which separate elements fit a pre-set pattern” (Mason 491). To Pythagoras and his followers all that exists, was essentially mathematical. “Mathematics is, I believe, the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as in a super-sensible intelligible world. Geometry deals with exact circles, but no sensible object is exactly circular; however carefully we may use our compasses, there will be some imperfections and irregularities. This suggests the view that all exact reasoning applies to ideal as opposed to sensible objects; it is natural to go further, and to argue that thought is nobler than sense, and the objects of thought more real than those of sense-perception” (Russell Western Philosophy 37). The implications of rational empiricism are not confined to the mathematicians. This idea of a more real-world than the one revealed to our senses is now an endemic aspect of the Western tradition. The so-called atomists were not all in contrast to Pythagoras’ deductive empiricists. Aristotle stood as their crowning exemplar and will be discusses later. Pre- Socratic atomists such as: Anaxagoras (ca. 510-428), Parmenides (ca. 515), Leucippus (ca. 5th century B.C.E.) and Democritus (ca. 460-370) were equally instrumental in developing the subterranean landscape of Western thinking. These men would tirelessly debate over the material nature of existences; the term a-toms comes from” [l]ate 15th century from Old French atome, via Latin from Greek atomos ‘indivisible’, based on a- ‘not’ + temnein ‘to cut’” (Dictionary, Oxford English and Dictionary.com). That atoms constituted the very essential make-up of the constituent world was taken for granted. Leucippus and Democritus posited, “that everything is composed of atoms, which are

23 physically, but not geometrically, indivisible; that between the atoms there is empty space; that atoms are indestructible; that they always have been, and always will be, in motion; that there are an infinite number of atoms, and even of kinds of atoms, the differences being as regards shape and size” (Russell Western Philosophy 65). Parmenides is quoted as saying that the base atomic structure, “was ever, is now, and ever shall be, an ever-living Fire” (Russell Western Philosophy 46). But as Russell points out, “fire is something continually changing, and its permanence is rather that of a process than that of a substance” (Russell Western Philosophy 46). Change vexed the atomists and figures who embraced it in a very Daoist fashion such as Heraclitus, famous for his assertion that “You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you” (Russell Western Philosophy 45) were readily dismissed in their time. This seemingly irreconcilable difference, between the world as we perceive it and a world that makes rational sense, was what Anaxagoras sought to address. He “Anaxagoras held that everything is infinitely divisible, and that even the smallest portion of matter contains some of each element. Things appear to be that of which they contain most” (Russell Western Philosophy 62). Still it was Empedocles (495-444) ultimately, who “suggested a statesmanlike compromise by allowing four elements, earth, air, fire and water” (Russell Western Philosophy 43), to be coequal fundamental elements would provide a seemingly rational and satisfactory explanation for the gulf between our conceived and our observed worlds. This model was (and arguably is) so compelling and seemingly logical it is little wonder most anyone raised in Western culture can even today, name the four elements: earth, fire, water, and air. For centuries ever after (arguably even into the present day) those who were spawned from this thought-tradition would be arguing moreover what the essential character of reality is but rarely whether or not something essential even existed. So why was/is Socrates such a singular figure in the Western thought-tradition? Volumes have been written and many scholars have made their careers offering answers to this question. While it is beyond the scope of this thesis to proffer a complete response to this question, what is important here is how Socrates transformed the parameters of the philosophical inquest. Many advances were made by the pre-Socratic thinkers but the only certain truths that had been discovered were the abstract absolutes of mathematical theorems and formulas. How these could be transformed to offer incontrovertible truths about the human condition was still an elusive pursuit. Many had abandoned the search for truths of the human condition and instead settled for developing rhetorical acumen. “The Sophists [especially] were sought after by young men who wished to learn the art of disputation” (Russell Western Philosophy 59). Being successful in the art of disputation allowed a man to rise in Athenian society and to marshal greater defense should they find themselves the target of litigation. A cynicism about Truth developed from these rhetoricians. Protagoras’s maxim that “man is the measure of all things,” (Russell Western Philosophy 149) was intellectual fodder for accepting the idea that the “better man” was a vessel of a “better truth” and therefore becoming a more powerful persuader was a means to being perceived as the better man. Socrates turned this on its ear.

24 3.1.3. The Fathers of Western Thought

Socrates was trained in the rhetoric of the Sophists and could easily (and often did) persuade those around him of his superiority. Yet he wore this regard humbly, and when falsely charged and sentenced to death he became a martyr for his conviction that greater knowledge was not only obtainable but within reach by cooperative efforts in the form of dialectical inquiry. And I am called wise, for my hearers always imagine that I myself possessed the wisdom which I find wanting in others: but the truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise; and by his answer he intends show that the wisdom of man is worth little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name by way of illustration, as if he said, “He, Omen, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom isn’t truth worth nothing.” And so I go about the world, obedient to the god, in search And make inquiry into the wisdom of anyone, whether citizen or stranger, who appears to be wise; in my occupation quite absorbs me, and I have no time to give either to any public matter of interest or to any concern of my own, but I am in utter poverty by reason of my devotion to the god (Jowett 39-40).

Socrates's “defense” of himself is a work of rhetorical genius. “The Apology gives a clear picture of a man of a certain type: a man very sure of himself, high-minded, indifferent to worldly success, believing that he is guided by a divine voice, and persuaded that clear thinking is the most important requisite for right living,” (Russell Western Philosophy 89). So powerful was his example that it drove Plato to establish The Academy, to train young minds to engage in Socratic inquiries. “Plato was satisfied that the truths of mathematics were sufficient to put skepticism on notice. Mathematics has established that some things can be known with certainty. The problem of knowledge then becomes a search for the kind of truths that will match up with mathematical certainties,” (Robinson Lect. 8). Mathematicians had shown that Truths were obtainable, Socrates had shown that a method to discovery was within reach. “Thus one might think that Socrates uses recollection to show how we can know and not know the same thing at the same time: latently we know the object but, because we have forgotten it and appear like those who do not know (cf. 80 d 3 ), there is a point to inquiry” (Dominic 79). Plato remained so devoted to his friend and teacher that much of his works (e.g. Plato’s Republic) are nominally attributed and delivered in the voice of Socrates. We get a glimpse of what Plato was after in founding The Academy in his pursuit of “the good” as he states it in his Republic. The position of the good in Plato's philosophy is peculiar. Science and truth, he says, are like the good, but the good has a higher place. “The good is not essence, but far exceeds essence in dignity and power.” Dialectic leads to the end of the intellectual world in the perception of the absolute good. It is by means of the good that dialectic is able to dispense with the hypotheses of the mathematician. The underlying assumption is that reality, as opposed to appearance, is completely and perfectly good; to perceive the good, therefore, is to perceive reality. Throughout Plato's philosophy there is the same fusion of intellect and mysticism as in Pythagoreanism, but at this final culmination mysticism clearly has the upper hand (Russell Western Philosophy 126).

25 From this, it is evident that the Platonic position leans towards the abstract and ineffable. The “truth” of things can only be found in their incorporeal forms. Rational ideas are valued far more than sensory evidence in the Platonic mind. “Only this sort of knowledge that is called a priori—especially logic and mathematics—can be possibly supposed to exist in everyone independently of experience. In fact, this is the only sort of knowledge (apart from mystic insight) that Plato admits to be really knowledge,” (Russell Western Philosophy 139). Yet we catch a glimpse of something else at work here. Plato appeals to “essence” as what is exceeded in pursuit of the “good,” implying that the highest intellectual pursuit of his time was in seeking what is essential. To essentialize then was to determine the highest “truths” of his time. Plato promotes a rationalistic approach both in discovering the essentials of reality penultimate only to discovering “the good.” His rationalism would be challenged within his lifetime, though his essentialism was not. Among the young minds Plato trained in pursuit of “the good” one incredibly curious mind arrived in the form of Aristotle, and the parameters of how to engage in a dialogue would be forever changed. Aristotle’s methods, inquiries, and genius would reshape the Western philosophical endeavors and reaffirm the value of evidence, logic, and proof. He opens his Metaphysics with a rebuff of his mentor’s devaluing of sensory evidence. “All men by nature desire to know. An example is the delight we take in our senses. For even quite apart from their usefulness, they are loved for their own sake, and none more than the sense of sight” (Aristotle 5). Here Aristotle is appealing to the experiential, the sensory, the material as his foundation for pursuing knowledge. If as Alfred Whitehead once said, “all of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (Whitehead 39) then it is equally true that all of Western academia consists of engagement (either mimicking or rejecting) Aristotle’s methodologies. Bertrand Russell avers, [Aristotle] is the first to write like a professor: his treatises are systematic, his discussions are divided into heads, he is a professional teacher, not an inspired prophet. His work is critical, careful, pedestrian, without any trace of Bacchic enthusiasm. The Orphic elements in Plato are watered down in Aristotle, and mixed with a strong dose of common sense; where he is Platonic, one feels that his natural temperament has been overpowered by the teaching to which he has been subjected. He is not passionate, or in any profound sense religious. The errors of his predecessors were the glorious errors of youth attempting the impossible; his errors are those of age which cannot free itself of habitual prejudices (Russell Western Philosophy 161).

The Aristotelian would become the model for scholarship in the modern age. As a logician, he was somewhat rudimentary, but as an influential force of the Western thought-tradition, he stands unparalleled. Aristotle helped lay the foundations of Western logic, among “them was the Principle of Excluded Middle (PEM), which says that every claim must be either true or false with no other options (the Latin name for this rule, tertium non datur, means literally ‘a third is not given’). The other rule was the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC): nothing can be true and false at the same time” (Priest). Aristotle set the terms for the long debates of Western academia and these principles stand as tantamount to reasoned and logical positions. It must be said that an intellect as formidable as Aristotle's is deserving of respect no matter his positions because

26 developing the form of the Western thought-tradition to such an extent that he must be addressed millennia after his death is an achievement precious few minds can claim. He is worthy of great respect but fetishizing him or his approach is antithetical to the intellectual pursuits he pioneered. It bears mentioning that these towering intellectual giants in their time were not necessarily highly prized by the masses about them. Socrates was famously put to death, Pythagoras was run out of town, and Aristotle suffered Pythagoras’s fate so as to avoid Socrates’. Their contributions to the world of Western thought required time to ferment and to take hold in the wider realm of popular thinking. A wholesale marketing campaign, a pan-Mediterranean franchising (first in the form Alexander the great but later and more enduringly with the Roman empire) would prove necessary for the dissemination of Greek thought.

3.1.4. Rome Franchising the Essentials

To speak of Rome as if it were a monolithic entity that wholesale adopted, consumed, and disseminated Greek culture is to vastly oversimplify the complexities and transformations of what was, in reality, a centuries-long enterprise. This oversimplification does capture some highlights of the connections that existed between the waning Greek city-states and the waxing Roman nation. Of all the Greek thought- traditions imported to Rome, Stoicism was particularly successful in gaining traction. Certainly, Aristotle and Plato had a strong influence on Stoic thought, because both gave pride of place to rationality and the rule of reason over passion. Neither Aristotle nor Plato, however, translates directly into Stoicism or Epicureanism. Stoicism was a new influence in the house of intellect that would guide and direct a new empire lasting a thousand years (Robinson Lect. 15).

One aspect of Stoicism that differentiated it from its predecessors was its take on essence. “Unlike Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics confined existence to bodies,” (Long 240) meaning only corporeal existing things had any real essence. Most of the leaders of Rome were students of law and Stoicism’s emphasis on logos (universal reason) held great appeal for them. “The Stoic account relies on the notion of oikeion, natural affinities an appropriateness that expresses the order of nature itself,” (Robinson Lect. 15). Universal reason was the inherent providence of mankind, thus by extension reasoned law (passed down by the Roman government) ought to be accepted by any reasonable person. “It is therefor shameful that men should begin and end where irrational creatures do. He is indeed rather to begin there, but to end where nature itself hath fixt our end; and that is in contemplation and understanding and in the scheme of life conformable to nature” (Carter 18). To defy Roman law was to defy the very cohesive reasoning that gave people their humanity. A rationale for imperial expansion can be justified easily by invoking Stoic precepts. Alongside a framework for rationalizing conquest, Stoicism came bundled with many other presuppositions that found their way into the greater Roman zeitgeist. Stoicism constructed an ethic of forbearance, tolerance, and acceptance grounded in its metaphysical foundations. One of this thought-tradition’s greatest figures was the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180), who captures this in his meditations when

27 he says, “nature United the elements of which she compounded you, and now she dissolves the union. Well, I am but separated from kinsmen, unresisting and rebellious; for this too is according to nature,” (Aurelius 113). Robinson succinctly summarizes this declaring that “Stoicism is a form of essentialism!” (Robinson Lect. 15). Both in ethics and metaphysics, Stoicism sought answers to life’s questions in the essential constitutes of the world. The development of Stoicism may see its zenith in Aurelius, but Greek thought had not only found its way into the hands of Roman imperialists, but it was also disseminating far and wide across the Hellenized world. The Jewish scholars of the first century A.D. had at their disposal many of the same texts, treatises, and Greek teachers available to them as were available to much of the Roman elite. Even the apostle Paul was aware that he was offering a competing vision of the world that was contending with philosophies like, Cynicism, Skepticism, Epicureanism and especially Stoicism. It became the imperative of the early Jewish Christians to reconcile what would come to be called Christianity with the philosophical competitors of their day. Much of Plato’s rational appeal to “forms” aligned itself well with the received revelations of their religion. That “the good” superseded all other acquisitions of knowledge was well suited to be adopted into the acceptance of God as superseding all other intellectual pursuits. And much as Plato and Aristotle had provided a scaffolding for Stoics to build upon, so too did those frameworks and the one offering by Stoicism offer a lattice upon which the Jewish Christians might graft their faith. The early church fathers had to reconcile the teachings of the church, the message contained in the life of Christ himself, with a philosophy respected as one of the great achievements of human thought, even if “pagan” thought. There is not, therefore, an unbridgeable distance between the lessons of faith and the lessons of philosophy. Indeed, there is much intellectual energy devoted to having the philosophical light— primarily the Stoic light—brought to bear on the authority of faith (Robinson Lect. 16).

The impersonal “god” of Stoicism was not incommensurate with the personal and involved God of the Jewish Christians. The rational plan of the Hebrew God (revealed in part by the Ten Commandments) well paralleled the logos of the Stoics. However, the differences between these thought-traditions were also in need of some redress, “The Stoics held that there are certain principles which are luminously obvious and are admitted by all men; these could be made, as in Euclid Elements, the basis of deduction. Innate ideas, similarly, could be used as the starting- point of definitions. This point of view was accepted throughout the Middle Ages, and even by Descartes,” (Russell Western Philosophy 269). Knowledge of God was a revealed truth, not held by all men and therefore leaving a great many men “in the dark” as it were as to this sublime truth. Many other conundrums vexed the early church fathers inclining some to give up on philosophy as having anything of value to offer. “Christian fathers, such as Origen and Tertullian, wanted to dismiss the whole of Greek and Roman philosophy—look what a mess these fine thinkers had made of their world! The teachings and example of Jesus Christ were all that was needed,” (Robinson Lect. 16). This tension of anti-intellectualism and deep philosophical interrogation of the tenets of the Hebrew scriptures and the example of Jesus Christ persists into our modern day. As the Christian thought-tradition began supplanting the pagan thought-traditions of Rome, the empire went into decline. Constantine ushered in the beginning of the end

28 for the once-great Roman Empire. Its decadence saw a war of attrition by many previously admired intellectuals. St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) was one living through this fall and he (like Plato) envisioned a utopia free from the corruption of impermanence. “Cicero, too, is a witness to the corruption of the state in his time, a corruption that made it unworthy of the name res publica, having lost the essential quality of justice. Yet this, Augustine argues, was never really present in Rome, for it exists only in the republic whose founder is Christ,” (Augustine x). His City of God is a spiritual assent free from the materialistic entropy-bound realms of man. “The City of God is the society of the elect. Knowledge of God is obtained only through Christ. There are things that can be discovered by reason (as in the philosophers), but for all further religious knowledge we must rely on the Scriptures” (Russell Western Philosophy 358). In his Confessions, St. Augustine offers an example for Western Christians of how devotedness and pursuit of the intellectual need not be in direct conflict. Augustine was an accomplished academic and indeed because of that pursuit credits his acceptance of God as only coming from exhausting his rational arguments against the Christian teachings. What he drives at in his Confessions is to lay bare what is necessary for and of a Christian. “Man is, as Aristotle teaches, by nature, a social animal. But in the perfectionist moral philosophy of Aristotle, there would seem to be little room for the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, which for Augustine, are essential to full development of our humanity,” (Robinson Lect. 18). Intellect alone is insufficient, faith is what is required, but to be a “good Christian” is not to ignore the intellect God blessed you with. Indeed, intellect informed by faith allows a Christian to make themselves an even better follower of God by informing their intellectual endeavors with an awareness of God’s providence at work in the world around them. Perhaps but for Augustine, teaching orders among the early church may not have found much purchase. In 410 C.E. the Goths sacked the city of Rome. By then the penchant for essentializing as a means for understanding had become so prominent in the Western world that despite the Roman empire's final fall, essentializing had become inextricably synonymous with the purpose of any intellectual endeavor. Christianity would herald essentialism in the forms of theology it developed over the ensuing centuries. This Western thought-tradition’s Greco-Roman roots would be lost to the greater part of Christendom until the dawn of the Renaissance. “Rome” continued in the Eastern Byzantine Empire but remained quite culturally divorced from the rest of the Western world, “most of what had been Roman provinces in the east, including also Africa and Spain in the west, became Mohammedan [Islamic]” (Russell Western Philosophy 275) where all the vestiges of Greek philosophy found a home for centuries. “From the eleventh century onward, at first through Moorish influences, the west gradually recovered what it had lost of the Grecian heritage,” (Russell Western Philosophy 275) but by then, great intellectual effort and vigor had gone into the reconciliation of the God of Abraham with the genius of the pagan philosophers.. By the time Islam was militarily successful enough to occupy the Byzantine world, it found itself with ready access to a culture that included the philosophic thought of Plato, Aristotle, and other leading thinkers. Early in the 10th century, al-Farabi (870 - 950) used Plato’s Republic as the model for his inquiry into the nature of the right form of civic life. He insisted, however, that what is needed

29 for leadership is more than Plato’s philosopher-king; what is needed is one who is also a prophet (Robinson Lect. 19).

