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History of non-Christian Religions — Topic 11

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History of non-Christian Religions — Topic 11

11.1 Laozi.

The Daodejing is the foundational text of Daoism, traditionally ascribed to the legendary teacher Laozi. Laozi is a legendary and mythical figure, and no precise information about his biography survives. Many contemporary scholars doubt that Laozi existed at all. Some suppose that he may have been an older contemporary of Confucius, about whom the sources preserve no reliable information of either a historical or a biographical character.

The Daodejing is the foundational text of Daoism, traditionally ascribed to the legendary sage Laozi. Laozi is a semi-mythical figure, and no precise historical information about his biography survives. Many contemporary scholars doubt his historical existence, suggesting he may have been an older contemporary of Confucius, or a composite of several early Daoist thinkers.

According to the account given by Sima Qian (2nd century BCE) in his Records of the Grand Historian, Laozi (whose personal name was Li Er) lived in the 6th century BCE in the state of Chu and served as the archivist in the royal library of the Zhou dynasty. In 517 BCE, the legendary meeting between Laozi and Confucius supposedly took place. In his old age, witnessing the decline of the Zhou dynasty, Laozi decided to leave the Middle Kingdom and journeyed westward. When he reached the frontier pass, the keeper of the pass, Yin Xi, recognized his sagehood and implored him: “You are about to withdraw from the world; please, write a book for me.” Laozi granted his request and dictated the text of the Daodejing. He then departed, and nothing further is known of his life or death.

Later, the figure of the sage was heavily mythologized. Under the Han dynasty, he was proclaimed the incarnation of the Dao itself, existing “before Heaven and Earth.” Gradually, he came to be venerated as the Most High God, Laojun (“the Aged Sovereign”), who had undergone thousands of incarnations. Daoist hagiography embellishes Laozi with many hyperboles; for instance, according to myth, he spent 81 years in his mother’s womb and was born into the world as an old man with white hair, emerging from his mother’s side.

The process of Laozi’s deification apparently began to take shape within religious Daoism at the end of the 3rd or the beginning of the 2nd century BCE, but it was fully formed by the 2nd century CE. In 165 CE, Emperor Huan of Han ordered a sacrifice to be made to the divine Laozi in his homeland, and a year later in his own palace.

11.2 The Text of the Daodejing.

The Daodejing is by tradition assigned to the 6th century BC; contemporary scholars, however, regard a date in the 4th–3rd centuries BC as more reliable. The authorship of the treatise is likewise disputed today. The historian Sima Qian supposed that the author of the book may have been another contemporary of Confucius — Lao Lai-zi or the Zhou statesman Dan. The work is also frequently attributed to Zhuangzi. In any case, Daoist tradition preserves the legend that, as he was leaving the Middle Kingdom, the teacher fell ill and was forced to stop at the frontier pass of Yin Xi, where, after persuasion, he dictated the Daodejing to the keeper of the pass.

The text consists of 81 chapters and comprises some 5,000 characters. It is divided into two parts: the Daojing (“Canon of the Dao”) and the Dejing (“Canon of Virtue”). The traditional arrangement of the text dates to the 2nd–1st centuries BCE, as evidenced by the ancient silk manuscripts discovered in the 1970s at Mawangdui (Changsha), which feature a different chapter order. The treatise is written in rhythmical, predominantly rhymed prose, and its concise, often paradoxical language has generated hundreds of commentaries across various Daoist schools.

The language of the Daodejing differs from the classical language of its time. Function words, for example, are frequently omitted, so that the treatise often admits of polysemic interpretation. Hundreds of commentaries on the treatise are known across the various Daoist schools. The earliest commentary is that of Heshang Gong, composed during the Han dynasty.

11.3 The Concept of the Dao in the Daodejing.

At the center of the treatise stands the concept of the Dao (the Way). The Dao is the divine, nameless source of all things, and simultaneously the path along which all things proceed toward their fullness:

Dao is the emptiness that contains all things within itself.

Use it — and it seems never to overflow.

O, abyss! Ancestor of the ten thousand things!…

The Imperceptible! It seems to exist eternally.

I do not know whose child it is.

It seems to precede the Supreme Sovereign!

(alternative translate:

The Way is like an empty vessel

That yet may be drawn from

Without ever needing to be filled.

It is bottomless; the very progenitor of all things in the world…

It is so deep, so unfathomable,

It seems to have existed before the Lord of Heaven).

As previously outlined in our study of ancient Chinese philosophy, the Dao can be understood in three principal senses:

The Dao as the beginning and end of all things, as the first essence from which all arises. The process of arising from the Dao is not a single event; it is not an act of creation, not a one-time making of the world, but a constant arising of all things at every moment. The Dao may thus be regarded as the first cause of all, including of Tian Di (the Heavenly Sovereign), who is himself, accordingly, an incarnation of the Dao. “I do not know whose child it [the Dao] is, but it seems to precede the Heavenly Sovereign,” says the Daodejing.

