Global History in Middle East and Asian

Taoism and Later World Religions

Laozi -- the legendary author of the Dao Dejing -- may not have been a real person, since his name is simply the Chinese for "Old Master." Yet the Dao itself would not want this fact to get in our way inquiring what Laozi himself would have thought of something -- after all, the Dao teaches that "the name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name." Indeed, the Dao's insights are particularly interesting in considering developments in world religion after the time in which the Dao Dejing was composed (somewhere between about 500 and 300 B.C.E.). I hope to apply the principles of Laozi to take a Daoist view of the two major religions to rise out of Judaism -- Christianity and Islam.

A Daoist view of Islam would be somewhat contradictory. Islam itself means submission unto the will of Allah. To some degree this could be considered similar to Laozi's concept of "wuwei." Both imply a suppression of the personal will, although "wuwei" is usually translated as "nonaction" or "nonstriving" and it represents the effort to "go with the flow," so to speak. It implies a certain degree of harmony with the forces (if not the "will") of nature. But there the similarities end. Nothing could be farther from the Daoist view of life or of religion than the dogmatic character of Islam, with its unalterable five pillars. The notion of praying five times a day toward Mecca at specific hours seems like an attempt to impose a human order -- although Muslims consider it a divine order -- upon the natural progression of the day. Whereas the Dao functions in a way that is totally opposite: the natural order of the day should guide human endeavor. Moreover the actual tenets of Islamic dogma do not match up with stated Daoist beliefs. For example, one of the five central commandments of Islam is almsgiving for the poor: whereas Laozi rather shockingly announces that charity is counterproductive: "If we could renounce our benevolence and discard our righteousness, the people would again become filial and kindly." (p.91)

This resembles more some of the more cryptic statements of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, as when he warns his apostles that "The poor you always have with you; but me you have not for long." Overall, though, Christianity places less of an emphasis on charity for the poor, and more of an emphasis on the worth of the impoverished -- examples abound in Christian scripture of Jesus warning a rich man that a camel will get through the eye of a needle more easily than he will enter Heaven, or warning against the perils of materialism with claims like "You cannot serve both God and Mammon." But the largest gulf between Christianity and Daoism is that Christianity is a salvation religion. (So is Islam, although interestingly the Judaism from which both derived is not.) Laozi offers no guidance for the afterlife or for salvation, and when he refers to Heaven he presumably means something like "the natural order of the universe," for he places Heaven subordinate to the Dao itself: "Man takes his law from the Earth; the Earth takes its law from Heaven; Heaven takes its law from the Dao." But then Laozi shockingly follows this with the claim that "the law of the Dao is its being what it is," in other words, it is not only the central ordering principle of the world, it is also self-evident to an observer. Daoism resembles the other religions of the east in placing no emphasis on salvation, although salvationist strands of Buddhism would emerge in the years after Laozi's death.