3.1.5. Christendom

Christianity grew up in conflict with Islam and the Muslim world was likewise shaped by its ongoing battles with the Christian West. Despite the approximately nine centuries pejoratively known as the “Dark Ages” or the “Medieval Age,” thought was not entirely dead in Western Europe. Charlemagne (742 - 814) launched a campaign not only to unite the “Christian” world but also to educate the masses inhabiting that world. “Teachers were needed to bring about these changes, and Charlemagne recruited them from England and Ireland. One of Charlemagne’s recruits was Alcuin (732-804) of Britain, who would become one of the most influential figures in the restoration of scholarship in the Western world” (Robinson Lect. 20). Alcuin was indispensable to the history of Western scholarship, “[t]he Emperor [Charlemagne] employed him to teach Latin to the Franks and to educate the royal family. He spent a considerable part of his life at the court of Charlemagne, engaged in teaching and in founding schools” (Russell Western Philosophy 395). This was one of Charlemagne’s attempts to shift the Western cultural balance away from mysticism and towards a more rationalistic one. “So there were attractions to philosophy and there were attractions to mysticism. About the year 1000 weakness in the caliphate of Cordoba encouraged the Reconquista, the “taking back” of Spain for the Christians.” Hecht goes on to say that, “[o]ver the next centuries the Reconquista brought the new ideas in Muslim and Jewish Spain to European Christians” (Hecht 252). The University came into being in these “Medieval” times “students at the great cathedral in Paris w[ere] constituted as a universitas” (Robinson Lect. 20). This new institution gave rise to Thomas Aquinas (1225 or 1226 - 1274) who helped reshape the boundries between theology and scholarship. Aquinas concentrated on this issue of essentials. He asked, “what is meant by ‘wisdom’ and “what is the divine essence?” Aquinas was the culmination of a collision course between classic thought, Christian dogma, and scholarship; the architect of scholasticism. His Summa Theologiae and Summa contra Gentiles provide a virtual resurrection of Aristotelian thinking. Both are replete with Aristotle’s PEM and PNC as when Aquinas states in the Summa Theologiae “* q. 3, a. 3 (Quod Deus est idem quod sua essentia “That God is identical with His essence”) – the argument is: cum Deus non sit compositus ex materia et forma (“for God is not composed of matter and form”)” (Kąkol). Aquinas goes to great lengths to reconcile the logic of Aristotle with the tenets of the Dominican denomination of the Christian faith but ultimately what he produces is a body of work that will enshrine the presupposed truths of Christianity in the mantle of philosophical reason. Christian suppositions being “true” by the PNC Aquinas’ assertions were beyond contestation. Russell enumerates some of these: “God is good, and is His own goodness; He is the good of every good. He is intelligent, and His act of intelligence is His essence. He understands by His essence, and understands Himself perfectly” (Russell Western Philosophy 456). Here we observe a binary “true” that will broach no challenge less the challenger be deemed “false” and by extension, “a heretic.”

30 The certitude offered in Aquinas’s treatises was a balm for the European Christian’s soul. From the beginning of these Dark and Medieval Ages (ca. 500) to the dawn of the Renaissance (ca. 1400) Europeans had endured approximately 150 wars, battles, kingdom risings, successions, civil wars, and all manner of plague, blight, famine and hardship within not only on their own continent, but extending as far southward and eastward as Northern Africa and Western Asia. Some of this strife finally ended in 1648, after the tumultuous Thirty Years War, “a war that itself came at the end of about a century of religious slaughter and warfare in the Western Christian world,” (Liulevicius Lect. 6). European powers came together, spending five years in negotiations, to produce The Treaty of Westphalia. The treaty gave political supremacy to the “nation-states.” In the Westphalian agreement, “it was recognized that sovereign states had exclusive authority over their lands and people as well as ambassadors abroad. States took responsibility for any warlike acts of its citizens against other states” (Cerf 2018) and transferred political authority out of the hands of the Holy Roman Empire. Today’s Westphalian system, still retains many of the original tenets which “involved the recognition that world politics would not be under the rule of one universal authority but, instead, would be a constant, dynamic interplay of states, seeking to preserve their sovereignty and their own advantage,” (Liulevicius Lect. 6). What the Westphalian system did was to take essentializing, dichotomizing and the reduction of complex phenomena out of an academic exercise and apply it to an international political model. People who may have been of differing and divergent groups were subsumed under the identity of ‘nationality’ and the State assumed all essential rights and responsibilities to govern them. Ironically this Westphalian peace would only in practice be extended to the so-called “civil-Christian” nations. Europe forged in the crucible of centuries of battle and debate emerged obdurate, with a decidedly Christian identity. It was unwavering in the certainty of its righteousness and its rightness. Quoting Rodney Needham (1923- 2006) in his essay on Belief Lopez Jr. writes, [T]he concept of belief certainly seemed, by the great reliance placed upon it in the Western tradition, to have an essential and irrefragable significance, formulated over centuries of theological exegesis, philosophical analysis, and its numerous applications in common discourse (Lopez Jr. 24).

Figure 1 Raphael Sanzio's Schools of Athens commissioned by Pope Julius II

31 Faith, belief, and Christian identity marked one as a part of the Western world. This emerging peace (as it was) created enough breathing room for Europeans to embark on larger affairs than subsistence. Still, the development of the Western thought-tradition needed to tread carefully through the Renaissance. Aesthetics, rather than ethics, or (god forbid) ontology was a safer ground for innovation during the Renaissance. Great care was taken by many of the geniuses of this period not to run afoul of the Church. In embracing the classic world, artists, clergy, and men of great learning needed to go to great lengths to ensure that in the process of exalting the admirable of their Greco-Roman predecessors, they did not stumble into paganism, heathenism, nor witchcraft. Three centuries of witch-hunts occurred all while men such as Copernicus (1473- 1543), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Galileo (1564-1642), Descartes (1596-1650), Kepler (1571-1630), and Newton (1647-1727) were pressing the envelope of Church tolerance. Each of these figures advanced the Western thought-tradition in their way, yet each of them was deeply ensnared in the binary Platonian/Aristotelian essentialism that had shaped the thinking of their worlds. It is in this milieu that one of the earliest works of “Religious Studies” arises. The corpus of the nineteenth-century Religious scholars were predominantly Christians, looking to situate their faith in both a modernizing context and in relation to these other things they begrudgingly began to recognize as “religions.” One of the first early scholars was the Jesuit Joseph D Acosta (1539-40-1600). His The Natural and Moral History of The Indies (1590 C.E.; English translation, 1604 C.E.) does not define religion per se. Instead, the definition needs to be sought in synonyms and implications, “for Acosta, “religion” is the belief system that results in ceremonial behavior,” (Smith 270). This is a seminal moment, in that the “truths” of Aquinas are conspicuously absent from the peoples of this “New World;” little wonder it was so easy for the “civilized” West to dismiss these civilizations as “heathens.” A little over a century later, David Hume’s (1711-1776) The Natural History of Religion (1757 C.E.) attempts to ground the study of “religions” in a natural context versus a supernatural one. Despite Hume’s attempt much of the “Religious Studies” scholarship over the next century were well biased by Christian supremacy; for example: Hannah Adams (1755-1831), A Dictionary Of All Religions And Religious Denominations, Jewish, Heathen, Mahometan, End Christian, Ancient And Modern [1817]; David Benedict (1779 - 1874), History Of All Religions, As Divided Into Paganism, Mahometan, Judaism And Christianity [1824]; Vincent Milner, Religious Denominations Of The World: Comprising A General View Of The Origin, History And Condition Of The Various Sects Of Christians, The Jews, And Mahometans, As Well As The Pagan Forms Of Religion And Existing In The Different Countries Of The Earth [1872] (Smith 275) to name but a few. It is easy to see, from just these few examples, how predominant Abrahamic chauvinism was (and in some quarters still is) in the realm of “Religious Studies.”

3.1.6. Dawning of Enlightenment

Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687) may have been the starting-gun blast of the European Enlightenment, but from then until the end of the eighteenth century, what had been brewing in the Renaissance came into the world screaming. As

32 the Western nations embarked on empires of their own, the armor of certainty so long held by the Church began to face new intellectual challenges. Martin Luther (1483-1546) had already breeched the bulkhead of the Catholic Church’s hegemony over Europe, but now the oncolite of questioning minds had reached a fever pitch. The minds of the Enlightenment era directly shaped the modern era. Still, one of the hallmarks of their new methodology was a penchant for reductionism. Take a complex problem (like the motion of the planets or is the behavior of the tides) separated into more and more isolated parts or models, prove, or examine the part of the model, then see how the piece slots into the reality it seeks to approximate. For example, Newton displaced Kepler’s theory of motion by, “reduce[ing] the problem to that of an ideal mass—a point—revolving around an abstract center of force” (Robinson Lect. 27) instead of Kepler’s insistence that motion (of say, the planets) will only continue as long as external force is applied. This reductionism as a method for analyzing complexities became the hallmark of scientific inquiry. Yet make no mistake, Newton was very much an essentialist in his beliefs about his own work. In a letter to Richard Bentley he writes: Tis unconceivable that inanimate brute matter should (without the mediation of something else which is not material) operate upon & affect other matter without mutual contact; as it must if gravitation in the sense of Epicurus be essential & inherent in it. And this is one reason why I desired you would not ascribe innate gravity to me. That gravity should be innate inherent & essential to matter so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of any thing else by & through which their action or force may be conveyed from one to another is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters any competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws, but whether this agent be material or immaterial is a question I have left to the consideration of my readers (Westfall 505).

This essential and inherent and innate interpretation of the universe would be echoed in virtually every “scientific” thinker of the age, from Thomas Hobbes’ (1588- 1679) Leviathan to John Locke’s corpuscular ontology. Bacon’s Novum Organum (New Method) proclaiming the supremacy and epistemological authority of experimental science, still seeks to reduce complexities as much as Descartes’ axiomatic rationalism “cogito ergo sum” as a foundation for undeniable knowledge. By the end of the Enlightenment despite great strides forward being made by some, this old rationalist versus empiricist debate remained unsettled. Hume’s may have cauterized some of the schisms of Western epistemology in Of Miracles when for example, “Hume placed the criteria for judging in favor of a miracle so high that it was unlikely he would ever accept the veracity of miraculous occurrences; thus, his empiricism did not involve an a priori negation of miracles,” (Jones Lect. 3) but his radical empiricism was sharply at odds with Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) rational idealism that one is hard-pressed not to hear echoes of Plato’s a priori (what is before) versus Aristotle’s a posteriori (what is after) debate being rehashed in more sophisticated terms. The rationalist/empiricist debate waged on with many thinkers making their attempt to reconcile these conflicting epistemologies. The Scientific Revolution is so-called because ‘science’ became The Way to excavate the truth from the world around us. To this ends Religious Studies

33 succumb to the thrall of being “properly” scientized. One of the great heralds of this “new” German Orientalist and philologist Max Müller (1823-1900). He famously stated “All real science rests on classification and only in case we cannot succeed in classifying the various dialects of faith, shall we have to confess that a science of religion is really an impossibility,” clearly the “science of religion is in its inception; tellingly of that birth he goes on to say “the simplest classification…is that into true and false religions” (Müller 62). The Aristotelian true/false dichotomy prevails. Karl Marx (1818-1883) would declare all religions false. He disqualified religion as a valid subject owing to its being reducible to nothing more than another tool of the bourgeoisie used to control the proletariat in his understanding of the world’s economic history. Likewise, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) discredited and pathologized religions, “All later religions prove to be attempts to solve the same problem,” (Freud 239). By reducing all religions under this rubric “[r]eligion, by displacing real human needs and fears onto unreal, symbolic entities, was a form of alienation that prevented people from coming to grips with their real problems and frustrations. People were better off without it, just as his patients were better off without their neuroses” (Jones Lect. 11). Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) reduced religion by subsuming it into society. For Durkheim between the sacred and the profane, it was the sacred that “is” society, thus it can be studied with the tools of Sociology. No other considerations needed to be applied to understand “religions.” Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a linguist by training, provided an excellent framework for future Symbolic Anthropologist (e.g. Claude Levi-Strauss [1908 - 2009] or Clifford Geertz [1926-2006]) to envelope “Religious Studies” under the umbrella of Anthropology. Before getting too far into contemporary Religious Studies it is worth one last visit back to the nineteenth century to round out how some of these Modern thinkers were able to untether themselves from the wisdom-of-the-ages. It is hard to add any novel commentary on the Enlightenment thinkers or the age of Reason. So much has already been said about who these men were and how they shaped modernity. However, what was not said in their time, and what would take another couple of centuries from the beginning of this Scientific revolution to be addressed directly, was the essentialist characteristics of all their pontifications.

3.1.7. The Existential Way

Fish have no word for water, likewise, the Enlightenment thinkers did not see any of their paradigm-shifting ideas as being resolutely grounded in the presupposition of essentialism. That particular presupposition had dominated the Western thought-tradition for thousands of years. From the pre-Socratic atomists to the dawn of the twentieth century, the quest for the Holy Grail had been discovering, determining, and defining what was essential to the make-up of anything. Arguably what was needed to breach the confines of this paradigm was a fresh injection of ideas; thoughts not mired in the preconceived notions of Western culture. These ideas arrived in Europe, via the cultural exchange that occurred between the East and West, and coincided with Western powers expansion, imperialistic machinations, and (traumatically) colonialism. Many scholars have observed the distinctly Eastern characteristics of the non-conformist modern philosophers. This is especially evident in existentialists like: Søren Kierkegaard (1813- 1855), Albert Camus (1913-1960), and Frederick Nietzsche (1844-1900). These

34 philosophers would question the very idea of essentialism as a fitting basis from which to launch any intellectual inquiry. They gave truth to a Maxim of the Dao De Jing, Indeed, the hidden and the manifest give birth to each other.

Difficult and easy complement each other.

Long and short exhibit each other.

High and low set measure to each other.

Voice and sound harmonize each other.

Back and front follow each other (Ryden: 2).

The idea of existentialism threw into sharp relief the presupposition of essentialism. Existence precedes essence could sum up much of the existentialists’ assertions. Why was this so revolutionary? Before this concept, the idea of “a thing’s essence” was the taken for granted starting point. Essence was a preordained inherent quality without which any given thing could not be said to be of a category. With this transposing of existence and essence, the idea of inherent essence is displaced with the postulate that what we referred to as ‘essence’ is either an emergent property or a non- existent one. This called into question the very validity of rationalism or empiricism as a means of obtaining the truth. What’s more, the assertion of no preordained teleologically endowed essence, is tantamount to the denial of the spirit, the soul or God. Obviously in a Western world whetted to Abrahamic (particularly Christian) chauvinism this assertion was met with stern admonishment in many corners, still is. Existentialist metaphysics were criticized by many as being hypocritical, lazy and/or nihilistic. Martin Heidegger (himself often and ironically cited as an existential philosopher) chastised Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1905-1980) central existentialist claim, Existentialism says existence precedes essence. In this statement he is taking existentia and essentia according to their metaphysical meaning, which, from Plato's time on, has said that essentia precedes existentia. Sartre reverses this statement. But the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it, he stays with metaphysics, in oblivion of the truth of Being (Krell 208).