The Dao as the law of the arising, existence, and disappearance of things in nature. In other words, the Dao as the immanent path of things. This path is inevitable, ruled by no one.

The Dao as it pertains to the human person. The Dao as a personal path. Unlike the previous sense, the Dao in its personal aspect is the ideal development, pattern, or calling of the human being to which he must conform, but in practice does not. In this sense the Dao underlies the moral and ethical dimension of life. The central concern of all Chinese religious and philosophical thought lies in the recognition of the Dao, in following one’s Dao, in conforming oneself to it.

All things follow the Dao inevitably, but the human being possesses free will and may therefore turn aside from the Way. He who does not follow the Dao perishes; whereas he who is conformed to the Dao, as the treatise says, “in death does not die.” In order to be conformed to the Dao, one must know what it is. Yet the Dao cannot be expressed in words; with this the treatise begins: “The Dao that can be expressed in words is not the true Dao.” The only possible way, therefore, is by analogies. The Dao is like water — an analogy Laozi repeats many times:

The highest good is like water.

Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.

It flows in places men reject and so is like the Dao.

From this comes the idea of the softness of the Dao. Water contends with nothing, yet conquers all. He who wishes to be conformed to the Dao must therefore be soft:

A human being, at birth, is soft and tender.

In dying, he is hard and stiff.

When all things, grasses and trees, are alive, they are soft and pliant.

But they die dry and rigid.

Hence rigidity and tension are companions of death;

softness and tenderness are companions of life.

Laozi repeatedly emphasizes the apophatic character of the Dao, the impossibility of knowing it. Thus in chapter 14 he says:

[This One] above is not bright; below is not dark;

it stretches without end and without bound; one cannot give it a name.

And again it returns to where there are no things.

It is called the formless form, the image without substance;

it is called the misty and dim.

You meet it — you do not see its face;

you see it off — you do not see its back.

Many times Laozi characterizes the Dao as the one principle that underlies all, communicating to all things existence, ontological status, and ultimately life:

Of those who in antiquity obtained the one:

Heaven, having obtained the one, became pure;

Earth, having obtained the one, became still;

the spirits, having obtained the one, became divine;

the valleys, having obtained the one, became full;

all the myriad things, having obtained the one, live;

princes and kings, having obtained the one, rule the realm.

Thus all comes to pass through the one.

Were Heaven not pure, would it not split apart?

Were Earth not still, would it not be shaken to pieces?

Were the spirits not divine, would they not lose their power?

Were the valleys not filled, would they not run dry?

Did not all the myriad things have life within them, would they not perish?

Were princes and kings without honor and glory, would they not fall?

11.4 Action Through Non-Action (Wuwei)

Another fundamental idea of the Daodejing is the principle of wuwei, often translated as “non-action” or “effortless action.” It is not idleness, but rather contemplative passivity and spontaneous alignment with the natural order. Indeed, in Laozi non-action often appears as disinterestedness, as the renunciation of self, of acquisition, as voluntary poverty. In chapter 48 we read:

To devote oneself to study means to acquire daily.

To devote oneself to the Dao means to lose daily.

Lose, and lose again — thus thou shalt come to non-doing.

Thou shalt do nothing — and all shall be accomplished.

The world will be possessed by him who never busies himself with affairs;

but he who busies himself with affairs will never possess the world.

The sage does nothing, yet accomplishes all. Of course, Daoist “non-doing” has nothing in common with idleness. The point is that the sage does not act by force; he does not change the world by violating its structure. Any attempt to act aggressively upon the world leads to ruin. To some extent this recalls the Gospel saying that “those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword,” though of course this analogy is only partial. He who acts by force violates the Dao; he who hoards strength violates the Dao; he who displays striving violates the Dao:

This is called: “to come forth without coming forth,”

“to roll up the sleeve without baring the arm,”

“to conquer without enmity,”

“to subdue without using armies.”

Closely connected with non-doing is the idea of moderation in all things, of restraining oneself from any excessive action. Images of excess in the Daodejing are many:

Better than to hold the vessel filled to the brim

is to stop in time.

He who tries to sharpen the blade ever sharper

will not preserve what he has gained for long…

He who stands on tiptoe will not stand long.

He who takes wide strides will not go far.

In a closely related sense Laozi often speaks of renouncing one’s own opinion: he who insists on the exclusivity of his own view does not know the truth and cannot understand another. The Dao embraces all, and one who strives for its knowledge cannot confine himself to his own opinion alone.

He who clings to his own view will understand little.

He who clings to his own truth will convince few.

11.5 The Idea of Emptiness and Simplicity.

Closely connected with this, in turn, is the idea of inner emptiness, of inner poverty. It is quite simple: if a person fills himself with knowledge and holds his own point of view, then no room remains in him for the Dao. The Dao does not belong to any one person, and therefore it cannot be appropriated. The Dao is the source and the end of all, and so he who wishes to be conformed to the Dao must renounce what is his own. One’s own opinion is always a particular perspective, one’s own angle of vision; but this is not enough — one must look at the world “through the eyes of the Dao.” For this reason Laozi says: lose, and lose again. In a single person there is room enough for only one:

Without going out of the courtyard, thou canst know the world.

