Daoism

In a modern international context, the Western category of Daoism (also spelled Taoism) may refer to two distinct religious and cultural phenomena: (1) an indigenous Chinese religious tradition that is intricately connected with traditional Chinese culture and is now present throughout the modern world and (2) a new religious movement (NRM) with only loose connections with the earlier Chinese religious tradition. Historically speaking, and beyond dominant Western constructs, only the former is Daoism per se. Nonetheless, both movements are diverse, and both continue to undergo complex transformations within contexts of globalization, multiculturalism, and religious pluralism.

In the West, the matter is complicated by a number of other factors, including Orientalist and popular misrepresentations of the Chinese religious tradition, the complex history of American forms of alternative spirituality, and the use of a “rhetoric of tradition” among self-identified Western Daoists (or, perhaps more in keeping with their own presentation, Dao-ists). The present entry accepts the validity and importance of studying each phenomenon on its own terms while at the same time advancing a critical analysis of “popular Western Taoism” (PWT). (The word Tao is often used in the West; the word Dao is more accurate and is derived from the Pinyin Romanization system.) The reader should not make the mistake of assuming an artificial bifurcation: Real Daoism only exists in China, and transnational forms of Daoism are often fabrications, though there are, in fact, ordained and lineagebased Daoists, Chinese immigrants, and “non-Chinese” converts in the West. The present entry examines each phenomenon—the one Chinese, and now global, and the other Western, having become institutionalized in the United States and disseminated throughout the “developed world.” The entry discusses the history of Chinese Daoism, the emergence of Daoism as a global religious and cultural phenomenon, and the challenges that Daoists and Daoist communities face in the modern world.