Post-World War II existentialism caught traction as did other unconventional modes of thought. The certitude and faith in reason, in science and the progress of humanity came under intense scrutiny. Unorthodox and nonconformist thinkers’ ideas began to catch fire; from minds such as: Karl Popper (1902-1994), Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000), Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) John Rawls (1921-2002), Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922-1996) Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) Richard Rorty (1931-2007) and scores of other great thinkers. They built upon the, often previously neglected, ideas of their Romantic era predecessors. As a result, their ideas have greatly contributed to the development of thought in a variety of fields such as: law, political theory, philosophy of science, literature, the arts, and numerous other fields. Likewise, space was opened for the inclusion of many hither to disregarded voices, such as: Hehaka Sapa, commonly known as Black Elk (1863-1950) Hannah Arendt (1906-

35 1975), Henry Odera Oruka (1944-1995) and Virginia Potter Held. Tracing the divergence between essentialism and anti-essentialism though all of these fields of study could prove fascinating, and might contribute to ongoing modern/post-modern discourses. However, following a single line through to contemporary Religious Studies (where an essentialized debate persists over the sui generis character of the subject in question) prohibits more than a mention of all the modern thinkers who have, with varying degrees of success, shed the centuries-long strangle-hold of binary reductionism in the Western thought-tradition. Religious Studies in this period faced a quandary: If Western modernity was meant to improve the world, then how could something as abominable as the atrocities of WWII have ever occurred at such scale? In many ways, the subject of Theodicy (God’s goodness in light of the existence and extent of evil) rocked Religious Studies back on its heels and demanded better answers than those being provided under all the reductionists’ models. Evil was what the world had just experienced, and Müller’s “true and false” religions no longer seemed a wise dichotomy to adopt in approaching the subject of people’s religious identities. The shoah had just demonstrated where that type of binary reduction could lead. Perhaps a better model for studying religions could be found. Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843) laid the groundwork for the phenomenological study of religions. “Using the Kantian argument against solipsism, Fries felt justified in saying that these feelings, which he called ahndung (intimations), had to correspond to something real in the world” (Jones Lect. 19). Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) built on this idea, deciding that “religion” must be the name for humans encounter with “the holy.” “The encounter with the holy evoked a unique human response of both awe and fascination: the mysterium tremendum et fascinans” (Jones Lect. 19). This attempt to place religions back on their own ground; something sui generis and a properly independent subject for study, was a rejection of the mechanistic hyper-scientizing, hyper reductionist tendencies of his time. We must dispute even the main justification of the theory, which is sought for in the old maxim of parsimony in the use of principles of explanation (entia, and also principia, præter necessitatem non esse multiplicanda), and in Kant's “regulative principle,” that science must proceed as if everything could ultimately be explained in terms of mechanism. For surely our task is to try to explain things, not at any cost with the fewest possible principles, but rather with the aid of those principles which appear most correct. If nature is not fundamentally simple, then it is not scientific but unscientific to simplify it theoretically. And the proposition bracketed above has its obvious converse side, that while entities and principles must not be multiplied except when it is necessary, on the other hand their number must not be arbitrarily lessened. To proceed according to the fundamental maxims of the mechanistic view can only be wholesome for a time and, so to speak, for pædagogical reasons. To apply them seriously and permanently would be highly injurious, for, by prejudging what is discoverable in nature, it would tend to prevent the calm, objective study of things which asks for nothing more than to see them as they are. It would thus destroy the fineness of our appreciation of what there really is in nature. This is true alike of forcible attempts to reduce the processes of life to mechanical processes, and of the Darwinian doctrine of the universal dominance of utility. Both bear unmistakably the stamp of foregone conclusions, and betray a desire

36 for the simplest, rather than for the most correct principles of interpretation (Otto 2009, 228-9).

Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) felt that “the holy” held too many Christian connotations and preferred to use the term “the sacred.” He was particularly interested in sacred spaces, Axis mundi, or “world-axis,” points of reverence. His priority was to establish a study of religions that could be conducted on “religions’” terms. Still, Eliade’s frame for Religious Studies has evoked responses from scholars (whetted to the Western thought-tradition) who persist in asking, if religions are or are not sui generis phenomena? Aristotle’s binary dichotomization seems too high a hurdle to clear for some. In his book McCutcheon dedicates an entire chapter to Mircea Eliade. He posits that Eliade’s influence is hard to overstate, “Eliade’s scholarly writings and theories and their status [are] representative of much of the modern discourse,” (McCutcheon 27). McCutcheon goes on to state that, “the dubious theoretical basis of the [religious studies] field seems to have much to do with its ongoing institutional insecurity,” (McCutcheon 201). “Religious Studies” he contends, are in a tailspin, in no small part due to circular referential and unquestioned assumptions as to the sui generis nature of what religion “is.” He advocates for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of “religions” and recognition on the part of contemporary scholars of the distinction between “religious studies” and theological ones. This may well be sound advice for the Religious Studies field, but it clearly rests on the presupposition that religions must conform to an either/or proposition. Fitzgerald goes further than McCutcheon in his indictment of Religious Studies and the sui generis theory. He advocates for the whole scale reduction/dissolution of the field. The notion of ‘religions’ is obsolete he argues, because it is too nebulous to pin down with an exact or particular meaning the so-called ‘object’ of its purview. The very idea of ‘Religion’ also carries too much theological “load” associated with Judeo- Christian cultures. The intrinsic associations in the loaded term ‘religion’ are pathological to any conducive study. Contemporary attempts to denude ‘religion’ of its “conceptual colonization” have resulted in such diluting of the term as to render it meaningless. “The problem lies in the mystifying potential with which the concept of religion is charged in which can act as a confusing and distorting element even in quite sophisticated and self- critical text,” (Fitzgerald 13). Fitzgerald would, therefore, have all so-called “religious studies” absorbed into “cultural studies.” Again an “it is this, not a that” argument. Notwithstanding that his arguments against ‘religions’ may be equally applied to the concept of “culture,” the telling point in his view is how binary the logic underpinning it is. These arguments of categorization and taxonomy are riddled throughout Western scholarship’s handling of religions. In 1997, at an address to the University of Tennessee, Kirkland launched an indictment of Westerners co-opting of what they perceive as a Daoist identity. He argues that poor transmission and the heavy influence of Western presuppositionless ideas fabricate a “Daoism” that is not authentic. He sees the Daoism of the Western imagination as bereft of any of “real Daoism’s” core values, core ideas, or most importantly core traditions without which, [T]he tradition can be made acceptable to modern tastes, secular humanist tastes that refuse to compromise the supposed freedom of the individual to find Truth wherever he/she wants to find it, and to deny that it exists anywhere else. With

37 these facts in mind, it is little wonder that such sanitized — indeed, fictionalized — visions of “Taoism” — like similarly sanitized, secularized visions of Zen — have proven irresistible to modern Westerners (Kirkland 13).

Kirkland sets out a clear and lucid analysis of how early Daoist ideas were transmitted to Western audiences. He likewise offers a compelling breakdown of the Western thought-traditions that would likely be at work within the minds of those early on who ingested Daoist ideas. The description of the “Western imagination” and the concise historiography of Confusion/Protestant collusion are sound. However, his thesis embodies one of the very central Western presupposition Kirkland so derides, essentialism. Kirkland’s presentation, whether intentionally or inadvertently, serves as an exemplar of essentialists' binary reduction of “is/is not” argumentation. If something is ‘essential’ than without it, something cannot be fitted into said category. This generates a dichotomizing analysis that is easy to become trapped in; it can only either be ‘rabbit season’ or ‘duck season.’ This Western thought-tradition has become a thought trap. It entrenches thinkers into fixed positions and their arguments continually reinforce one another. This tradition of dichotomizing and essentializing perpetuate reductive analyses until phenomena become unrecognizable micro-constructions. Over the centuries the branches of essentialism may drift but the fruits they produce all share the same roots. Kirkland’s “real” Daoism is essentially one with a deep tradition. He exhibits both the penchant for essentialism and the traditionalism that is endemic to the East and the catalyst for much of the Eastern reductive behaviours.

38 Chapter 4. The Eastern thought-tradition

4.1.1. Deep Roots

The linear through-line in the Western thought-tradition is somewhat more opaque when one turns to look at the Eastern thought-traditions. Yet the undeniable tradition of tradition stands out in stark relief. Traditions help shape identities which are derived from myths; that is, stories we tell ourselves about ourselves to better-know ourselves. As Robinson puts it, “[t]he mythology of a people is the basis on which they recognize themselves as a people and have a coherent relationship, not only to each other but with their own past” (Robinson Lect. 1). Many Modern Daoist associations, scholars, and individual practitioners have fallen into the orbit of China’s prevailing hub-to-spokes myth. This myth contends that the prowess of the “Middle Kingdom,” pinnacle of civilization, was so potent it shaped those in its orbit. This myth has great allure among the Chinese. It is a myth predicated on traditionalism and like essentialism, it has a reductive effect on interpreting human phenomena. Chinese speak of their “five thousand years of history” with immense pride. While that number (5,000) may be an exaggeration, even this inclination to over-estimate their historical records is evidence of the premium Chinese place on precedence (Hardy Minds of the East Lect 35). Precedents serve the Chinese thought paradigms, much as the irreducibility, (of that which is essential) serves many of the Western paradigms. Deconstructing traditionalism and its reductive impacts will necessitate a historical and contemporary examination of China, similar to the one performed on the West in the previous chapter. However, the counter to deconstructing this myth is stalwart. China’s mythology is so entwined with national identity, between that and the added element of national propaganda makes this process much more fraught. Post-Mao China has sought to capitalize on its distinctive Chinese heritage and institutions through, for example, the Religious Affairs Bureau and the Chinese Daoist Association. These institutions have a vested interest in keeping “Chinese” whatever can be construed as “of and for China.” Daoism dao jiao and Confucianism ru jiao both fit squarely under this rubric, despite being once (and outside of mainland China still are) thought-traditions predicated on providing individual and societal answers to transforming conditions (as spelled out in the Yi Jing). They were not intended to be pretenses for propagandist pageantry. Daoist exemplars especially, scoff at this type of coopting. The testimonies of Daoist clergy in China offer compelling voices regarding what is being lost (authenticity) in the denuding of their earnest and dedicated following of the Dao in pursuit of a hegemonic Chinese national identity (Palmer). First, let us consider the prevailing myth of China and how well it comports with the actual history of the emergence of the kingdom of China. “Kingdom” is a more suitable term than “nation” as in its prehistory what would become China was an uneasy confederation of disparate tribes occupying the same adjacent regions. “In the early Holocene, a succession of three cultures occupied this area: Xinglongwa (8500-

39 7000 B.C.), Xinle (7000-5000 B.C.), and Hongshan (3000-2500 B.C.)” (Loewe 48).Next to these Liao River basin residents, the Yangshao culture (ca. 5000 B.C.) flourished in the Yellow River valley and lowlands. They were the first Neolithic culture to be found in China. They were a millet farming culture that displayed “Proto-Daoist” burial rights, including, [t]he tomb of a figure, presumably religious, flanked by a dragon to his left and a tiger to his right, both formed with clam shells (Fig. 1.5). This seems to resemble descriptions in such later sources as Baopuzi (third century A.D.) of Daoist priests who employed dragons, tigers, or deer as helpers in their journeys to Heaven, where they met with deities and ancestors to acquire wisdom, medical cures, and other benefits (Loewe 51-2).

Many of these shamanistic practices were not exclusive to the Yangshao, both the Xinglongwa and Daxi cultures exhibited similar ceremonial iconographies. Many of the prehistoric Northern plains cultures conglomerated over time to form the locus of what would constitute China. The permeability of what is termed the “interactive sphere” that would comprise China is undeniable evidence of just how deep and how reactive the myth of a core Chinese culture goes. In other words, by virtue of being aware of their own multicultural origins, the Chinese elites were compelled to perpetuate a myth of an uncorrupted, indomitable “original” culture. Yet the fact remains, “a view of ancient China heretofore regarded as heresy: that Chinese civilization, rather than being the end result of a radiating process from the core (the Central Plain) to the “land of the barbarians,” in fact had many origins” (Loewe 58). Why is this significant? It demonstrates how, from its very inception, China was facing an identity crisis over exactly who and what could be amalgamated into consideration of being properly “Chinese.” From the earliest moment of a thought-tradition emerging out of China, Chinese scholars were adamant about establishing the criteria of acceptable Chinese conduct. The early successes of the Xia dynasty (ca. 2070-1600) and the Shang (ca. 1600-1046) who succeeded them created a templet of proof that it was possible to bring a people together under one rule. Later historians (primarily Western-trained historians) would argue over the veracity of claiming the Xia as a proper Chinese dynasty but for the Chinese, there is no argument to be broached. The Xia form the inception locus of China. “This was the Three Dynasties, the Xia, Shang, and Zhou. These three states arose from the Longshan base to a still higher social level. With bronze instruments of ritual and war, and further armed with a full-fledged writing system, they went on to subdue many of the wan guo and to achieve supremacy in successive periods,” (Loewe 64). That writing system is evident by the Shang dynasty in caches of Oracle bones that record much of their history and their focus on ancestral reverence. Late Shang cult, as it was recorded in the oracle-bone inscriptions, involved not mere veneration or commemoration, but actual worship.45 By this I mean that the cult was thought to be operational and pragmatic. The regular offerings, sacrificial pledges (pp. 160–62 above), appeals, reports, and so on, by which the Shang kings sustained, appeased, and informed their ancestors, were not simply marks of respect. They were attempts to influence the religious power that the ancestors possessed, either by the offering of victims or by the expressions of hope that, if the Shang king performed certain rituals, there would, for example,

40 be “no disasters” (wang huo ), there would be “no fault (or troubles)”(wang you ), we would “receive harvest” (shou nian ), and we would “receive assistance” (shou you ). Thus, ancestor worship was inextricably tied to the successful exercise of power, both spiritual and political. This undoubtedly was one of the reasons that participation in the worship was limited to members of the royal lineage. The worship of the ancestors not only validated status; it gave access to power (Keightley 162).

The emphasis on the royal lineage may well have contributed to the unrest and eventual uprising of people on the periphery. Akin to Denmark’s Muslims, marginalization breeds resentment.

4.1.2. Kingdoms become Dynasties and One Hundred Schools Bloom

The Zhou dynasty (1046-256) was the uncontested highwater mark of the ancient Chinese dynasties. The Zhou people were a marginalized group living under oppressive conditions under the Shang king. “Under a man later known as King Wen, the Zhou planned their final rebellion around 1050 B.C.E.” (Hammond Lect. 3). This multi- generational plan culminated under Wen’s son, King Wu in around 1045 B.C.E. and led to the capture of the Shang capital at Anyang. King Wu is credited with giving a speech before the final battle invoking the “Mandate of Heaven” (Tian Ming ). This justification for usurpation was “passed on to the founders of the Chou, who deserved it because of their virtue. Obviously, the future of the house of Chou depended upon whether future rulers were virtuous,” (Chan 3). Granted it was invoked more as a polemic than as a guiding principle. “Note that the Mandate of Heaven, the doctrine (usually employed as part of the victor’s propaganda) in which Heaven confers rulership on the virtuous and destroys the wicked, provides a simple moral explanation for historical causation” (Keightley 79). Yet this proved a bit of a departure from the shamanistic ancestor worship of the Shang. However, the change in political emphasis did not eclipse the cultural importance of ancestor worship. A tension developed between the more abstract impersonal Mandate of Heaven and the more reachable and obtainable ancestry that could be appealed to. The glimpse that the oracle-bone inscriptions afford us of metaphysical conceptions in the eleventh and tenth centuries b.c. suggests that the philosophical tensions that we associate primarily with the Taoism and Confucianism of Eastern Chou had already appeared, in different form, in the intellectual history of China, half a millennium earlier (Keightley 143).

The Zhou kings set out to rule with absolute hegemonic authority but culturally China embarked on a synthesis of new norms. What emerges from the Zhou conquest is not an erasure of the Shang rule as much as a hybrid of cultures. This process would repeat itself innumerable times throughout China’s history. Other features of Shang religion also survived the Zhou conquest, which traditionally marked the beginning of historical China. Its influence on Zhou thought radiated enduring Shang attitudes throughout Chinese history. Especially important, the traditional Chinese religion of ancestor worship appears already to have existed in the Shang. It signaled a religious view that society is continuous

41 across even the boundary of life and death. It contributed to the view of the spiritual realm as continuous with the natural world. The doctrine underwrote the Confucian view of society as an extended family (Hansen 32).

The Zhou set the precedent of what “a China” could be, yet in their decline, they also demonstrated how catastrophic the breaking apart of “a China” could also be. These declining years of the Zhou are respectively known as: “Spring and Autumn Period” (Chun-Qiu Shidai ) (771–476), the “Warring States Period” (zhanguo shidai ) (ca. 481-221) or the time of the “Hundred Schools of Thought” (zhuzi baijia ) (ca. 770-222). The Warring States era (475-221 B.C.) brought a great deal of chaos and suffering to China, which, paradoxically, also allowed for a remarkable degree of social mobility. Talented, ambitious men vied for political appointments and often wrote about their ideas. Collectively called the Hundred Schools, these philosophies represent a golden age of thought and intellectual freedom in China (Hardy Minds of the East Lect. 8).