Without opening the window, thou canst behold the Heavenly Way.

The farther thou goest, the less thou knowest.

This is why the wisest person

goes nowhere — yet knows all,

looks at nothing — yet understands all,

does nothing — yet accomplishes all.

Laozi proclaims many times the renunciation of accumulating ordinary book- learning and everyday knowledge. To know much is not necessary; one must know the chief thing, that which gives life. Book-learning Laozi replaces with reverent unknowing:

Cast aside learning, and thou shalt know no sorrow.

“Of course!” and “Very well!” — how far apart are they?…

I alone am tranquil, giving nothing of myself away, like an infant not yet smiling,

a weary wanderer with nowhere to return!

All others possess in abundance;

I alone seem deprived of all.

I have the heart of a fool — vague and simple!

Ordinary people are quick to judgment;

I alone abide in unknowing.

Ordinary people judge with such precision;

I alone am detached and free of thought…

For ordinary people everything has its reason;

I alone am simple and direct, as one without learning.

11.6 The Internal Polemic with Confucius.

Laozi naturally appears as an opponent of Confucian ritualism. Whereas for Confucius the will of Heaven and the Dao are attained by following the rites and ceremonial, by the precise performance of social roles, for Laozi the Dao lies in inner transformation, in inner alchemy. Laozi preaches, as it were, a leap into perfection, a mystical breakthrough into the Dao, without the intermediate observance of rites. While Confucius speaks of the gradual transformation of the human being through external discipline, Laozi concentrates on inner perfection, which must be discovered and realized; for him there is no need of rites and ceremonies.

It is not without reason that the legend was told of the meeting between Laozi and Confucius. Laozi said to Confucius: “Lay aside, my friend, thy arrogance, all manner of strivings and grandiose plans: none of this has any value for thy true self. I have nothing more to say to thee!” Confucius walked away and said to his disciples: “I know how birds fly, how fish swim, how game runs… But how a dragon soars upon wind and clouds and rises into the heavens, I do not comprehend. Today I have seen Laozi, and I think he is like a dragon.”

In the Daodejing the polemic with Confucius surfaces several times:

When the Great Dao is lost, Virtue (De) appears.

When Virtue is lost, humaneness (Ren) appears.

When humaneness is lost, righteousness (Yi) appears.

When righteousness is lost, ritual propriety (Li) appears.

Ritual propriety is the thinning of loyalty and trust, and the beginning of chaos.

Foreknowledge is but the blossom of the Way and the beginning of ignorance.

This is why the great man takes his refuge in what is deep and does not dwell in what is shallow;

he takes his refuge in the root and does not dwell in the blossom.

In this 38th chapter the terminology of Confucianism is employed. Laozi emphasizes that everything Confucius values — humaneness, righteousness, ritual propriety, devotion — is itself a manifestation of the loss of the Dao, of deviation from the Way. When men lose the Dao, perfection appears; the loss of perfection leads to the search for perfection; then comes ritual propriety, and so on. Ritual propriety and devotion are signs of decline.

This very strange judgment must be properly understood: the perfect man need not seek perfection — he is already perfect. The saint need not strive for holiness — he is already holy. Only the imperfect and the sinful need to seek perfection and strive for holiness. Of these Laozi speaks. Devotion is present only in times of turmoil. For if all live in love, no one thinks of devotion. But once turmoil begins, men begin to divide people into the devoted and the undevoted, and this is because love has been lost.

In this also lies Laozi’s verdict on Confucius. The values that Confucius extols are, from Laozi’s standpoint, the values of a Dao that has been lost — of a fallen world, if you will. They are not bad, but one must rather attend to perfection itself.

11.7 Zhuang Zhou. The Zhuangzi.

The Zhuangzi is the second most important philosophical book of Daoism, and it has undergone a long history. The catalogue of the imperial library compiled at the turn of the Christian era mentions a treatise Zhuangzi consisting of 52 chapters. At the beginning of the 3rd century editions consisting of 26 or 27 chapters were in circulation. The final form of the treatise was given at the turn of the 3rd and 4th centuries by its classical commentator Guo Xiang. He identified 33 chapters within it, dividing them into three categories — “inner,” “outer,” and “miscellaneous.” The redaction carried out by Guo Xiang has been universally accepted.

On the whole the Zhuangzi develops the ideas of Laozi (if, indeed, the two are not one person, as some scholars hold) set forth in the Daodejing. At the same time, the text of the treatise is filled with contradictions. Modern scholars, in studies of the philosophy of the Zhuangzi, observes that the book contains entirely different, and at times mutually exclusive, worldviews. One may discover in it both metaphysics and the denial of metaphysics, monism and pluralism, the affirmation of the reality of the objective world and its reduction to the subject.

