Taoism is perhaps the most misunderstood of Asia's major religious
traditions. The West has been led to believe that Taoism is nothing
more than taijiquan, or fengshui, or Laozi's Dao De Jing. To be
blunt, we've been fooled. Taoism is much more than mere philosophy,
or a way of life, or any single practice. We must not confuse
activities commonly beloved by Taoists for those factors that
define Taoists.
Taoism is an ancient religious tradition, rooted in
traditional Chinese culture, with a large canonical body of ritual,
liturgy, prayer, magical practice, meditation and related
cultivations, an extensive pantheon of deities, etc. How
did we miss all this?
How the West was Fooled
In general, Western missionaries were the first individuals to
bring any sense of Taoism back to the West during the mid-to-late
19th Century. At that time, China's ruling Qing Dynasty was much
more supportive of Buddhism than it was of Taoism. Taoism of that
era suffered from some class-based stereotypes, and was often
looked down upon by the upper classes. When the original Western
missionary-translators arrived in China, they were guided by this
atmosphere to assume that Buddhism was a "lofty" religion, while
Taoism was mostly superstition for the "lowly" common man. It is
indeed easy to discriminate against that which we do not
understand! As these Westerners became acquainted with Chinese
religious writings, they found several Taoist books that could be
seen as quite compatible with their preconceived (and
ill-conceived!) notions regarding Chinese religious practice. The
most famous of these books are Laozi's Dao De Jing (The Classic of
the Way and Its Power) and the Zhuangzi (named for its author,
Zhuangzi). The early translators felt these works could be
separated from other parts of the Taoist tradition, and that they
represented something again "loftier" than other aspects of Taoism.
This reflected their great hubris, and these important works came
to be understood outside of all Taoist context.
Once these books (and a very few others) started to be translated,
their natural beauty so greatly charmed non-Chinese audiences that
an ever-increasing flood of translators have continued to render
their own versions. Things have gotten so silly that today we have
translators of the Dao De Jing who work only from the translations
of others, and who have themselves never read the original
version!
Even worse than the problem of poor translation, however, was the
impact such translations had upon an unsuspecting Western public.
These few works, which represent a miniscule proportion of the
5,000+ works included in the Taoist canon, began to be regarded as
the whole of Taoism! We inadvertently mistook an entire forest for
one beautiful bough of one ancient tree.