THE TAO OF ME:
Eastern Religion
in the
Western World
Daoism: The Complexity
I’m sure the main reason Benjamin Hoff decided to simply extract the philosophical essence of Daoism rather than go into the complex intricacies of the religion is because not only is its founding shrouded in mystery. but over the last two millennia, what started as a complex philosophy has become an even more complex religion. Daoism has seven schools: Wudoumi, Tianshi, Shangqing, Lingbao, Quanzhen, Zhengyi, Wuliu, and Yao Daoism. within Daoism there are a registered 86 different sects, which further complicates how to truly define “Daoism” as a religion. I find the complexity of Daoism to be unbearable. Any attempt by Western philosophers to introduce Daoism would have been dismissed if it started with two thousand years of foreign cultural history.
Daoism has no single founding date or even a founder. The figurehead of Daoism is generally thought to be Laozi and is thought to have written the Dao de Jing, which is the earliest known Daoist text; however most scholars believe that this is a compilation which was written by multiple authors over a long period of time, since the name “Laozi” translated simply means old master and there is no record of him existing besides the Dao de Jing and few texts claiming he existed a century after his supposed lifetime, though there is some scholarly dispute about this.
There is no clear date for the founding of Daoism since it gradually evolved out of traditional Chinese folk religion over the course of centuries, but figures who are clearly Daoist show up in literature as early as the founding of Confucianism, and literature which can be thought of as Daoist is contained within the Guanzi, which is a compilation of Confucian texts that pre-dates the Dao de Jing. While Daoism's founding date isn't clear, it can be thought of as having taken shape no later than the 4th century BCE.