The book is indeed exceedingly tangled and saturated with all manner of metaphors and riddles, which acquire meaning only in the context of Daoist philosophy and the Daodejing. Zhuangzi constantly emphasizes the inadequacy of human knowledge of things: “The men of antiquity reached the limit in their knowledge. What did they reach? They knew that originally things do not exist — this is the limit, the whole abyss of meaning, and there is nothing to add to it. Those who came after them held that things do exist, but that there are no boundaries between them. Those who came still later held that boundaries between things exist, but that no thing can be ‘this’ or ‘that.’ The opposition of ‘this’ and ‘that’ is the cause of the obscuring of the Way.”

This “obscuring,” according to Zhuangzi, is characteristic of the people of the present age. So long as the opposition of “this” and “that” — the duality that marks human perception of things — remains in consciousness, the Dao is not realized. This in part recalls the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta.

The world is essentially one, and yet the philosopher does not say, as the Advaitins do, that the world is illusory while God alone is real. The world is real, and multiplicity is present within it; nevertheless, all things have a single root, a single abyss of origin. “Things become what they are when they are given names. What, then, are they? They are such as they are. Why are they not such? They are not such because they are not such. Each thing originally has its own particular quality, and each thing originally has its own possibilities. There is no thing that lacks the qualities and possibilities proper to it. Therefore, if someone arbitrarily sets the leper over against the beauty Xishi, a blade of grass against a pillar, nobility against baseness, let him gather them all together. Their separation is their making; their making is their unmaking. But all things — both those coming to be and those passing away — interpenetrate one another and come together into one. Only the person who has grasped the truth to the end knows that all comes to one.”

The philosopher finds the answer to the question of how unity is combined with the multiplicity of things in the idea of “the transformation of things,” possibly one of the most original of Daoist ideas. In his famous parable of the butterfly, Zhuangzi says: “Once I, Zhuang Zhou, saw myself in a dream as a butterfly — a happy butterfly fluttering among the flowers to its delight, not at all knowing that it was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly I awoke and saw that I was Zhuang Zhou. And I did not know whether I was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly that dreamt it was Zhuang Zhou. And yet between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there is, beyond doubt, a difference. This is what the transformation of things is!”

Following Laozi, Zhuangzi speaks of the inner emptiness needed for the knowledge of the Dao and its transformations. To attain this emptiness one must rid oneself of one’s own opinion: “Those who in antiquity governed the realm did not seek to apply their own mind, even though their knowledge embraced Heaven and Earth. They did not speak from themselves, even though they had grasped the nature of things to the end.” But he who has his own opinion is doomed to duality and ignorance, for if a person looks from his own point of view, he is no longer able to look from any other, and in the end the world breaks up for him into “mine” and “his,” into “this” and “that.” “Every ‘this’ is also ‘that’; every ‘that’ is also ‘this.’ There they say ‘so’ and ‘not so’ from their own point of view; here they say ‘so’ and ‘not so’ from their own point of view as well… Where ‘this’ and ‘that’ do not yet stand opposed to one another, there is the Axis of the Way.”

So long as people hold their own point of view, so long as they judge the world as “so” and “not so,” the Dao will remain obscured, or, as Zhuangzi says, “will suffer harm.” The ancients were different: they did not even divide the world into the heavenly and the earthly: “What the true men loved was one. And what they did not love was also one. In the one they were one, and in the not-one they were one as well. In the one they were the disciples of Heaven. In the not-one they were the disciples of man. He in whom neither the heavenly nor the human encroaches on the other is worthy to be called a true man”…

11.8 Liezi. The Liezi.

The Liezi — a Daoist treatise named after its supposed author Liezi — is perhaps the third most important philosophical treatise of Daoism.

According to Chinese tradition, the treatise goes back to the ancient philosopher and Daoist teacher Lie Yukou, who lived in the 5th century BC. The earliest mention of a figure named Liezi is found in the Zhuangzi, where it is said that Liezi could travel by holding onto the wind. The text was first mentioned in the catalogues of the imperial library compiled by the philosopher Liu Xin (Han dynasty).

During the Three Kingdoms period the treatise was lost and reconstructed from memory, with inevitable alterations and abridgements, by the Confucian thinker Zhang Zhan. The Liezi consists of eight chapters, and a notable feature of this work is the unity of its style, which is indirect evidence that the text was written by one person. It is generally accepted that the seventh chapter, “Yang Zhu,” belongs to a different author.

The Liezi elaborates, develops, and supplements the positions of the Daoist treatise Daodejing. For a long time, however, the treatise stood at the periphery of the commentarial tradition and did not enjoy the same success as the Zhuangzi. Zhang Zhan sums up the overall sense of the treatise thus:

“In general, this book explains that all that exists has the supreme emptiness as its foundation; that all phenomena in the world are grounded in their own disappearance; that spiritual wisdom attains fullness in calm concentration; that thought perishes by clinging to things; that waking and sleeping are of equal significance; that the great and the small have no common measure; that the supreme understanding does not require intellectual effort; that self- cultivation is more important than dissipation; and that by following nature one may attain all things, without fearing even to walk on water or through fire.”