Centuries of decadence and bloodshed were the fertile ground for a vast expansion of Chinese thinking to foment. Confucius (Kongzi 551-479), Mencius (Mengzi 371-289), Xunzi (ca. 300-237), Han Feizi, (ca. 233 B.C.E.) Li Si (ca. 208 B.C.E.), Zhuangzi (369-286), and scores of unrequited geniuses flourished at this time. This was the era where sophisticated and incontestable precedence were flushed out and harkened to. No end of treatises, commentaries, dissertations, and examinations exist on one or another figure or text from this period in China’s past. It is important to contextualize what most of these thinkers were attempting to figure out. The perdition in the wake of the Zhou collapse had people casting around for an answer to the question “what went wrong?” Most seem to hit on the maxim that it was people that went wrong in one fashion or another. However, it was Confucius who explained this in terms of departure from traditions, neglect of rituals, and the disregarding of precedents. This was not because of an underlying pessimism but because drift was tantamount to corruption and combating that was society's first priority. For the most part, Confucianism seemed committed to the view that people begin from an equal base—an equal innate ability to acquire and become expert in their li roles. All are capable of attaining excellence in traditional terms. Therefore, those who reach the higher ranks in that practice both deserve it and benefit others by being there. They model correct behavior for the rest of us. Submission to li ritual is the key that justifies promotion to higher roles and status (Hansen 63).

Traditionalism was given an injection of intellectualism with the teachings of Confucius. Adherence to tradition not only formed a harmonious societal norm, but it was also the very inoculation against decadence, decline and the dissolution of “Chinese” civilization. The decline of the Zhou Dynasty was precipitated by the rise of hegemonic rulers taking the title of “King” for themselves. These “tyrant kings” (ba wang ) demonstrated a disregard for their traditional roles and a disrespect for proper titles. If these were the primary antecedents for the Warring States period, Confucius concluded,

42 then the prescription for a healthy society was to be found in people fulfilling their proper roles living up to their station and a prescriptive understanding of names. This idea is captured quite succinctly by Xunzi, “[w]hen sage-kings instituted names, the names were fixed and actualities distinguished. The sage-kings’ principles were carried out and their will’s understood” (Chan 124). Xunzi championed Confucius’ teachings and elevated the rectification of names (zheng ming ) beyond a normative consideration into a systematic logical theory, in fact, Chan states that “[i]n fact, this is the nearest approach to logic in ancient Chinese philosophy,” (W.-T. Chan 1969, 128). However, Xunzi’s monopoly on logic has been more recently disputed. “In addition to meticulously developing scientific theories about geometry, mechanics, optics, and economics, the later Mohists also articulated detailed philosophical theories in areas we now recognize as logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language” (Willman). Mozi (ca. 470-391) wrote in formal extended argumentation and advocated for “universal love” (jian ai ) as the key to ending the decadence of the Spring and Autumn tumult. He established a formal school and avowed three criteria by which something could be known: utility, veracity, and precedent. Mohism (Mojia ) may not have gained traction in China like Confucianism, but the challenge presented by the Mohist to such core Confucian ideas as ren , yi and especially xiao , necessitated a response. As Hansen puts it, “Mozi launched a Socratic attack on Confucian tradition. He represents an explicit departure from the hypertraditional attitude that permeated early Confucianism” (Hansen 107). Mohists were not the only thinkers who critically engaged with some Confucian ideas; legalists (e.g. Han Feizi), logicians (e.g. Huizi ), and obviously Daoists (evident in the Laozi and the Zhuangzi) also question the “solutions” presented by Confucians like Xunzi, and Mencius. Although Confucianism was destined to be the prominent school of thought, it was the tactics of Legalism that united China and imposed its uniform singular identity. Typically, Legalists are cast as the villains of Chinese history, owing in part to their brutal, and a-moralistic approach to governance but the real disdain for Legalism is likely owing to its unabashed dismissal of tradition and history. The short-lived Qin dynasty (221-206) ended the Warring States period and consolidated a China out of disparate states by shrewd military tactics and adopting legalism as its official ruling philosophy. Legalism as conceived by the Qin prime minister Shang Yang (ca. 390- 338), espoused pragmatism over “wasteful” pursuits (i.e. Confucian style scholarship). Legalists also flouted precedent, Shang Yang offered this paradox on the subject, “If the Emperors and Kings [of old] did not copy one another, what standards should we follow?" (Turner 5395). In truth, though the severity of rewards and punishments promulgated by the legalist continued into many successive dynasties overt legalism fell quickly out of popular favor. In 202 BCE when Liu Bang founded the Han Dynasty, he proclaimed that the draconian ways of Legalism were to be abandoned and that the empire was to return to humaneness and simplicity. Yet in reality, much of the Qin tactics and administrative techniques were retained. During the Han Dynasty the scholar Han Feizi, still advocating for legalist principles, tells a parable of a man sitting on a stump who witnesses a rabbit break its neck on a stump. After this, he abandons farming and eternally sits on the same stump waiting for another rabbit. This parable has come down

43 in modern Chinese as a chengyu or four-word idiom shou zhu dai tu roughly translated as “sitting by a stump, waiting for a rabbit” the meaning of this idiom is that what worked in the past does not entail what will work in the future or that precedent does not inform effective action. During the Warring States, only the Confucians and the Mohists were true “schools” the others were amalgamations of similar thinkers who would be combined together about a century after the Warring States period by Sima Tan .

4.1.3. Establishing Traditions

Sima Tan was Court Astrologer (tai shi gong ) between 140-110. Under his ministrations, the ideas of the Hundred Schools were synthesized into like categories. The “[n]ames for the first three types-Yinyang, Ru, and Mo-preexisted Tan. The other names-Fajia, Mingjia, and Daojia-were his own invention. All six groups were in an important sense synthetic” (Campany 129). Sima Tan was acting as an innovator with his invention of new “schools” but to gain credence in imperial scholastic circles he was compelled to couch his invention in the guise of “received wisdom.” The past Sima Tan invented for “each school was said to have descended from an official function of the Zhou court, “the Fajia, for example, emerging from the liguan or chief of prisons. That vision of “the many schools” (baijia) has retained its prominence down to our recent past” (Campany 131). Sima Tan was not merely pedantically categorizing schools of thought, there was a polemic element to his work as well. He openly and compellingly advocated for “Daoism” as the preferred school for governing. While not the first to openly advocate for the adoption of Daoist ideas, (the Lao Zi and the Zhuangzi had also made arguments for Daoist ideas) Sima Tan’s Yaozhi covertly argues for not being hemmed in by tradition. As Campany puts it, “[h]e, like an American sociologist classifying “the realm of contemporary events,” shows no interest in the past” (Campany), but all the while Sima Tan pays lip service to the past. He is truly calling for a turning away from tradition. Turning from tradition was not a popular sentiment in Han China where Confucianism maintained its dominance among the gentry-scholars (Shi ). Later scholars learned from both Sima Tan and his son Sima Qian's misfortunes, and incredible accomplishments. Sima Qian famously opted to accept the humiliation of castration over execution so as to be able to finish his seminal work the Grand Scribe’s records (Shiji ). Begun by his father the Shiji was the Sima clan’s magnum opus, “On its completion, the Shiji was comparable in length to the Bible. It covered the history of the entire world as Sima Qian knew it, beginning with China’s legendary Yellow Emperor” (Hardy Minds of the East Tradition Lect. 15). It holds: eight treatises on ritual, music, astrology, calendars, economics, and more, ten chronological tables, twelve dynastic annals, thirty “hereditary houses,” biographies, and seventy biographies of “significant people” such as poets, philosophers, and doctors. The Shiji is a monumental achievement for any institution let alone any one man. It set the precedent for every successive dynasty to commission their own official record of history, “the Shiji is the first of the 24 so called standard histories that cover 18 centuries of Chinese civilization” (Hardy Minds of the East Lect. 15). In these histories, an official record of precedence

44 could be cited by generations of Chinese scholars. Few other cultures have placed a written history at the very centre of their self-determination. Some learned another lesson from the Sima clan’s examples, they learned to shroud their ideas in precedence, in history, and venerated received wisdom to put forward their own ideas. Perhaps no one better demonstrates this shrewd scholastic tactic as much as the “feminist” scholar Ban Zhao who came from a somewhat subversive stock. The Ban clan made their fortunes in the livestock business, but they owed much of their power and privilege to a woman about whom we know little, the Consort Ban. We do know that she was the daughter of a court official and concubine to Wang Zhengyuan’s son, Emperor Cheng. She was erudite and renowned for her poetry. Her erudition had helped save her brother from a charge of treason, and, as a result, he lived to father a son, Ban Biao (Wilson Lect. 4).

Ban Biao fathered twin sons Ban Gu and Ban Chao and a daughter Ban Zhao who rose to fame (later infamy) within the Han court. Biao was critical of the missing Confucian values he perceived as absent from Sima Qian’s Shiji, he, therefore, sought to have his children well inculcated in those values. Ban Gu was a truly devout Confucian scholar, but his unauthorized Book of the Han (Hanshu ) was not well received. His brother Ban Chao, spent thirty years in the imperial military stationed at the Western frontier in the Tarim Basin, creatively maintaining Han control in the face of the Xiongnu northern nomadic threat. He had great success, “Ban Chao’s frontier strategy and expeditionary forays contributed to the development of what we know as the Silk Road” (Wilson Lect. 4). But it would be their sister, Ban Zhao, who would alter the course of Chinese history in a much more enduring way. Ban Zhao was a young widow but found herself in a uniquely privileged position. Not being a prisoner in a husband’s home, she took advantage of her scholastic upbringing and became a renowned poet, socialite, and scholar in her own right. Perhaps best known for her Admonitions for Women (Nu Jie ) where she is writing advice for new brides (a precarious position in classical Chinese society) including such advice as, “Let a woman not act contrary to the wishes and opinions of parents-in-law about right and wrong” (Hinsch 129), and many other such “yielding” suggestions. However, her text includes a simple admonishment for men, “Yet only to teach men and not to teach women – is that not ignoring the essential relation between them? According to the “Rites,” it is the rule to begin to teach children to read at the age of eight years,” (Swann 84). With such slyness as to be overlooked, Ban Zhao tilts the status quo on its ear advocating for the education of women in defiance of her contemporary traditions by appealing to deeper tradition, the so-called “teaching of the sages.” Ban Zhao may not have been the first to make this move, and she certainly would not be the last, but in her example, the means to ground innovative ideas in the guise of tradition is so evident as to be applauded. “The savvy woman could adopt the self- effacing rhetoric of patrilinealism as a kind of ideological camouflage that would render her innocuous in the eyes of her enemies” (Hinsch 131). This was a very Daoist inspired approach to discourse, to be seen as harmless in the eyes of an enemy, and Ban Zhao became an exemplar of savvy Daoist scholarship in a Confucian dominated society. The two rival ideologies (Confucianism and Daoism) remained at work through the Han Dynasty (Confucianism dominating and Daoism working quietly in the

45 background). However, by the third century C.E. the Han began their decline. It was followed by The Three Kingdoms period (220–280) in which the once mighty Han was divided into the Wei, Shu, and Wu regimes. In this period of uncertainty and strife, a group of Daoists emerged as the living embodiment of the Daoist antiestablishment ethos. The stories of “The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove” (zhulin qixian ) still resonate with Chinese today. These seminal figures provided seven rich examples of the so-called Neo-Daoists' reactions to authorities clamoring for power during the Three Kingdom's period. The Seven Sages were respectively: Ji Kang (223-262), (also called Xi Kang), Liu Ling (221-300), Ruan Ji (210-263), Ruan Xian , (234-305) Xiang Xiu (227-272), Wang Rong (234-305) and Shan Tao (205-283). These seven eccentrics were part of the “Pure Conversation” (Qingtan ) movement within Daoism. This philosophical school of Daoism engaged in the more metaphysical, the more esoteric, and more ethical concerns. As a “school of thought,” qingtan was inspired by the thinking of He Yan (ca. 193-249). His scholarship on the significance of “emptiness” (wu ) inspired many of the Seven to look through the pomp and circumstance of courtly affairs and indulge in a more free-thinking, and eccentric approach to life. One of Ruan Ji’s poems well captures the sentiment that united these iconoclasts, The scholar is versed in the Six Classics,

his sense of purpose is fixed, it may not be opposed. He will not make any motion contrary to rites,

he won’t speak if not according to the rules.

Thirsty, he drinks from the clear stream’s current; hungry, he eats one tray of food for two days.

He has nothing with which to make seasonal offerings,

his clothing always leaves him suffering from the cold.

His slippers awry, he chants “Southern Wind,”1

in a hemp-padded gown he mocks splendid coaches.2 Trusting in the Way, he holds to the Poems and Documents,

his sense of right may keep him from accepting a single meal. Fierce are his phrases of censure and praise—

for such as him Laozi gave a long sigh (Swartz 85).

Ironically the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove became influential figures in Chinese culture as a whole. Their ideals of self-perfection through individual cultivation in contrast to virtue accrued through public service set the example for means to counterbalance the constraining pressures and expectations inherent in the Confucian scholastic rat-race.

46 It is into this rat-race that the great Daoist alchemist Ge Hong (ca. 283-364) emerged to provide both an example and a book, The Master Who Embraces Simplicity (Baopuzi ) of how to synthesize Daoist ethics with Confucian morality. Ge Hong and the Seven Sages represent a couple of iterations of Neo-Daoism that arose in this period. A third iteration was the so-called “religious” Daoists who are often attributed to Zhang Daoling (ca. 142 C.E) and his “Way of the Celestial Masters” (Tianshi dao ) sect. Early on they had been associated with Han rebellions and enjoyed a resurgence alongside ascending Buddhism in the Neo-Daoist movements of the fourth through the sixth centuries. The fourth iteration of the Neo-Daoists were the burgeoning scholars offering Confucian style commentaries on extant Daoist texts like the Laozi and the Zhuangzi. Ge Hong could be seen as occupying any number of these different iterations, but in him, we get a feel for how Sima Tan’s Daojia was assimilating itself into an altering Chinese landscape. In Ge Hong, a fusion of ideas can be seen at work. “Although he was a Daoist, Ge Hong did not entirely withdraw from the world. He was a successful militia commander, and he alternated between periods of government service and Daoist reclusion throughout his life” (Hardy Minds of the East Lect. 16). His recommendation to do away with official appointments by recommendation and replace it strictly with the imperial examination system would prove both prophetic and herald a major victory of meritocracy over aristocracy.

4.1.4. A Way Things Never Were

Because Daoism is the subject of this thesis it is important to ask at this point, which if any of these iterations embodies the “true” Daoism as posited by Kirkland? The answer does not become more refined (more essentialized) in the ensuing centuries. Indeed, the fall of the Han precipitated the rise of so-called “Neo-Daoism” with its multiple forms and variations. However, what is clear is that by this point in Chinese history the premium placed on tradition and precedent had become thoroughly inculcated into China’s society. Ostensibly the imperial examination system attempted to test for inculcation. More on that shortly. But the evolving nature of China’s societal makeup, its recalcitrance to accepting changes, and the cultural norm of ostracizing “outsiders” all served as reinforcers of this high-cultural expectation. To excel within Chinese society necessitated having a deeply grounded and exhaustive understanding of history. The clamoring for position among the educated was still in its fetal stages through the Three Kingdoms period. Meritocracy and aristocracy were still vying for the reins of power and social mobility was still greatly hemmed in. However, the tool kit for a talented person to climb the social ladder had been in place since the Han Dynasty but, within the next couple of centuries that tool kit (in the form of the Chinese civil service imperial examinations) was about to get a serious retooling. It would prove to be the most powerful instrument for reinforcing Chinese values chief among these the value of history, praxis, and traditions. In 581 CE a northern general Yang Jian (541-604) seized power and set about establishing a reunification of China which he completed within eight years. One new element of the Sui Dynasty (581-618) was the decision to be patrons of Buddhism, which had gained prominence in China through the collapse of the Han and the ensuing

