Daoism is a Chinese tradition of philosophy and, later, religion, rooted in two ancient books, the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) and the Zhuangzi, which teaches that humans are one small part of nature and live best by following the Dao, the ‘way’ things move of themselves, instead of forcing them. Its central ideas are ziran, being so of itself, and wu wei, not forcing. Its humility before nature, its honouring of what is low and yielding, and its distrust of control all sit close to Therapeutic Shamanism, though Daoism grew up inside farming states, long after the turn Therapeutic Shamanism calls the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer.
What is Daoism? #
Dao (in older spelling Tao) means ‘way’ or ‘path’. Two books lie at the root of the tradition. The Daodejing, ‘the classic of the way and its power’, is traditionally ascribed to a sage called Laozi, ‘the old master’; the Zhuangzi is named after the thinker Zhuang Zhou. Both took shape in China’s Classical period, roughly the fifth to the third centuries BCE.1 Neither author called himself a Daoist. The label was coined later, by historians of the Han dynasty, to group thinkers they saw as alike.1
From those books grew a religious tradition as well. Its first organised form, the Way of the Celestial Masters, traces itself to a vision of Laozi said to have come to Zhang Daoling in 142 CE, and religious Daoism continues in China and beyond today.2 This answer is about the early teaching on humans and nature; the Zhuangzi has an answer of its own, What did Zhuangzi teach about humans inside nature?
What does Daoism say about humans and nature? #
That humans stand inside nature and learn from it, not above it. In the Daodejing‘s words, “Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Tao. The law of the Tao is its being what it is.”3 And the Dao itself cannot be pinned down, for “The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao.”4
Nature does not exist for humans. Heaven and earth “do not act from (the impulse of) any wish to be benevolent; they deal with all things as the dogs of grass are dealt with”, the straw dogs made for a ceremony and thrown away once it is over.5 Things follow their own ziran, their ‘self-so-ness’, growing and changing of themselves, and the wise person does the same.6
Hence wu wei, often translated ‘non-action’, better understood as not forcing. “The Tao in its regular course does nothing (for the sake of doing it), and so there is nothing which it does not do.”7 Its favourite image is water, the softest and weakest thing, which settles in the low places others despise and yet wears away the hardest.8 A ruler who tries to grasp the world loses it, since the world is “a spirit-like thing, and cannot be got by active doing.”9 The Daodejing even imagines a small state with few people, where boats and carriages go unused, weapons stay put away, and people return to knotted cords in place of writing, content with plain food and simple homes.10
Later Daoism took in the ideas of yin and yang, the paired forces whose interplay makes all change, and of qi, described by the scholar Livia Kohn as “the cosmic energy that pervades all.”11
Did Daoism grow out of shamanism? #
Some writers on Daoism think it drew on it. The French scholar Isabelle Robinet held that many Daoist practices came from the wu, the shamans of the Warring States period, and from the ‘masters of methods’ of the same time; others note that some scholars place Zhuang Zhou in or near the south, where the state of Chu had a strong shamanic culture in which female shamans were important.12
Others draw the line more sharply. Early Daoist movements defined themselves against the shamans of their day even whilst taking in some of their ways, and the historian of religion Russell Kirkland holds that before the Han dynasty there were no real ‘Daoists’ or ‘Daoism’ at all, only the texts and teachers later grouped under that name.12
Is Daoism an ecological philosophy? #
Many writers think so. In 2001 a centre at Harvard published Daoism and Ecology, edited by Norman Girardot, James Miller and Liu Xiaogan, the first collected work on what the Daoist tradition could bring to environmental problems,13 and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Daoist ethics “easily embraces environmentalism”.14
The historian Mark Elvin, in The Retreat of the Elephants (2004), questioned how much such ideas changed what actually happened. China’s environment, in his account, was shaped by the pursuit of power and profit, not by ideology, and awareness of deforestation did not stop it. The anthropologist E. N. Anderson replied in a review that ideology and religion did matter, because they led people to weigh long-term and wide-ranging consequences instead of only short-term gains.15
How does Daoism connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In three places especially. The first is humility. The Daodejing has humans taking their law from the Earth. In terms of the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, Therapeutic Shamanism sees humans as the children. The Stone People are the oldest and wisest by far, then the Plant People, then the Animal People, and then Human.16 See Who are the Animal, Plant and Stone People?
The second is the honouring of what is low. Daoism prizes water, the valley and the low places, against a culture that ranks the high above the low. Therapeutic Shamanism names that ranking, the judgement that ‘up is good and down is bad’, as a spell soaked deep into the culture and its language, and shamanism as entirely free of it. The Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer is not better than the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, and God is not superior to Goddess.17
The third is distrust of control. The Daodejing warns that whoever grasps the world destroys it. Therapeutic Shamanism traces the grasping to the move from hunter-gathering to totalitarian agriculture, when people stopped seeing themselves as part of the land and began to see themselves as owning it, growing only what they wanted, using the land as they wished, and waging war on anything in the way.18 Even wu wei has a counterpart in the Plant People, who, free of the restless need to be doing things, live at a slower pace than animals.19 See What are Plant People and what gifts do they bring?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Mainly over when and where Daoism arose. Its books were written in the Warring States period, among farming kingdoms with cities, armies, writing and kings, and many chapters of the Daodejing give advice on how a sage should rule. Even its ideal of the small, simple state is a village of farmers, with boats, carriages and armour put away, not a band of hunter-gatherers.20 In Therapeutic Shamanism’s account, the turn that matters, the Fall, came with the move from hunter-gathering to totalitarian agriculture and the states that grew from it.21 Daoism looks back with longing to a simpler life, but it does so from inside the farming world, and it speaks of following nature more than of meeting the other beings of the living world one by one. See What is the Fall? and What is the difference between a hunter-gatherer and an agricultural society?