The first chapter of the work is entitled “The Gift of Heaven.” It sets forth a conception characteristic of Daoism (similar to that of the Zhuangzi and the Daodejing), according to which life and death are phases of a natural cycle, stages of the natural order of things. A human being must not concentrate on one alone — say, on life — for life passes away and is replaced by death in accord with this cycle.

The being of an individual person arises through the social conventions of life, and is conditioned by them. Attachment to life or to death is only an absolutizing of these conventions. In reality, life and death are merely forms of the transformation of the cosmic energy qi, of which all things are woven, including human individuality. The individual is only a moment in the wheel of cosmic transformations, only a form of existence; and the form of life is replaced by death.

The chapter “The Yellow Emperor (Huang Di)” is devoted to the Daoist attitude toward human activity. Many stories are recounted here about Liezi, Confucius, and Daoist sages. Their burden is to show that action which does not destroy the harmony of the Dao is possible only through the renunciation of one’s “I,” of egocentrism, and of goal-directedness. Such action is precisely non-action. What matters is not the form of the activity itself, nor its outward expression, but the inner intention of the agent, which transforms doing into non-doing. Doing as such is here depicted as action for oneself.

This conception is illustrated by parables and stories. A drunkard who falls from a cart, for example, is not injured because he does not know what is happening; he is not acting; he is relaxed and not tensed. Such wholeness of consciousness is attained through following one’s own nature.

In the third chapter, “King Mu of Zhou,” Liezi sets forth his conception that life is like a dream, and a dream may be regarded as waking. This in part recalls Advaita; but unlike Advaita, the Daoists did not entirely deny the reality of life and of this world.

The fourth chapter bears the title “Kongzi,” that is, Confucius — the old rhetorical device of using stories about Confucius for the critique of Confucian ideas. The Confucians never tired of speaking of the necessity of education and the accumulation of knowledge. The Daoists opposed reverent ignorance to this: from their point of view, book-learning distorts true knowledge of the universe. The universe is spontaneous; it consists of changes and cannot be fixed in a lifeless book. When someone begins to draw fine distinctions between concepts, this is a sure sign that he has lost the knowledge of the Dao.

On the whole, Zhang Zhan lists all the principal positions of Daoism that can be found in varying degrees in the two other foundational Daoist treatises, the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. And yet the Liezi is fairly original. Perhaps the theme of fate is treated most interestingly in this treatise, in the sixth chapter:

“To be born in due time and to die in due time — this is the blessing of Heaven. Not to live when it is time to live, and not to die when it is time to die — this is the punishment of Heaven. Some are born and die at the proper time; others live and die when it is not time to live or die. But neither we ourselves nor others have it in our power to give us life when we are born or to send us death when we die. Both are determined by Fate, and human understanding cannot grasp this. Therefore it is said: Incomprehensibly, succeeding one another to infinity, they follow of themselves the Heavenly Way. In equilibrium, the unending circle turns of itself the Heavenly Way. Earth and Heaven cannot prevent this; the sages of all ages cannot deny it; spirits and demons cannot deceive it.”

And yet this is not the Greek fatum and not its inexorability. Daoist reflections always contain a practical side; one may indeed say that the theoretical portion of a Daoist statement often has an applied character, and is therefore not absolute in relation to the practical.

All this applies fully to the Daoist category of fate, and as James Sellmann justly writes, “in reality the Daoist conception of fate, like the Daoist conception of non-action, is meant to move the reader to set out on the path of recognizing the spontaneity of natural changes. The central idea is to renounce intentional actions and simply to respond to circumstances as they arise. Thus an experienced swimmer seeks to follow the current of a turbulent river and does not try to fight against it”…

By way of conclusion, let us cite an extensive quotation from Vasilyev: “In the philosophy of Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Liezi, as in the works of less famous Daoist thinkers from the Jixia school, there were contained many interesting thoughts and important positions. Most of them, however, were destined for a short life. Of all that was written in the Daoist philosophical treatises in the second half of the first millennium BC, only a few main elements preserved their force and went on to receive further development and to influence the minds of many generations of Chinese… First and foremost, this is the teaching about the Dao and all the problems of natural philosophy and cosmogony connected with it. This teaching was taken up in its most mystical interpretation and over time was overlaid with numerous details and embellished with colorful particulars — this is especially characteristic of the Liezi, the latest of the three treatises. The second important element was the teaching about the relativity of being, of life and death, and in this connection about the possibility of long life and of attaining immortality. This thesis with time advanced almost to first place, pushing aside everything else, so that for a time — at the turn of our era, in the Han epoch — the search for immortality was in fact transformed into the chief and almost sole occupation of ‘learned’ Daoists… And, finally, the third and last was the principle of wuwei. It was precisely these basic elements of philosophical Daoism that became the theoretical foundation of the religion of the Daoists, which arose in the Han era.”