47 unrest of the Three Kingdoms. Buddhism remained a contentious new addition to the Chinese cultural milieu for many years. Its addition to Chinese society helped to reshape existing institutions and necessitated reexaminations of thought-traditions like Daoism and Confucianism. Those reinterpretations of classic Chinese thought-traditions bloomed in the following Tang Dynasty (618-907). The Tang is often referred to as China’s “golden age” and certainly was the most cosmopolitan age China had experienced up until then. Wilson refers to the Tang culture as a “hybridizing” of desperate periphery people. Between 617-621 the Li family, descendants of Turkic nomads, consolidated their power and claimed to be the descendants of Laozi. Li Shimin had several Shaolin Buddhist monks employed as personal bodyguards and in 626 when his father Li Yuan abdicated his throne, the Taizong Emperor elevated Buddhism by “award[ing] tax-exempt land to Buddhist monasteries and also provided patronage and support for the translation of Buddhist texts into Chinese” (Ho 158). However, it would be Xuanzang’s pilgrimage to India that would cement Buddhism’s place within Chinese culture. “After sixteen years traveling and studying, he returned to China with 657 texts and, with the emperor’s patronage, set up one of the most ambitious translation projects in Chinese history” (Hardy Minds of the East Lect. 17). His legend was transformed into the story Journey to the West (Xi You Ji ) first published in the 16th century. This fable recounts the monk’s journey but has him accompanied by divine helpers: Pigsy (Zhu Bajie ), Sandy (Sha Wujing ), and perhaps most famously, the most Daoist like character in the story, the Monkey King (Sun Wukong ). Monkey is a non-conformist, impulsive rascal (another iteration of Li Bai, the Seven Sages and the character of choice voiced by Jackie Chan in the Kung Fu Panda series. Buddhism fell out of favour among the elite towards the end of the Tang Dynasty but remained highly prized among the laity. To this day tales of the Monkey King remains popular throughout the Chinese-influenced world. Yet Xuanzang’s efforts represent a complete sinification of what had been up until his time a “foreign” element among the Chinese. Despite Buddhism’s thorough integration into Chinese popular culture, many among the intelligentsia saw in it a competitor for hearts and minds. Midway through the Tang a civil war known as The An Lushan Rebellion (755-763) broke out and tore the country asunder. The antecedence of the An Lushan Rebellion was steeped in palace intrigues, romance, and xenophobic court ministers. Han Yu (768-824) was born at the very end of this tumultuous period and (in a manner that would please William F. Buckley Jr.) stood athwart history and said “wait! Remember when . . .” in a polite Confucian manner. Han Yu took and passed the imperial exams on his fourth attempt and became a vociferous advocate for a “return” to Confucianism. “In 805, he wrote “Essentials of the Moral Way” (or “An Inquiry on the Dao”), an essay that suggested Chinese civilization should be defined by Confucianism,” (Hardy Minds of the East Lect. 23). He also advocated for a return to the formal ancient prose style of the Analects spearheading what became known as the “ancient writing/culture” (gu wen ) movement. Han Yu so believed in the supremacy of Confucianism that in 819 he wrote a strongly worded protest memorial to the emperor against Buddhist worship (specifically a ceremony celebrating a relic of the Buddha). This memorial nearly got him executed but instead, he suffered banishment from the

48 imperial capital to southern China. Not to be deterred from his Confucian chauvinism, in his new post, Han Yu wrote his famous “Proclamation to the Crocodile” in which he excoriates a man-eating crocodile for being insubordinate to the emperor. The governor has received the command of the Son of Heaven to protect this ground and take charge of its people; but you, crocodile, goggle-eyed, are not content with the deep waters of the creek, but seize your advantage to devour the people and their stock, the bears and boars, stags and deer, to fatten your body and multiply your sons and grandsons. You join issue with the governor and contend with him for the mastery. The governor, though weak and feeble, will not endure to bow his head and humble his heart before a crocodile, nor will he look on timorously and be put to shame before his officers and his people by leading unworthily a borrowed existence in this place. But having received the command of the Son of Heaven to come here as an officer, he cannot but dispute with you, crocodile: and if you have understanding, do you hearken to the governor's words (Chou).

Quite astonishingly, a storm swept in and within a few weeks, the offending crocodile was nowhere to be found in the region. As interesting a figure as Han Yu presents, his influence among Confucian scholars caught fire. By the end of the Tang, Confucians had reasserted themselves as the indispensable commodity of a thriving Chinese empire. However, as the literati class grew, the number of official posts did not. Consequently, many educated Confucian gentlemen turning to non-official civil pursuits. Men such as Su Shi (1037-1101) also known as “Su of the Eastern Slopes” (Dongpo Jushi ) provided an example of how these swelling numbers of Confucian elites could be of service, even if they did not serve in official capacities. Most literati would never hold office, but they didn’t have to if they wanted to emulate Su Shi. He was a model of the well-rounded literatus. Aside from being a public servant, essayist, and poet, he was also a painter, calligrapher, raconteur, gourmand, as well as an expert in agriculture, hydraulics, and even medicine (Wilson Lect. 9).

Su Shi was much beloved by the Chinese for his selfless dedication to serving his fellow citizens. His benevolence is captured quite beautifully in his biography by Lin Yutang (1895-1976), Together with Su’s letter to Chu Shouchang against infanticide and his letter of 1092 to the Empress begging for forgiveness of debts to the poor, this letter [forsaking revenge on a rival] must rank among the three greatest human documents written by the poet (Yutang 340).

Men such as him helped to ensure, not only that Confucian cultural norms were to become established as the dominant standard but, as suggested by Ge Hong, the examinations had begun to replace aristocratic prerogative and would prove a reinforcer of those same cultural norms. The end of the Tang was followed by about fifty years of disarray, but Confucianism prevailed as the Song dynasty (960-1279) rose from its ashes. This was a prosperous and commercially expansive time and Confucianism flourished producing many of the so-called Neo-Confucian scholars. “[I]n the 11th century, scholars such as

49 Zhou Dunyi, Zhang Zai, Cheng Hao, and Cheng I sought to give Confucian ethics a metaphysical foundation from Daoism and Buddhism” (Hardy Minds of the East Lect. 23). Once again, innovation found a home in the synthesizing of older ideas and turning to “ancient wisdom” as the source of authentication.

4.1.5. The Return of the Jinshi

Perhaps no figure embodies this movement as well as Zhu Xi (1130-1200). Zhu has been touted as one of the most influential thinkers in Chinese history behind Confucius, Mencius, and Laozi. Zhu Xi saw that in order to make Confucian ideas and ideals relevant to the times he occupied they required an overhaul. According to Zhu Xi, studying is about spiritual enlightenment, not exam success. Zhu Xi created a focused and sequential curriculum. Instead of mastering the five daunting classics called for in the civil service exams, one should start with a more manageable set of four books. These were The Great Learning, the Analects, Mencius, and the Doctrine of the Mean. They’re much less voluminous and contain the clearest exposition of the way of the ancient Confucian masters (Wilson Lect. 9).

By updating and streamlining the materials for the imperial exams, Zhu Xi helped to create a machine of conformity. In 1315, more than a century after his death, the Mongol Yuan Dynasty recruited Chinese officials to work under their rule. They reinstated the exams and opted to test students on their knowledge of the Four Books and Zhu Xi’s commentaries instead of the Five Classics. From that point until 1905, just before the end of imperial rule in China (the Qing Dynasty fell in 1911) the exams and what it meant to be a truly “Chinese” person were established and reinforced by Zhu Xi’s curricula. With so much of Chinese social, political and cultural heritage tied up in the imperial exam system, it is worth taking a moment to dig into what the exams were and how they defined, reinforced and integrated Chinese society. Tens of millions of highly educated and highly motivated men endured the civil service examinations throughout China’s imperial era. Failure often meant men despaired or raged, but then began preparing for the next cycle of exams. For all its faults, the examinations system was a powerful form of ordering, integrating, and evaluating society. What the Grand Canal did for the physical integration of the empire, the examination system did for imperial China’s cultural unity (Wilson Lect. 23).

The preparation for the exams began with the birth of a suitable son. Parents would forgo other aspirations for their selected prodigal son in favor of investing in their formal education. Passing at the lowest level came with perks (such as tax exemptions and immunity from corporal punishment) but even failing to pass might allow a former candidate to set themselves up as a local tutor or even to establish a school. Firstly, the prospect would need to be literate in thousands of Chinese characters, then “[b]y age seven or eight, a student would be entrusted to the care of a teacher, usually a man who had some examination success. Wealthy families preferred private tutors, but many young men studied in village schools” (Wilson Lect. 23). This would be the beginning of

50 the rote memorization of core classics, in addition to mastery of the “eight-legged essay” (baguwen ). As a young man, the candidate may try his hand at the qualifying exam, the lowest level of which was the county or prefectural exam (xian kao shi or (fufu kao shi ). Success at this level ensured some improvement in socio- economic status and qualified one, for life, to move on to the Provincial Exam (xiangshi ) which was held every three years at the provincial capital. The actual examination process lasted anywhere between one week and ten days and paranoia about cheating was paramount. Anything with writing on it was confiscated before entering the exam compound and candidates were sequestered to isolated cells where they were to remain the entire time. If someone died during the exams, their body was simply hurled over the compound wall. Even failure here ensured that the candidate and successful officials shared a common experience and education. Out of the thousands of candidates, only a few hundred would pass but those whose names did not appear on the placard might still wait with bated breath as the senior examiner would write in the names of the top five newly minted “elevated man” (juren ). For these elite, offers of employment, marriage proposals, gifts of ingratiation would pour in. The whole of Chinese culture revered these men (at least openly) and for the ambitious juren their sights turned to the next conquest, passing the Metropolitan and Palace examinations. Metropolitan exams (huishi ) were a rehearsal of the Provincial ones with higher stakes. Several thousand juren would descend on the capital and endure a similar grueling ordeal, but instead of the eight-legged essays, they were required to answer their questions in the form of a memorial (official letter to the emperor). Knowing that success at this level may well mean your exam answers might be read by the emperor at a future date could only have added pressure. A few hundred successful candidates would now be conferred the title of “advanced scholar” (jinshi ). “One jinshi every three generations seems to have been enough to maintain a family’s social standing” (Wilson Lect. 23). This was an achievement that provided for generations, wealth, prestige and power that marked one as occupying the apex of Chinese society and culture. “Even people who failed the exams received an education that gave them a lot in common with the jinshi who served as county magistrates or provincial governors. That bond meant that local officials increasingly relied on the educated local elite who had endured the examination prep” (Wilson Lect. 23). The exams gave a common ideology, common mores, and common experiences for people within China for centuries. Exam preparation, education, machinations, institutions, suppliers and materials (for example the manufacturing of books, paper, inks, desks, robes), hordes of functionaries needed to maintain and execute the exams, and the millions of secondary industries that earned a living by these triennial market booms all contributed to a societal fervor that molded what it meant to be Chinese for centuries. While the imperial examinations fostered a top-down prescriptive approach to forming Chinese identity, the Chinese people were not so homogeneous as to be without subversives. Coastal traders, pirates, frontier interlopers and a host of “minority” people made up a vast majority of China’s societal pressure points. The pressure to conform was, and to this day is, in China a high-handed enterprise. According to anthropologist Steven Harrell, in their interactions with the peripheral peoples, Chinese governments from the Ming and Qing dynasties to the People's Republic positioned themselves as the civilizing center committed

51 “to raise the peripheral peoples’ civilization to the level of the center, or at least closer to that level” (Harrell 1995: 4). These “civilizing projects,” as Harrell calls them, stemmed not so much from the state's impulse to do good for the peripheral peoples it dominated; rather, they were part of the process of domination. This is to say, one of the ways the civilizing center cast its authority and hegemony over the dominated was to transform them into an image of itself (Harrell 1995:4) (Ong 19).

Many people feel this pressure to conform. Many saw exam successes as their ticket to successful integration. Failure in this endeavor broke many candidates. Still most went home, licked their wounds, and tried several more times or found another means to ingratiate themselves into Chinese society. Yet others like Hong Xiuquan (1814- 1864) after his third failure at the qualifying exam in 1837, suffered from stress illness, delirium, and delusions. Men like him might rail against the whole of the imperial system. He was not unique in his bitter resentment towards the exams, the examiners, and the whole Chinese social structure, but his particular case resulted in megalomania, delusions of Christian grandeur, and war. He abandoned his attempts to achieve success within the Mandarin scholarly system and instead went about establishing a nominally Christian utopian society. “Hong's ideology came to embrace both the creation of a new Christian community and the destruction of the Manchus, against whose wickedness and deceit he cried out in moving and powerful terms” (Spence 171-2). Under Hong Xiuquan’s leadership, the Taiping Heavenly King (Tai ping tian wang) would eventually become the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864). The toll of the Taiping Rebellion is hard to conceptualize, as this was the largest single genocide in modern history. “The death toll from the Taiping War has generally been estimated at twenty million people; some say thirty million, and recent demographic studies have estimated a much larger number, reaching up to seventy million dead (Platt, p. 358)” (Li 2014). This was just one more wound from the opening salvos of what later Chinese came to refer to as “The Century of Humiliation.” It helped further cripple Chinese society when it already faced external pressures from the avarice of Western nations and growing Japanese chauvinism.

52 4.1.6. Invading Pathogens

Figure 2 LeRaphael Petit Journal Sanzio's January Schools 16th of Athens 1898 “En commissioned Chine Le gâteau by Pope des JuliusRois II et... des Empereurs” English: “China -- the cake of kings and... of emperors”

China had faced invasions before, and as stated before, even their last dynasty, the Qing (r. 1636-1912), were descendants of Northern nomadic invaders known as the “jurchen” (Nuzhen ). Yet like all previous invaders the Manchus, as they were also known, succumbed to sinification, adopting much of the previous Ming (r. 1368-1644) dynasty’s norms. The Western invaders of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries proved impervious to similar sinification. These “Western Devils” came with a very different agenda than the Mongols or the Manchus. They did not seek to occupy and rule China but to extort its riches and subjugate its peoples. The tribulations of the Century of Humiliation were marked by two opium wars, a series of on equal treaties (their inequity highlighted by the extraterritoriality enjoy by foreign liaisons) and the Sino Japanese wars.

53 In the face of all this strife Prince Gong (1833-1898) advocated for the Self- Strengthening Movement (Tongzhi Zhongxing ) (1862-1875). The idea behind these reforms was “to manage rural unrest and to learn from foreigners how to produce modern weapons. Indeed, by the mid-1870s, China was manufacturing thousands of small arms comparable to those used by Europeans” (Baum Lect. 5). However, along with technological acumen came broader ideas of ideological and structural reforms. In response to this, men like “Kang Youwei (1858-1927) argued that Confucius could still be China’s salvation” (Hardy Minds of the East Lect. 33). Kang engaged in the time-tested strategy of “reinterpreting” Confucianism. “He [Confucius] therefore inaugurated the doctrine of the Three Rotating Phases so that later generations may adapt and change in order to remove harm” (Chan 727). Yet his reinterpretations were seen as radical and heterodoxic. His memorial to the emperor was entertained but ultimately rejected by the Dowager Empress Cixi (1861-1908). For his efforts, he was forced to flee China to Japan. Cixi and her compatriots were more inclined to clandestinely support movements like the Boxers Uprisings (1898-1900) even while the young Emperor Guangxu (1871-1908) embarked in systemic changes, known as the Hundred Days of Reform. In the end, nothing could save the End of the Qing Empire and with it the end of dynastic rule in China. The West had brought with it not only strife but ideologies and ideas. These as much as any other influence helped usher in an end to the traditional social structure of China. For the first time in centuries “tradition” as such, had fallen greatly out of favor in China. It had failed to inoculate their civilization against the corruption of external powers. So, the search began for new structures and new systems upon which the Chinese could rely in facing a world that had been so deeply transformed from that of their ancestors. For a brief moment, it looked as though they had found their “new” way. Sun Yat-sen (Sun Yixian ) (1866-1925) had been a powerful leader in the overthrow of the Qing he was “the titular head of the broad spectrum of “revolutionary”[sic] and anti-Qing groups that were lumped together as the Revolutionary Alliance” (Spence, The Search for Modern China 261). He was also the heir apparent to lead the newly formed republic. His Guomindang (GMD) failed to maintain a republic in China beyond the end of World War II (1949) in the face of a competing ideology. The birth of Chinese Communism (1917-1925) was spearheaded by a young and ambitious Mao Zedong. Mao’s communist vision could have been the death of traditionalism in China. As Chiang K’ai-shek (Jiang Zhongzheng ) (1887-1975) and the remaining GMD fled mainland China for Taiwan, Mao Zedong ascended a platform atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace at the southern entrance to the Forbidden City. Looking down from the same majestic edifice where a succession of Chinese emperors and court officials had displayed the awesome might of the Middle Kingdom, Mao proudly proclaimed the birth of the People’s Republic of China (Baum Lect. 13).