11.9 Daoist Myths.

It has become a commonplace in studies of Daoism to observe that, with time, the philosophical conception of the early Daoists was gradually overlaid with mythology, generating a religious field. The philosophical concepts were illustrated and gave rise to new myths in which old heroes took on new roles. Characteristic of the Han era are collections such as the Huainanzi, composed by Daoists, in which philosophical ideas were overlaid with corresponding mythologems.

At the head of the Daoist pantheon stand the “three purities,” to which correspond the “Three Pure Ones.” Sanqing — “three purities.” In Chinese Daoist cosmogony these are the three spheres of the highest world: yuqing (“jade purity”), shangqing (“upper purity”), and taiqing (“great purity”). Yuqing is accessible to the wisest sages (sheng), shangqing to the saints (zhen), and taiqing to the Daoist immortals (xian).

In later Daoism these spheres came to have eponymous gods. The deity of yuqing is traditionally called Yuanshi Tianzun (the Original Heavenly Lord) and bears the title Tianbao (Heavenly Jewel). His palace with golden gates stands on Mount Yushan (the Jade Mountain). In many works and in folk tradition yuqing and its deity are identified with the highest deity of the folk pantheon, Yudi (the Jade Emperor). The god of the second purity, shangqing, bears the title Lingbao Tianzun (Heavenly Lord of the Numinous Jewel) or Taishang Daojun (Supreme Sovereign of the Dao). He measures time and divides it into periods. He dwells near the northern edge of the universe and governs yin and yang. The god of the third sphere is called Taishang Laojun (the Supreme Old Sovereign Laozi) and is identified with Laozi; he is also called Shenbao (Divine Jewel), and at times he is set in correspondence with Huang Di, while in some Daoist schools he is exalted above all three, as the direct embodiment of the Dao.

In the earliest sources Huang Di appears as a wise ancient hero-ruler, one of the first three. Already in the treatises — the Zhuangzi, the Hanfeizi, and others — however, there is information of a mythological character. It is difficult to say whether these are genuine Daoist innovations, since Daoism, like Confucianism, presented itself as a restoration of antiquity: “What others have taught, that I too teach,” says Laozi. It thus remains possible that the Daoist myths about Huang Di rest on traditions that have not come down to us.

In Daoism Huang Di appears as the first “immortal” in the history of China, the supreme patron of the Daoist teaching, and one of the founders of Daoism. How and when exactly this transformation occurred is not known with certainty. It is known, however, that already at the turn of the 2nd to 1st centuries BC the Daoists considered Huang Di and Laozi to be their patriarchs. Laozi, moreover, is regarded as the incarnation and very body of the Dao.

Besides Huang Di, a place of the first importance in Daoist mythology is given to Pangu. The myth of Pangu is rather late; the earliest version of the myth is dated to the 3rd–4th centuries AD, and this is of particular interest, for it is essentially the only Chinese myth of the creation of the world. To the philosophy of Ancient China the idea of the creation of the world was foreign, as was cosmogony in general.

Similar variants of the Pangu myth were found among some non-Chinese tribes of southern China, who traced their origin to the legendary dog Panhu, who married the daughter of the ancient Chinese emperor Diku. Many scholars of religion and orientalists have noted the similarity of the Chinese Pangu myth to the Vedic myth of Purusha.

In Daoism the Pangu myth essentially became an illustration of the basic philosophical ideas. Thus in the beginning there was the primordial chaos, the abyss (hundun). The arising of the world from hundun is recounted in the Daoist treatise Zhuangzi. According to this tradition, Hundun (chaos) had no face. In another source, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, written in the Han epoch, it is said that Hundun is a divine being resembling a bag of fiery red color, without a head, but with six paws and four wings.

Within chaos the giant Pangu was conceived. Eighteen thousand years passed, and the universe began to come into being. The light and bright energy yang (yang-qi) rose upward and became Heaven, while the heavy and dark energy yin (yin-qi) sank downward and became Earth. Pangu remained in the middle and “changed his appearance nine times a day.” Standing between heaven and earth, in heaven he was a god and on earth a man. Heaven gradually rose higher and higher, and with it grew Pangu, standing between heaven and earth. Thousands of years later he reached the size of ninety thousand li and died.

His eyes became the sun and the moon. His body turned into earth; his breath became the wind; his bones became stones and mountains; his hair became grasses. From his beard rose the stars, and from the insects that lived on his body came human beings.

The development of the Pangu myth introduced ordinary people to the central ideas of philosophical Daoism — to the difficult notion of the Dao in cosmos and cosmogony. Essentially the Pangu myth embodies the saying of Laozi: “one gives birth to two; two gives birth to three; three gives birth to all the myriad things.” Pangu is the mythical image of a unified cosmos as a single being. In the end such an approach popularized Daoism among the people, and Daoist theory merged with folk beliefs. The Pangu myth became very popular in China, and Pangu himself became one of the chief figures of the Daoist pantheon.

Another important figure of Daoist mythology is the goddess Xiwangmu (the Queen Mother of the West). In pre-Han sources she is first mentioned in connection with an enumeration of the ancient heroes who mastered the Dao. This enumeration is found in the Zhuangzi. Later the myth of Xiwangmu appears in fully developed form, with numerous details and particulars.

Thus, from the material gathered concerning Xiwangmu in the Shanhaijing, it appears that the goddess had the body of a human being, the teeth of a tiger, and the tail of a leopard; that she lived far in the west, on the summit of the “Jade Mountain” (Yushan); and that three fierce birds attended her. The Mu Tianzi Zhuan describes in detail the westward journey of one of the early Zhou kings, the ruler Mu (947–928 BC), and his meeting and conversation with the goddess. By all appearances, Xiwangmu was originally in charge of punishments for failure to fulfill the will of Heaven, in the form of misfortunes and natural disasters. At the turn of the Christian era, cults of Xiwangmu of an orgiastic character are attested. In Daoism, however, she appears as the knower and bestower of immortality.

From the Huainanzi we know that the goddess Xiwangmu possessed the miraculous elixir of immortality and that the great hero of antiquity Yi succeeded in reaching her. She granted him the elixir, but it was stolen from him by his wife, who drank the magical liquid and ascended to the moon.

In Xiwangmu’s garden grow wondrous trees of immortality. Such a tree bears fruit once every three thousand years; from its fruit the elixir of immortality is prepared. Later, in medieval China, these fruits were usually identified with peaches, and the wondrous trees with the peach garden of Xiwangmu.

11.10 Immortality.

The myth of Xiwangmu is directly related to one of the chief doctrines of Daoism — the teaching of immortality. The fervent preaching of ideas of longevity and immortality not only won the Daoist magicians and preachers great popularity among the people, but also gave the Daoists the opportunity to gain a position in society and to win the favor of emperors who longed to obtain immortality.

The Daoist preaching of physical immortality, or of the extreme prolongation of life, spread at least from the 3rd century BC. It is known that the emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, the unifier of China and the first emperor, became absorbed in it. When the Daoist magician Xu Shi reported to the emperor that somewhere in the ocean there were three sacred islands inhabited by celestial beings, and that there one might obtain the elixir of immortality, Qin Shi Huangdi ordered an expedition to be equipped.

Several thousand youths and maidens were sent under Xu Shi’s command in search of the islands. Few returned. Fearing the emperor’s wrath, Xu Shi contrived an explanation: he claimed that he had found the islands, but that they were surrounded by sharks. In addition to Xu Shi, the emperor sent a number of other Daoist magicians in search of the elixir and the herbs of immortality. All returned empty-handed. The emperor then severely punished and executed the unsuccessful and sent out new ones.

The first Han emperors, and especially Wudi, likewise turned their gaze to the Daoists, who promised immortality. The emperor’s interest was kindled by legends about the immortals, about the successes of Daoist sages who had prepared the magical elixir and ascended to heaven. Wudi spared no expense; he built Daoist temples and patronized scholars. Like Qin Shi Huangdi, he executed the unsuccessful and continued to seek immortality.

It is clear that the original Daoist conception did not presuppose physical immortality. Laozi says that “he who follows the Dao in death does not die” — that is, physical death is plainly not denied. In chapter 40 Laozi speaks of longevity, and in chapter 50 he mysteriously says that in one who has attained wisdom there is no place for death to settle. Yet there is no direct affirmation of physical immortality in Laozi.

Analogous ideas, in more concrete and developed form, are also found in the Zhuangzi. There it is said that great sages live for as long as a thousand years. Guang Chengzi lived 1,200 years because he led a measured life, free of passions, of action, and of superfluous knowledge. There is also one Peng Zu, who lived about 800 years. Those who wish to attain longevity and to be like Peng Zu must train their bodies through special breathing and gymnastic exercises. True immortals do not eat grain, but drink dew and breathe the wind.

In the Han era many treatises appeared in which the basic principles of attaining immortality were worked out. Most of these works have now been lost; only a few have been preserved, for example the treatise of Ge Hong (284–363 AD), the Baopuzi.

11.11 Inner Alchemy (neidan) and Daoist Practice.

The body of every person is likened to the universe; the image of the human being is Pangu. Both in macrocosm and in microcosm a multitude of spirits is at work, and their presence is of great significance for the functioning and preservation of the organism. In the human body 36,000 spirits actively function; they are subdivided into 3 large groups, 6 small ones, 120 sections, and so on. These 36,000 spirits also correspond to the 360 days of the lunar year and are divided into 24 sections corresponding to the number of half- months. Each of these groups, headed by a corresponding “ruler,” passes through a particular part of the human organism, and is connected with its 5 internal organs, 12 vessels, bones, muscles, and so on.