Mao’s genius was to juxtapose the revolutionary “new” with the deeply rooted “traditional.” His commemoration of the twenty-eighth anniversary of the Communist Party (June 30th, 1949) demonstrates this ability well. A single line at its conclusion, “[b]ut we still have much work to do; to use the analogy of a journey, our last work is

54 only the first step in a long march of ten thousand li” (Cheng 357). Mao spun together these elements seamlessly and seduced a generation to embrace his vision. Mao’s imperial style combined with centuries of inculcation to Confucian values served to create a national cognitive dissonance that is still in evidence in contemporary China. “The ideas of Mao Zedong (1893-1976) have affected more people, to a larger extent, than almost anyone else in modern history” (Hardy Minds of the East Lect. 34), although not an emperor in title, in effect Mao was as pivotal in Chinese history as any Chinese leader that preceded him. He was often confronted with the tragic results of the implementation of his decrees and would fall back on allusions to tradition to reinvigorate the population. His 1957 response to popular agitation to full collectivization of the rural farm was to let “a hundred schools of thought contend,” as a ruse to rout out dissidents. This was an allusion to The Hundred Schools of Thought (zhuzi baijia ) of Warring States China. Less than a decade later, on the heels of major famine due to collectivization, and the failure of his Great Leap Forward “with the goal of galvanizing human life and the economy alike by ending all the old distinctions of gender, age, skill, and occupation. It was a fantastic dream, and it led to catastrophe for millions of people as famine followed euphoria” (Spence 440). Mao’s waning power was reasserted with his call for a Cultural Revolution, formally the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in which he called for Red Guards to “destroy the four olds.” This was a wholesale attack on China’s traditionalism. “In their drive against the “four olds”—old customs, habits, culture, and thinking—Red Guards caused vast destruction to buildings, art objects, and temples” (Spence 649). Many Chinese who had not already fled the mainland did so under this purge of tradition. They took their traditions with them to the ever-increasing diaspora of Chinese emigrants. Locations like Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan were more readily within reach for these fleeing refugees. Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and other former tributary states also provided inviting succor. Far from China: North America, South America, the Caribbean, Oceania, South Africa, and Europe; waves of migration had been forming since the nineteenth century. Under Maoist zealots, those waves took on tsunami proportions. Today, the largest population of ethnic Chinese outside of Asia resides in the New York metropolitan area (Wang). Today China retains much of the schizophrenic self-identity imposed upon it during Mao’s reign. This applies not only to tradition versus change but also to indigenous versus dispersed. The term huaqiao has become a fixed part of the Chinese lexicon that carries with it a lot of presuppositional baggage. These diasporic Chinese, “[d]espite the avowed goal by Chinese officials and literati to civilize the emigrants, there were always reservations at the back of their minds that no matter how hard overseas Chinese tried, they would never be on par with their China counterparts in terms of civility and Chineseness” (Ong 23). This sentiment towards Chinese who “abandoned” the motherland is only amplified towards those who would presume a claim on what they perceive as rightly their “Chinese” cultural heritage.

55 4.1.7. Gold-medal Traditions

Returning to cultural heritage brings us back to Daoism. “After the interval of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), in which even the Daoist Association was dissolved and the monasteries closed or converted to secular uses, Daoism, together with the four other official religions, was reinstated” (Palmer 30). After Mao under Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997), China was allowed to capitalize on its “Chineseness” again. And capitalize they did. China’s economic explosion in the 1990s had two particularly fascinating by- products. The first of these was the visible rekindling of Chinese national pride and patriotism. Not since the early 1950s, when Mao reclaimed the wounded dignity of the Chinese people, had the laobaixing displayed such unabashed pride in their country and its accomplishments. The second by-product involved a revival of the darker side of Chinese nationalism—xenophobia—and a venting of long-repressed resentments against those countries that had victimized China in the past (Baum Lect. 43).

With this phoenix-like rise, China also experienced a surge of nationalism that infected every aspect of their culture. In 2008 the Chinese hosted the Summer Olympic Games and in the opening ceremony commenced a virtual “debutante ball” on the world stage. The over four-hour ceremony celebrated much of China’s antiquity. “In the first act of the cultural performance, the unique history was first presented with the well- known four great inventions: paper-making, movable type, gunpowder, and the compass” (Cui 1227). This media event was carefully orchestrated not only to position China as friendly and formidable in the imaginations of foreign nationals but to once and for all molt the long looming guise of “the sick man of Asia” (Dongya bingfu ). “Thus, a sports event hosted by China offered a perfect chance both to show pride in its ancient civilization, and more important, to wipe out the oppression and humiliation that has been implicated in the Chinese body in modern times” (Cui 1222). Successfully achieving these ends entailed recounting the myth of China. “Those [aspects] highlighted as the first, the oldest, and the grandest were all used to indicate the unique position that ancient China held in the world and make it clear that the Chinese national image was worthy of pride” (Cui 1228). In the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, an unabashed effort to reify the “true” traditional Chinese identity can be observed. A synchronized performance of 2008 taijiquan practitioners stood out as strikingly memorable. Was this Daoism being showcased? Maybe or maybe not, but if it was then an orchestrated, homogenized, superficial, and popularly appealing display of Daoism, it was what the CCP was prepared to embrace publicly. It reinforced the cultural tradition aspect of taijiquan only. And a cultural identity, predicated on millennia of tradition, leaves little room for alteration, hybridity, or drift. China took the gold medal here in creating a perfect intersection of precedence, traditionalism, and the grand myth of China all in four hours and nine minutes on Friday, 8 August 2008. Here and in the preceding chapter, synoptic analyses, rather than comprehensive histories, have been laid out for both the Western and Eastern thought-traditions. This was to expose the substratum of essentialism and traditionalism respectively that prevail within each culture. Now that a clearer understanding of the intellectual landscape has

56 been laid out, offering a navigational tool to correct for presuppositional biases can be more easily substantiated. That tool is presented in the form of the PVA.

57 Chapter 5. The hermeneutic of the perceived-value-added (PVA) model

5.1.1. The Way Cannot be Told

By this point, it should be quite clear that Daoism is suffering from categorization pressures both emic and etic. Traditionalists would house Daoism squarely within the boundaries of a Chinese cultural/religious phenomenon, while essentializing academics would have Daoism establish some form of distinct inclusive/exclusive criteria (something akin to the Nicaean creed) to clearly demarcate who and what qualifies as in or out. Yet despite these pressures, Daoists continue to defy the questing grasp of examiners. Like scuba-divers trying to handle an octopus, a firm grasp of Daoism remains elusive while readily being capable of gripping the interest of the observer. In this section I will not offer a tool to capture Daoism once and for all, but instead a hermeneutic model that may better allow the diver a means to observe Daoism in its varied natural habitats and hopefully shift the thinking as to what qualifies as in or out of the Daoist tent. The Daoist thought-tradition is very emphatic on cautioning against our predilection to reduce things to some form of artificial binary. As has been demonstrated earlier this cautioning rests on some very sound reasoning. Artificial binary reductions can be monstrously consequential, as it fosters conflicts around who and what qualifies as “in” and who and what qualifies as “out.” This could be a very terse Cliff note to the histories spelled out in the previous two chapters. The long battles to exclude running conterminously with the long battles to be accepted. Each episode in the history of the Eastern and Western thought-traditions appears punctuated by either another inclusion or exclusion of what was earlier taken to be a fringe idea, people or group. Generally, the long-arc of history has been one of broader inclusion resulting in greater diversity by- and-large. Those who were once marginalized and “unacceptable” find room in the larger ocean of ideas. Many a thinker has asserted many a novel idea; many have put forth proofs or compelling evidence in support of their assertions. Yet the greatest minds in history have exhibited a crescendo to their ideas and arrived upon the shores of ineffability. This was as true for the Buddhists’ “emptiness” as it was for Kant’s noumena or Nietzsche’s “army of metaphors,” Kierkegaard’s “paradox of thoughts” or Wittgenstein’s incapability to capture the logical form of a rude gesture. For Daoism the truth of ineffability rests right at its centre. The Dao De Jing famously states that “those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know” (Ryden: 56). This is more than a philosophical disclaimer; it is an invitation to interrogate professed knowledge and an assertion that true knowledge exceeds the capacity of language to be captured. Socrates solidified his position as the father of Western thought not by making grandiose declarations but by engaging the great minds of his day in healthy skeptical debates regarding their assertions of “truth.” Around the same time Socrates was being executed for his efforts, Zhuangzi was lamenting over

58 his desire to meet, “a man who has abandoned words, for there is a man I would care to have a word with” (Merton Sect. 19). Sentiments such as these spawned a healthy suspicion of those who would proffer dictums. Across the Himalayas, and centuries later, Nagarjuna took the more circuitous route to arrive at a proof of the same concept. His catuskoti (tetralemma) set out the logical proof ({T}, {F}, {T, F} and {}) whereby no singular binary position can be said to completely capture ineffable concepts such as the Buddha-nature of a dog, your face before your parents met, what becomes of an enlightened dead person gave evidence of the true “emptiness” of manifestations. These familiar koans may strike some as hackneyed Zen, but their usefulness in advancing Mahayana Buddhists’ metaphysical ideas cannot be overemphasized. Mahayana was the primary form of Buddhism that entered China and an ongoing dialectical relationship with indigenous Daoists who already regarded such “proofs” with a guarded receptivity. However, Nagarjuna’s catuskoti did not assert what reality was, it simply demonstrated that any logical assertion regarding the matter could be demonstrated as incomplete. The idea of “form is emptiness and emptiness is form” paired well with the Daoist’s “uncarved block” and “being and non-being.” Centuries later Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), after decades spent as a philosopher, Baghdad university professor, and legal expert, would happen upon this same realization that “truth” was an ineffable experience after experiencing his own spiritual crisis in which he realized that pure religious truth was beyond the reach of reason and logic. In more modern times the sophisticated thinkers of the post- enlightenment West occasioned on this same fault of reason and logic. “Immanuel Kant, said that there are things one cannot experience (noumena), and that we cannot talk about such things. He also explained why this is so: our concepts apply only to things we can experience.” (Priest). Kant’s own words on the matter are more discursive, Our understanding thus acquires a kind of negative extension, that is, it does not become itself limited by sensibility, but, on the contrary, limits it, by calling things by themselves (not considered as phenomena) noumena. In doing this, it immediately proceeds to prescribe limits to itself, by admitting that it cannot know these noumena by means of the categories, but can only think of them under the name of something unknown (Kant 209).

Wittgenstein posited in the Tractatus that some truths can be shown but not spoken about, “The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.” (Wittgenstein Tractatus 68) Examples of the ineffability of “truth” abound. Despite all of these great thinkers’ maxims, the desire to “make concrete” what is fluid and cannot be pinned down persists both in academia and in people’s daily lives. Our human impulse to default back to binary {T}∧{F} rudimentary logic seems to forever constrain our analytical thoughts. Yet some seem to deftly escape the binary reductionist trap and provide useful alternative routes.

59 5.1.2. Practical Considerations

William James (1842-1910) was one such thinker and among the first contemporary mind to tackle persistent binarism head-on. His radical pragmatism implores others to treat experiences seriously and, in fact, as paramount to philosophies or scientific theories. “Every idea is someone’s; it is owned. Mental life is not an empty container filled with experiences agglomerating with one another. A thought is not a thought; it is my thought. The external world is chosen for the content that will be experienced and associated. Selection is at the core of experience” (Robinson Lect. 46). James referred to his examination of knowledge as being grounded in radical empiricism, despite conceding that there were things not knowable through experiences alone; however, most of these he asserts are abstractions and not highly relevant to daily life. Daily life and daily experiences discredit and defy dichotomizations. His pluralistic understanding of life does not reduce to abject relativism; it is more a fallibilism, by which he posits that because of the ever-continuous variation in experiences (individual or collective) that what is “true” now may be tied to our “highest interests” but these are fallible. William James was, above all, a realist: We must accept what is. Unlike the positivists, however, James took this to mean that we must accept that there is a religious element to life because credible report points to the existence of one, as well as to a striving to perfect oneself and to needs that go beyond the individual soul or body. There are, however, things that we cannot finally know. The fallibilist doesn’t deny that there is some absolute point of focus on which human interests can converge, but we are warned to be suspicious of those who come to us with final answers (Robinson Lect. 47).

Building on James’s fallibilist-pragmatism, a hermeneutic that treats seriously the notion that, “[i]t is not the province of science or philosophy to declare, for instance, that religious experiences and visions are more or less valid than other experiences,” (Robinson Lect. 46) but to treat all experiences with an equanimity that befit them. His insight that every idea is someone’s idea, every thought is owned, therefore the faculty of selectivity is of paramount consideration when one attends to the philosophy of thought. James’s writings are prodigious, and in his work on science, philosophy, and religion James is quite lucid, Let us play fair in this whole matter, and be quite candid with ourselves and with the facts. When we think certain states of mind superior to others, is it ever because of what we know concerning their organic antecedents? No! it is always for two entirely different reasons. It is either because we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life (James 22).

In the pursuit of “consequential fruits of life,” a hermeneutic that seeks these out may be established. Hermeneutics are simply a lens through which a thing can be observed. However, “hermeneutics” are among the terms (especially in Religious Studies) that labour under the aforementioned “Protestant bias.” So, it is worth a brief digression to lay bare what is actually being sought after with this new particular hermeneutical tool.

60 A hermeneutic is truly nothing more than a lens through which something may be observed. A famous example of this is from Wittgenstein's Lectures, (1932-1935) in which he posits, “Everybody is really going to Paris. True, some don't get there, but all their movements are preliminary,” (Wittgenstein “Cambridge Lectures” 16). This is not put forth as a “true/false” postulate, meant instead to invoke a lens through which one’s perspective on people’s activities is shifted away from the everyday assessment to observing people with a conceived purpose. Classically in biblical studies, the practice of “hermeneutics” is the imperative of theologians to cast themselves back and attempt to place themselves in the place, time and mindset of the authors of specific biblical passages—what was in the mind of Paul when he wrote his letter to the Corinthians? This is a hermeneutic, but it is far from the only lens one might adopt. To interpret events, text or phenomenon through the lens of a specific individual is an exercise in empathy, but to treat biblical hermeneutics as a normative means of doing religious studies is a misnomer. We all adopt hermeneutics all the time, it is only when they are incongruent with our typical lens that they may spark an epiphany. Anecdotally, not too long ago I had a co-worker approach me and tell me that her husband wanted to take her to see the latest installment in the Star Wars franchise. She confessed to never having watched any of the prior films. Knowing that I had, and would be seeing the film that evening, she proceeded to ask me if I thought she “would be totally lost” watching this latest film. As I watched that evening, I could not help but occasionally giggle as I tried to imagine the experience of this particular film being a person’s introduction to this multi-generational franchise. This was a hermeneutic lens that I adopted that changed my experience of what I observed. It may never have occurred to me to apply this particular lens had I not had that particular interaction with a co-worker; yet having had it I was powerless to not be drawn into this novel approach to the film.

5.1.3. Polishing the PVA Lens

The PVA model is a hermeneutical tool of a similar ilk. Its purpose is to cast the observer away from their rote experience and observations and instead attempt to appreciate a subject from a new point of view. That view asks the question “where in this phenomenon (text, practice, title) does this particular subject perceive value being added (or detracted) from their experience?” This may sound simple enough, yet it too requires an act of empathy on the part of the observer, for example, asking “where is the perceived value being added to applying a “Daoist” label to a work like the Han Feizi to be found?” For Ming Dynasty Daoists, looking for Daoist proclivities in any influential Chinese figures of antiquity, by including the Han Feizi in nearly fifteen hundred texts of the Daoist Canon (Daozang ) they provided a demonstration of how and when Daoist principles were utilized in a legitimate and effective practice of governance. Despite not being a self-ascribed “Daoist,” Han Feizi’s advice comports quite well with Daoist principles such as wu wei. “He advocates that mystically empty, unified, and still heart- mind as a ruling technique” (Hansen 351). Making the Han Feizi part of the Daoist Canon also stripped away some of the “legalist-villain” stigmas from his works and implored Daoists to take another look at what was being advoked in his works instead of succumbing to the disregard stemming from his label as the “Legalist scholar.” Attention to the background and what is hidden or disregarded are all very core to Daoist ideals.

61 Likewise, the PVA can be used to examine contemporary manifestations of Daoist inspired works. Take Benjamin Hoff’s 1982 The Tao of Pooh as a perfect opportunity to determine what value is being added by adopting the “Tao” label for the text. However, astute and scholastically dutiful Hoff’s exegesis of Daoist ideas is, his work has nonetheless had a significant impact on many a Western reader. In his article in the British Journal of Medicine titled “The Tao Of Pooh: A Philosophy That Changed My Practice,” Michael Archer writes about how his encounter with this pithy text altered his approach to practicing medicine. “Hoff has shown me how the ideal is to be a simple character such as Pooh himself, the eponymous P'u, the uncarved block—accepting life, work, and other people as they are rather than trying to impose order on them” (Archer) Hoff’s synthesis of beloved characters from classic childhood-fiction with central ideas of Daoism such as wu wei, pu, and de is no more a stretch of the tradition of Daoism than was the choice to include the Han Feizi in the Daoist Canon. Likewise, the “value-added” is this book's accessibility to readers looking for a new perspective on dealing with change. “I now seek to accept and move with events as they occur, preferring not to try to impose change nor viewing change as an obstacle to be overcome” (Archer). This certainly seems to be an embrace of a Daoist ethic. A former nurse colleague of mine told me that their hospital psyche ward retains a copy of The Tao of Pooh on hand because of its reoccurring effectiveness in facilitating dialogues with patients that may not engage with any other material. It would appear that one scholar’s “fatuous fluff” is another’s spiritual balm. And to paraphrase William James, when the contest comes down to experience versus science or philosophy, the onus is on the later to give way and find a means to accept the former. A lungfish may be more closely related to a cow than to a salmon, but its scientific taxonomy won’t stop people from fishing for both. The Tao of Pooh unlike the Daoist canon was written and published with a wide audience in mind. The Daoist canon was never meant for mass consumption. It is filled with highly esoteric texts that were written, published, and preserved for dissemination to Daoist priests, scholars, and initiated specialists. Its contents are an eclectic blend of texts compiled over a millennium. Even most self-identified Daoists are only obliquely aware of its contents. “There are works of alchemy; descriptions of heavens, spirits, and gods; liturgical texts; and more” (Hardy Sacred Texts Lect. 23) and even after its state- sponsored publication in 1445 only a handful of editions were available in Daoist monasteries. The sixty-volume modern edition was published in Shanghai in the Chinese Republic era during the 1920s. Only five hundred sets were produced and most of those were sold to university libraries. For the average Daoist practitioner, the centrality of a textual canon rarely figured into their daily life experience; terse, pithy, readable text like the Dao De Jing or The Tao of Pooh have long held the place where the initiate can peer through the looking glass.

5.1.4. The Business and Logic of Values

Perceived value is precisely that, perceived. One perceiver may experience value where another experiences none or, worse, a diminution of value. This is very much most people’s lived experience. From things as mundane as condiment preferences to choices in entertainment, diet, or dress, we exist in a multivariate milieu of options and choices.

62 So, when speaking of “value-added” what is under consideration is tantamount to the model. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Finance and Banking, value-added is, [t]he additional benefit that the product or service provides over and above its component parts. When there is little to differentiate one product or service from another, products and services that are perceived to have strong value added will generally fare better than those that are perceived not to have any. The value added is often achieved through providing additional services around a core service or a product. For instance, a car dealer may have the value-added service of picking up the vehicle at someone’s house whenever it needs maintenance or repairs and returning it as well as providing them with a replacement car for the duration of the repair at no extra charge (Doyle).

Value-added is when something more is included above and beyond what was originally received. This idea, long at the heart of business practices, became a foundational cornerstone for Michael E. Porter’s Competitive Advantage business model. The idea of value-added along a production/distribution chain is an old economic concept. In theory, goods are cheapest at their point of production and each handler from wholesaler to retailer continues through a process of value accretion until the product finally reaches the end-point consumer. In 1980 Michael E. Porter released his seminal book Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance and disrupted the long-held economic theory of “comparative advantage” per se. One of Porter’s central themes in developing this business theory is the idea of firms adopting a business model that takes full advantage of their value position. In other words, if a company positions itself to take full advantage of the particular value they create in a market, then they can offer that greater value to their consumers thereby enhancing both the emic and etic expectations and choices of the firm. He goes on to lay out the many ways by which an organization may go about creating this value-added model. These run from the most minuscule (such as offering dipping-sauces unasked for with a pizza order) to the most altruistic and unseen (such as a shoe company that provides shoes to impoverished children for every pair a customer purchases). The point is to create a sense of “something more gained” by the consumer for their choice to patronize a particular business’s goods or services. Porter’s Competitive Advantage theory provided the theoretical framework for firms to adopt value-added business models to their existing market strategies. Today, Porter still seems very concerned with the creation of value, although now his focus is much more oriented towards the generation of “shared value.” “A shared value approach reconnects company success with social progress,” (Porter). Porter would see the avarice of companies transformed into a passion for sustainability and greater equity. Perhaps there is a note of “buyer’s remorse” to his shift in “value” but his model’s endurance is incontestable. It is no coincidence that Porter’s ideas struck in the 1980s. His continuing contributions to modern business theory and practices are hard to overstate. Competitive Advantage was lauded as the ninth most influential management book of the twentieth century by the Fellows of the Academy of Management and it has remained a consummate part of business school curricula for the past several decades. Indeed, his work helped contribute to what former corporate lawyer Jamie Gamble has referred to as the “sociopathic behaviors of corporations” (Gamble), but it has also spurred interest in such developments as impact investing. This style of capital investment is “focusing not

63 just on the bottom line, but also on doing good for people and the planet” (Gunther). In other words, there is more than one method for increasing the value of a product or service. What Porter hits upon that concerns the creation of the PVA is how selections or choices of one product or service over another are done in a framework of the consumer’s perceived value. Obviously, thought-traditions do not necessarily comport to the same production and distribution chains as other consumer goods and services but they are nonetheless something which individuals consume selectively. Thought-traditions need not come to a consumer fully formed; instead, they may come fragmented and be stitched together throughout a lifetime. The aphorism, “a penny saved is a penny earned,” is an axiomatic expression of a thought-tradition that places a high value on frugality, accruing wealth, and opposing waste. Many North American readers will be familiar with this aphorism as it is credited to one of Benjamin Franklin’s almanacs c.1737. On the other hand, the saying, “you can’t take it with you,” clearly seems to proffer a completely antithetical thought-tradition. It gives an intellectual cover for turning away from spendthrift values and instead offers a value proposition of living for the moment, not deferring gratification indefinitely, carpe diem. Interestingly, because both of these aphorisms are fragments of larger constructs of thought-traditions (empirical pragmatism versus hedonism) well educated, clear-thinking people might draw from both at differing points in their lives. This is not merely a case of people’s propensity for hypocrisy; it is the effect of seeking value within the zeitgeist of thought-traditions within which one finds oneself. Becoming more or less aligned with any given thought-tradition may not necessarily preclude a person’s ability to find and obtain a value (however enduring or temporary) in another one. What determines those selection processes may be complex but ultimately it can be said that one position is adopted because there is derived a perceived value-added. The PVA hermeneutic model works by treating “perspective” as the variable that can be plugged into a relational position to the applied logic as opposed to limiting it in a functional one. This is commensurate with the formulations of Paul E Oppenheimer (1885-1977) and Edward N Zalta, in their Relations Versus Functions at the Foundations of Logic: Type-Theoretic Considerations. In it they state that, “Our work shows that a philosophically and mathematically rich system based on (modes of) predication cannot be reduced to a system that employs only functional application and naming” (Zalta 372). This replacement of “relation of” from “functions of” is implicit to the PVA and is not explicit in many of the more established religious studies models. How it can be used within existing models will be explained shortly, but first, it is necessary to wade into the weeds of how to go about the reassembling of our binary reductive mental architecture. First to reiterate what has already been presented, binary reductive logic is rudimentary, reflexive and long supported by such Aristotelian propositions as the PEM and the PNC. In an essay by noted logician Graham Priest, a systematic examination of Nagarjuna's catuskoti or tetralemma and how it fits within the structure of formal symbolic logic is offered. Priest does an exemplary job of explaining how at the center of Nagarjuna's logic structure a distinction is made between true and false as a relation versus as a function. True and false in a standard dichotomy are treated as functions (absolutes) but when one makes the presumptive shift of treating them as relations (relative to something) the dichotomy becomes a more complex polychotomy:

64 A relation is something that relates a certain kind of object to some number of others (zero, one, two, etc). A function, on the other hand, is a special kind of relation that links each such object to exactly one thing. Suppose we are talking about people. Mother of and father of are functions, because every person has exactly one (biological) mother and exactly one father. But son of and daughter of are relations, because parents might have any number of sons and daughters. Functions give a unique output; relations can give any number of outputs (Priest).

This may seem counter-intuitive, but it is how the world is experienced every day. A Hasse diagram of “value of” into relational terms yields the following: {T}

{T, F} { }

{F}

In Priest’s words, “Thus the four kotis (corners) of the catuskoti appear before us.” (Priest) The implications for applying this logic within the PVA model allow us to entertain the proposition that a given thing (for example Ursula K LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness) is Daoist, maybe treated as {T}, {F}, {T,F} and { } depending on the perceiver’s relation to the subject. For one perceiver it may be an obviously True proposition; for another False; for yet another it may hold elements both True and False; and still, another might perceive the question as a non sequitur to the topic at hand— neither True nor False. Determining these values requires that the determiner be able to shift their lens to treat seriously and entertain the perspective of a much larger number of given positions. That is, how might a hypothetical Daoist hermit residing in the Zhongnan Mountains of China treat this proposition? Consider the words of one such person, “Hermits played a political role, they pushed society forward and maintained ancient ideas,” said Zhang Jianfeng, part-time mountain dweller and founder of a Taoism magazine” (Hancock). Compare this with a quotation from LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness that, “To oppose something is to maintain it.” Would the hermit find wisdom in this {T}, would he contest her assertion {F}, or would he dismiss it as not in keeping with his tradition { }? Any of these responses are imaginable and merit consideration. Yet LeGuin’s choice to position her fiction as inspired by the same thought-tradition that inspires Zhang to retreat to the Mt. Zhongnan is certainly an avenue of inquiry worth exploring. The idea that perhaps, in fine Daoist tradition, that the hermit might view LeGuin’s idea as both wise and foolish {T,F} may be a bit more difficult for a Western thought-tradition-trained mind to accept. It is a paradox, and paradoxes have long been the bane of Western academical tradition. This type of notion is far more at home within Eastern thought-traditions but is not entirely incommensurate with scholarship nor with earnest academic inquiry. None other than Bertrand Russell, in 1901, conceived of the famous “Russell’s Paradox,” “[t]he comprehensive class we are considering, which is to

65 embrace everything, must embrace itself as one of its members” (Russell Mathematical Philosophy 136). The implications of this were staggering. Some sets are members of themselves; the set of all sets, for example, is a set, so it belongs to itself. But some sets are not members of themselves. The set of cats, for example, is not a cat, so it’s not a member of the set of cats. But what about the set of all the sets that are not members of themselves? If it is a member of itself, then it isn’t. But if it isn’t, then it is (Priest).

It took the world of mathematics, logicians, and philosophers over nine years to “solve” Russell’s Paradox. Yet what it unveiled was even more confounding. Having overcome this contradiction, could mathematics be assured that there were no ensuing contradictions that would arise? “The lamentable fact is that none of these set theories gave any answer whatsoever to this question” (Snapper 288). In other words, no mathematical proof exists to disprove the validity of paradoxes. “The worst blow came in 1931 when Kurt Godel showed that it is in principle impossible to show that mathematics is free from contradiction, using only the rigorous proof methods of mathematics [7]” (Snapper 288). It would appear that paradox is here to stay and something academics must learn to wrap their minds more comfortably around. So, returning to the question, when might something be deemed both True and False simultaneously? The simple common-sense answer would be when more than one perceiver’s perspective is being considered. A strong advocate for such common-sense was G.E Moore (1873-1958), a not-coincidental contemporary of Bertrand Russell. Moore's defense of “truisms” in his 1925 “A Defence of Common Sense” is a powerful indictment of the often-employed mental acrobatics that philosophers have occasionally used to obfuscate what we “know” to be true. His objective was not to delve into an epistemological rabbit-hole but to acknowledge that, with or without a clear definition, humans can experience “good” in their lives. We are capable of acknowledging experiences (good, authentic, valuable) without an exhaustive and dizzying analysis. Ironically, in proving his point Moore’s analysis is both pedantic and dizzying, Of the truth of these propositions there seems to me to be no doubt, but as to what is the correct analysis of them there seems to me to be the gravest doubt - the true analysis may, for instance, possibly be quite as paradoxical as is the third view given above under IV as to the analysis of 'This is part of the surface of a human hand'; but whether it is as paradoxical as this seems to me to be quite as doubtful as in that case. Many philosophers, on the other hand, seem to me to have assumed that there is little or no doubt as to the correct analysis of such propositions; and many of these, just reversing my position, have also held that the propositions themselves are not true (Moore 58-9).

Moore may be scrutinizing the very basis of truth claims but what he extracts is validation for suppositional language and ideas. “A Defense of Common Sense” provides another voice for the validity of a perceived value-added hermeneutic model. Language used in its ordinary sense ought not to require lengthy definitions or justifications. It can provide an analysis of “things” without requiring some intractable objective measure of what is meant in seeking out “value.”

66 5.1.5. Focusing Through the PVA

The PVA is meant to move the person applying it into “another’s shoes,” thereby encouraging them to determine where value is being added in the estimation of that “person’s shoes.” Who are the seekers and what is being sought? Both of these are addressable with the PVA model. The PVA model allows for intrinsic as well as an extrinsic examination of thought-traditions like Daoism by establishing the position of the perceiver then plugging that relationship to the subject into the old “function” position. Let us first look at a couple of existing Religious Studies models and see what they render and what they might fail to adequately address; we will then see where the PVA may be used to enhance the analysis. Marx’s model of Religious Studies reduces all religious phenomena to questions of power and the application of that power to exploit the labours of the working class (proletariats). How might classical Daoism be framed in this model? Near the end of the Han Dynasty, Zhang Daoling claimed to receive a vision from Lord Lao (the deified Laozi) about the impending end of the world. He became the first of the Celestial Masters and gathered followers with an alms admission of five pecks of rice, hence the moniker the “Way of the Five Pecks of Rice” (Wudou midao ). “Zhang also had his followers memorize and chant the Daodejing, and Zhang’s grandson, the third Celestial Master, wrote a commentary on the Daodejing called the Xiang’er that was also recited” (Hardy Sacred Texts Lect. 23). This group later joined up with the Yellow Turbans led by Zhang Jue (died 184) and incited a peasant revolt that lasted nearly twenty-one years. What are we to make of this using Marxist analysis? The inclinations of both Zhang Daoling and Zhang Jue to recruit from the peasant class comport well with Marx’s assertion that religion is an opiate (a compound to reduce pain). And making the literal fruits of their labour (five pecks of rice) the prerequisite fee for entry also seems very in keeping with Marx’s claims about exploiting the labors of an underclass. Likewise, that they would ultimately rise up and attempt to overthrow their oppressors fits well within the frame of Marxist analysis. However, despite the failure of the usurpation and the disbanding of the rebel forces, the Daoism of the Celestial Masters endured. Emperor Ling of Han (Han Ling di ) (156-189) did not alter his corrupt reign, and the Han did not fall for another generation or two. So why would the Celestial Masters’ sect persist to this day? In his essay on two distinct Celestial Masters’ texts, Michael Puett offers a possible rationale for this sect’s continuous appeal. “In the case of Xiang'er, following the admonitions of the Way results in the adept becoming self- sufficient, long-lived, and removed from the lineage and sacrificial constructions of other humans. For that of Laozi zhongjing, the adept becomes like Laozi himself” (Puett 244). The value-added for a perceiver (in this case an adept of the Way of the Celestial Masters) can be self-sufficiency, longevity and ultimately to aspire to divination like Lord Laozi. For the laity, a perceived value-added might be in being a contributor to helping some of these seekers in their self-elevation. For people in late Han China who may well have lived in “a world seen as haunted and populated by capricious spirits” (Puett 249) having contributed to an ally in that world would be of great value. A Marxist-style reductive analysis might well miss these points. It assumes a naivety to the masses that have a religion imposed upon them. Yet the motivations of actors in a religious movement are far more complex than a straightforward Marxist

67 analysis might reveal. A PVA heuristic can serve as a complement to even as reductive a model as Marxism to help include some of the otherwise neglected emic features of the subject. It is not only the emic that can be examined more closely with the PVA, but an etic understanding can also be brought into greater focus. The bi-annual Dharma Assembly ceremony (Fahui ) at the Tian Jin Daoist Temple (Tian Jin Tang ) in Vancouver British Columbia is dedicated to honouring ancestors and includes making offerings in the form of a feast to the ancestors. Analyzing this event through a standard phenomenological approach entails asking questions that address the encounter of this particular group of Daoists’ with what is utterly beyond ordinary or typical human experience (Otto’s mysterium). The consideration and investigation of the temple grounds themselves as a sacred space (a possible axis mundi) might also largely figure into the inquiry. This is a far less reductionist model than Marx’s as it does treat religion as a specific object to be studied. Yet the PVA can be linked to this approach and in establishing a perceiver that is outside the group (an etic perspective) one can reveal additional findings that might be glossed over in a standard phenomenological model. For example, according to the temple’s website, “In May 2019, the Ceremony provided 16,055 pounds of food to the Food Bank” (Tian-Jin Temple Ceremony). Naturally, the (emic) participants in the temple are proud of their charitable donations, but the (etic) non-Daoist community sees and derives value-added from the temple’s presence and these continuous bi-annual donations. Part of that value came in the form of renovating the former St. John the Divine Anglican Church that had fallen into disuse. What had been a looming empty hulk of space was resurrected and has given new life and vitality to the area. The other value-added is that the Dharma Assembly generates a regular and reliable influx of food to the local food banks (the predictability of resources is of paramount concern to most food banks). Charitable works are nothing unique to this temple, and no doubt other models of Religious Studies would capture this aspect of their liturgical practice (a sociological model comes to mind). However, the unique way in which the emic understanding (a feast for the ancestors) of these ceremonies synthesizes with the etic perceived value (supporting local foodbanks) they produce might be overlooked. Hypothetically, if the ceremony focused instead on, say, telling the ancestors bedtime stories, then the tons of food donations would not be generated. The PVA allows the scholar to capture both halves of the coin by shifting the perceiver’s relation to the subject. The perceived-value-added hermeneutic model can serve to reopen the aperture of potential inclusion for consideration. It allows for the treatment of many otherwise- disregarded contributors. This will prove invaluable in the coming decades, “[w]ith the exception of Buddhists, all of the world’s major religious groups are poised for at least some growth in absolute numbers in the coming decades” (Pew Research Center: Religion & Public Life). As the ever-expanding world’s religions continue to remake themselves, a flexible tool that encourages deeper evaluation is invaluable. This is especially true in the context of the hyper-mobility of thought-traditions at our present time.

68 5.1.6. Ideas on the Move

Mobility of ideas has been an inherent factor that is typically looked at retrospectively in the field of Religious Studies. It is easier (though not necessarily easy) to chart a course backwards through time to see how one facet of a thought-tradition was influential and helped to shape another manifestation of that thought-tradition. This makes sense as it is not possible to accurately predict how the thought-traditions of today will re-shape what is to come. Speculation is possible, but more as a mental exercise than as a tool of forecasting. This is one of the reasons why a tool that can capture a present experience of value being added is so useful. John Urry (1946-2016) was one of the most prodigious scholars in scholarship around the idea of the so-called “mobility-turn.” This idea is conceived of as being a “post-disciplinary” approach to the social sciences. The “mobility turn is post- disciplinary, beyond the individual separate disciplines and concerned with the multiple ways in which economic, social, and political life is performed and organized through time and across many complex spaces” (Urry). The nexus of this idea is that mobility depends on systems and systems often rely on technology; for example, for tea to be mobilized out of China required organized trade route that depended on technologies, such as barges, to make their way back to their final destination. Ideas, culture, and religions travel alongside other commodities, but in the age of telecommunications and global connectivity, these non-tangibles can travel at near-instantaneous speed. Urry’s concerns were that the mobility-turn fostered several paradoxes. To name a couple: people’s experiences became more personalized while simultaneously more dependent on unseen actors, and interconnectedness could spark immediate radical social upheavals but might not encourage sustained engagement. So organising meeting up with others - family, friends, colleagues and so on, because they are spatially distributed so it requires more and more coordination, and it requires coordination through these diverse systems that have to be working, have to be in place, have to be providing the anticipation that they will be functioning. So personalization and system dependence is a particular feature of the mobility turn (Urry).

The implications of a mobility-turn for the field of Religious Studies are obvious. Urry was especially, “concerned with predominantly a-spatial ‘social structures’” (Urry). This disentangling of structures, institutions, and identities from any spatio-temporal locus means that the axis mundi for many may not retain the gravity and sway it once did nor would the temporality imposed by religious institutions which might include, for example, the imperative to participate at a specific time with a specific ritual. If Urry’s mobility-turn hypothesis were to be fully realized, then the centrality of temples, churches, physical meetups of congregations and even regular ceremonies would be threatened. What would be left under these conditions for religious identity would be for the validity of that identity to be entirely predicated on the authenticity of the experiencer. This mirrors well the experience of trans-global Daoists’ adoption and adaptation of their identities, their communities, and their practices. However, it is worth noting that the complete collapse of spatio-temporal locus has not yet occurred, and in truth may never occur. While it is true that the supremacy of fixed locales and times may have ebbed, they are nonetheless still a valued part of many

69 religious practitioners’ (and many Daoists’) lived experiences. Thomas Faist addressed the question of whether or not the “mobility-turn” constitutes a new paradigm and how it stands “akin to the mind-boggling number of turns proclaimed in recent years—the ‘linguistic turn’, the ‘cultural turn’, the ‘spatial turn’—it is more fruitful to analyse how the term ‘mobility’ is used and what kind of boundary work it is actually doing” (Faist 1640). The thrust of his argument is that the mobility-turn highlights one aspect of modern society to the detriment of others. In other words, interconnectivity only applies if one is “connected” to the system in question. This certainly adds an interesting dimension to the subject of Daoism, as mentioned earlier, there exists a long tradition of Daoists entering hermitages. Not only this but there is a Daoist precept to not allow oneself to be swept away in the fades and pressures of hyper-normalized social constructs. Do these intrinsic qualities of Daoism help to inoculate Daoists from the mobility-turn? Or are Daoists somehow being successfully integrated into the larger global culture by either adjusting, abandoning or reimaging their guiding principles? No clear answer presents itself, but there are interesting windows permitting a view of possible answers, More than half the hermits are said to be women, and Li Yunqi, 26, spent several weeks at the cottages. “I like the life of a hermit, living on a mountain. I came here for inner peace and to escape the noise of the city,” she said, wearing a puffy pink coat and fiddling with a smartphone as an off-road vehicle carried her down a muddy path to civilization (Hancock).

Perhaps smartphone-connected Daoist hermits are the wave of the future. Daoists are transforming the parameters of what it means to be a Daoist. While this may have always been the case, the global exchange at work in the world today makes those changes harder to track and much more diverse. Yet that does not make them unidentifiable, it simply requires broadening the aperture of potential inclusion. We need to entertain the validity and interrogate the Daoist characteristic of phenomenon wherever they arise in the world. And they are arising all across the world. In his thesis research, Steven San-Hu Chan provides an in-depth and cogent analysis of some of the lineages of American Daoism. He also lays out a compelling argument for why these branches of the Daoist thought-tradition may have diverged so greatly from their Chinese counterparts but retain an authentic character to their roots. “The argument in opposition to Kirkland assumes that American Daoist identity is as valid as Chinese Daoist identity and that religious identity is fundamentally decided by the practitioner” (Chan 5). Chan also does an excellent job of addressing the predictable charges of orientalism, “[t]he Orientalists created a dichotomous relationship between East and West based on their own observations” (Chan 14) and cultural appropriation or intellectual colonization. He leans on Homi Bhabha’s work on the hybridization of culture, “The cultures of the colonized and the colonizer do not exist in vacuums, but are subject to change, especially when they are forced together through an act of violence, such as colonization” (Chan 17). His arguments for validating Western Daoism are based on the value-added through authenticity: American and Chinese Daoism have equal validity because each religion was formed in their own cultural contexts that allowed their followers a means to cope with their immediate surroundings. Like the Dao, Daoism evolved and

70 continued to change. American Daoism may be considered an Orientalist creation by some scholars, but it has special meaning to its adherents (Chan 24).

So, has Chan only shown that Americans and East Asians count as Daoists today? This is a specious question, but both essentialist and traditionalist framings derive such a conclusion and those are the frameworks he appears to be operating in. However, using the PVA as a hermeneutic tool for evaluating and analyzing Daoist thought-traditions, even as they are emerging, garners very interesting insights as to how and why an individual, a group or organizations might decide to align themselves with a Daoist label. It asks the question, “what benefit are they perceiving by the adoption of this identity over another?” Whether or not that qualifies them as in-group or out-group in the judgment of another perceiver is also an interesting avenue of inquiry. The question “Whose religion is valid?” is at the crux of this whole examination. While I may not offer a definitive answer, I hope to increase the aperture of determining considerations. Let us apply it here to Kirkland and Chan. Plot the question “where’s the value” from Chan’s perspective in as much as one is able. It would appears he is deriving an increased value in expanding the parameters of what constitutes Daoism and all of his thesis is a justification of that enhancement. Recognizing the value as a “coping mechanism” and its “special meaning to its adherents” are the validating values he places in his assessment. Plot Kirkland into the perceiver’s position, and we find that he seems to be deriving increased value from deeper penetration into the Chinese cultural tradition of Daoism. He seems to see a precolonial Daoism as free from the disruption of Western interference and thereby perceives a loss in value (value detracted) in a more superficial, Western palatable “secular humanist tastes” and culturally non-Chinese expansions. Expanding the parameters does not create an enhancement but a corruption. His value added is in not allowing the concept of Daoism to drift into some completely relativistic and individualistic pop-fad. What is crucial to making this hermeneutic device work as an effective model is an understanding that perceived value is a relation, not a function of the perceiver. Those values can be shifted over time, in varied circumstances or with drift over time. Not being able to “take it with you” may have held greater sway on one’s decision-making in their youth, but “a penny saved” being “a penny earned” may hold a great deal more appeal as one ages. Perhaps one more lesson from Alan Watts is worth consideration here. Watt’s describes identity as archetypal patterns (like whirlpools in a river) and thus subject to change while simultaneously maintaining a sense of distinction. These archetypal descriptions provide the sense that these characters are meant to be looked at, admired, experienced. They are not for the purposes of analysis, for trying to figure out what they mean or what they are up to. They are immortal patterns of human being as a verb (Garrett-Farb 60).

To-be verbs instead of nouns is something of a radical shift in perspective, and yet this is the lived experience of most people. Daoism need not be something that a person, group or organization “is;” it can instead be understood as something they “do.” By extension, “Daoist” need not be a proper noun but can instead be treated adjectivally, a description of how one conceives of and perceives a uniquely “Daoist” value-added to their endeavors.

71

72 Chapter 6. Conclusion

Daoism exists within tensions: the oldest of the ancient; the newest of the New Age; the most sequestered of the cultural East; and the most ecumenical of the wider World. Its complexities and nuances defy Western academic efforts to reduce it to simple categories and taxonomies, and yet its doctrines offer fairly simple models for interpreting the world around us. What has been set out in this work is how the all too pervasive thought traps of essentialism and traditionalism endemic to the Western and Eastern thought-traditions, respectively, steer analyses into pernicious reductive cul de sacs and exclusionary dead ends. Attempts to reduce something as complex as Daoism to little more than another facet of a non-Religious Studies academic discipline or as squarely within the boundaries of being only understandable as a Chinese cultural tradition leave many emerging Daoists’ offerings on the table. Daoism stands precipitously at a burgeoning frontier as a subject of Religious Studies, in a way similar to the pan-Asian religions included in Max Mueller’s compendium of fifty volumes in the Sacred Books of the East (1879-1910). That monumental achievement in the field of Religious Studies was something of a double- edged sword. On the one hand, this marked the first time so many “exotic” and “foreign” texts became accessible to Western scholars, opening their minds to the vast vistas of unexplored materials; but on the other hand, many of the presuppositions, chauvinisms, and biases they brought to the subjects became deeply entrenched in the ensuing scholarship, and much work has been done to scour away the tarnish in these illuminating volumes. Daoism is likewise poised today between being poorly handled with similar biases and agenda driven inauthenticity. Perhaps the central misapprehension being that “of a place and time” is synonymous with “for a place and time.” That which was “foreign” and “exotic” (like Islam in Denmark) is now right next door and more accessible than ever before. For several decades the only “Daoist” texts that were readily at hand for Western readers were varying qualities of translations of the Daode Jing, the Zhuangzi, and the Yi Jing. Hence in some respects, Kirkland cannot be criticized too harshly for his 1997 indictment of the Western imagination of the Dao. The “Inner Training” (Neiyi ), which was preserved as a chapter of the larger body of works attributed to Guanzi (ca. 7th century B.C.E.), was not well translated until the late 1990s and as an excerpt reads, “The Way has no fixed position; It abides within the excellent mind []”(Roth 1999 vs.5). Dissemination of the Daoist Canon was enhanced when, “[i]n 2004, the University of Chicago published a three-volume catalogue of the Daoist canon, giving brief descriptions for every text it contains,” and again, “[i]n 2008, [when] Routledge published the two-volume Encyclopedia of Taoism, which offers clear explanations of major works” (Hardy Sacred Texts Lect. 23). Alongside the Daode Jing in the Mawangdui tomb, there were discovered four short texts attributed to the HuangLao branch of Daoism that combines ideas about governance based on cosmology. The name comes from a compounding of the legendary Yellow Emperor (Huang) and Laozi

73 (Lao). So, when Kirkland spoke on “The Taoism of the Western Imagination,” most of the 1,487 works of the Daoist canon were either unavailable or not yet understood as to where or how they fit within the context of the Daoist Canon. Efforts are currently underway to further illuminate this often-neglected facet of the Daoist thought-tradition. But then again, perhaps texts were never paramount to Daoists’ self-identity. Daoist laity have never been overly focused nor intimately associated with Daoism’s canonical texts. Furthermore, Daoism is not a monolithic orthodoxy. It has always been more like a loosely-knit family of religions, akin to Hinduism, comprised of a constellation of followers with regionally individualized liturgical observances, practices and proclaimed revelations. Most of these have led to emphases on particular elements of the Daoist Canon or even what Western religious adherents might see as “heterodox” texts. These texts have primarily been the esoteric concern of initiated priests, specialized practitioners, and/or scholars interested in the Daoist thought- traditions. The terse texts most widely distributed were those same texts that first came into focus in the West. The Celestial Masters, for example, claimed revelation from Lord Lao and made the reciting the Daode Jing a sacrosanct practice. One legend attributes celestial ascendance to adherents who recited just this text ten thousand times. For the majority of Daoists, few texts have held pride of place as much as the Daode Jing, and little more than familiarity with its passages and participation in “Daoist” activities have been the benchmark for establishing the legitimacy of claiming a Daoist identity. The private consumption of “scripture” is another example of the textual slant inherent in the “Protestant bias” that persists in the field of Religious Studies. This preference is derived from seeking an essential/essentializing component of what is required for inclusion in a given religion or to fall into the rubric of “religion” at all. Yet most East Asian religious practitioners, especially Daoists, have generally not understood themselves in this essentially textual manner. “Although the Daoist Canon fits with traditional Western emphases on canons and texts, the function of these texts is quite different,” (Miller 25). Often texts were part of a ceremonial, liturgical, and/or prophylactic purpose. Specific recitations were performed to garner specific bodily comforts and protection in the here and now, not to deliver an exegesis of its ideas. Boiling religions in general, and Daoism in particular, down to “essential” components such as the thought-tradition’s texts is a thankfully waning tendency of Western trained scholars. In China, the thought-traditions of Daoism suffer from a different kind of malady. Having been long steeped in the same traditionalism that was endemic to Chinese culture writ large, Daoism now is compelled to wear the trappings of tradition without allowing Daoists to be fully immersed in the traditions. Typically, one was a “Daoist” if one was in the hereditary tradition of “Daoism.” This was as true of the laity as it was for the clergy, but it did not preclude engaging with other thought-traditions including most notably Confucianism and Buddhism. The traditional ties of heredity were weakened as China faced the onslaught of Western modernity. Daoists were scattered across the globe and many felt torn between preserving their traditions and adapting to new environments. Post-Mao-China has sought to recapture its heritage and offered a “safe homecoming” for displaced Daoists. However, this new China has placed its national agenda ahead of faithful repatriation of the Daoist traditions. Many are now faced with the “challenge of new interpretations among Chinese scholars and practitioners keen to modernize the

74 tradition and fit it in with the nation-building agenda of the Chinese Communist Party” (Miller 25). As foreign Daoists encounter indigenous or repatriated Daoists at the “fountainhead” of Daoism—China—the one tradition they both seem compelled to embrace is change. This may chafe against the sensibilities of nearly fetishized traditionalism among the Chinese. That traditionalism creates a reductive dichotomy similar to the West’s but with the prime criteria of inclusion/exclusion being how deeply established a prime-precedent might be. Both the East’s and the West’s reductive tendencies create pernicious conditions for analysis, and like most chronic conditions, need vigilant management so as to diminish their effects. The perceived-value-added model is offered as a new hermeneutic meant to do precisely this. It is not a replacement for existing methodologies or approaches to the study of religions, but by replacing observers’ perspectives as relations (instead of functions) of the underpinning logic it can thereby create much greater flexibility and inclusivity in the selection process of emic and etic interests. The ancient Greeks sought “justice” in some a priori concrete form. Their mistake was in treating justice as a noun, a thing that could be pinned down and preserved for all time. With centuries of development in Western thought-traditions even now it is given the designation of a noun, and yet we have come to accept that “justice” only exists through action and interaction. It does not stand alone outside of time and space. Likewise, religions, like Daoism, are not static, independent, fossilized specimens that can be scrutinized and completely encapsulated in some reified form. They are activities undertaken by people, reimagined and reinvented with every new generation’s iteration. If “Daoism” is an action people undertake, then “Daoist” is a description of those undertakings, in a word, an adjective. In The Empty Vessel, the only English language quarterly Daoist publication (since 1993), lay Daoist teacher, Chungliang “Al” Huang puts the matter succinctly, “[w]ith all respect for the “ism,” we need to label, we need to call it Taoism to give it a framework. But we know that Tao defies “ism.” If Tao gets stuck with “ism” then it would be separated from the rest of life. . .” (Towler 5). Frameworks give us a position to start an examination, but they are tools, not ends, unto themselves. “If we only see the term Taoism as a concept, it can be very confining. We need to open it up, and allow ourselves to grow in and fulfill Tao” (Towler 5). Here is a Daoist’s argument for greater inclusion, for breaking free of false dichotomies, for being more Daoist in an approach to the Dao. Sound advice for Daoists, but also good for scholars, yet the last word must go to Zhuangzi: A road is made by people walking on it; things are so because they are called so. What makes them so? Making them so makes them so. What makes them not so? Making them not so makes them not so. Things all must have that which is so; things all must have that which is acceptable. There is nothing that is not so, nothing that is not acceptable (Merton 40).

So, perhaps this road has led, if not to answers, then at least to better questions. I do hope so.

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