The highest role in this host of spirits of the microcosm belongs to the lords of the three main parts into which the human body was divided (head and arms; chest; belly and legs). These were in turn associated with the “Three Pure Ones” of the Daoist pantheon.

He who wished to attain immortality had to grasp the basic regularities and connections of these numerous spirits with the corresponding parts of the human body and prevent them from leaving the body. “If by a wide variety of means and methods one acts upon the spirits in the required direction and does not allow them to leave the body, then the power of the spirits within the body will gradually grow, and with it the substance of the body will change. When this process has gone far enough, the spirits will become the dominant element in the human being; his body will be dematerialized, and he, having become immortal, will ascend to heaven” [Vasilyev, L.S. Cults, Religions, Traditions in China. 2nd ed. Moscow: Vostochnaya Literatura Publishers, RAN, 2001].

Daoist practices may be divided into two main groups: physical-physiological and spiritual-ethical. To the group of physiological means belonged, first of all, restrictions and regulations regarding nutrition and certain other bodily functions. One was not to drink wine or to eat meat, spices, or vegetables. The seeker of immortality and longevity had to renounce grain, since it strengthens the material and impedes its transformation into spirit.

During fasts, one made do with a minimum of food, consisting of specially prepared souffles and various kinds of miraculous mixtures and pills. All these “substitutes” for food were usually prepared from fruits, nuts, cinnamon, rhubarb, processed plants, and a number of strengthening drugs. Minerals were also frequently used, and the composition and proportions of the ingredients were the most important factor in preparing such substances. The fasts were gradually extended and ideally were to become permanent.

Another practice was the regulation of the sexual life in a particular way. It was held that, as a result of properly ordered relations between man and woman, the inner forces of both are strengthened, and this contributes to longevity and to immortality. Wei Boyang, for example, worked out a conception in which he correlated the sexual relations of man and woman with the conceptions of the Dao, the five primary elements, the forces yin and yang, and the ideas and trigrams of the Book of Changes. There are grounds to suppose that these formulations lay at the basis of orgiastic sexual practices which, though not characteristic of all Daoism, were practiced by certain communities.

The most important and most widely accepted practices in Daoism were breathing exercises and special gymnastics. Zhuangzi already wrote of correct breathing. This series of exercises was subsequently elaborated in detail and prescribed as obligatory. This is the so-called “embryonic breathing” (as in the mother’s womb), the essence of which came to this: not to breathe through the mouth or through the nose — that is, inhalation and exhalation were to occur, as it were, without any active action on the part of the practitioner. For its training there were regimens: one breath per 12, and even per 120 heartbeats.

Finally, the gymnastics came down to a successive ritual changing of bodily positions. Some of these exercises went back genetically to the ritual bodily movements of diviners; others were imitations of the movements of animals. In particular, the starting positions for a number of exercises were the “poses” of the tiger, the deer, the bear, and the bird.

Besides the physical spirits in the human body, there also dwell within the human being psychic spirits. Ethical and psychic actions corresponded to them. In the Baopuzi it is said that he who wishes to become immortal must perform no fewer than 1,200 virtuous acts in succession. The principle of “in succession” of course presupposed that the whole of one’s life would consist solely of virtue.

Meditative practice also belonged to the means of nourishing the immaterial spirits.

All of this, however, was only preparation for the final and culminating mysterious act: the transformation of the human being into an immortal, the merging with the Dao, the transfiguration and ascent to heaven. In the literal sense this was described in Daoist treatises as the visible disappearance of the human being.

The last thing worth noting on this point is that inner alchemy (neidan) demanded enormous efforts and was not the only path. Alongside it flourished outer alchemy (waidan), based on laboratory activity, in the course of which the alchemist created from various substances (above all from cinnabar, lead, and mercury) a substance regarded as the elixir of immortality (dan; the same character also denotes cinnabar).

11.12 The Formation of Daoist Schools.

The 2nd century AD saw the appearance of the first organized Daoist movement — the school of the “Way of the Celestial Masters,” later renamed the school of the “Way of Orthodox Unity” (zhengyi dao). Its first patriarch (“celestial master”) is held to be Zhang Daoling, who according to tradition received a new revelation from the deified Laozi and became his vicegerent on earth. This title has been transmitted by inheritance in the Zhang lineage down to the present day. In the 4th century two new Daoist schools arose — the Maoshan school (also called Shangqing, “Highest Purity”) and the Lingbao school (“Numinous Jewel”). Both of these schools sought to combine the symbolic ritualism of the “Celestial Masters” with the occult and alchemical tradition of South Chinese Daoism, and devoted significant attention to techniques of meditative contemplation.

In the 7th–8th centuries, under the influence of Buddhism, monasticism and monasteries appeared in Daoism, which was foreign to the principles of original Daoism. At the same time the tendency intensified toward the predominance in Daoist practice of psychotechnical methods of contemplative meditation. Chief attention came to be devoted to methods of inner self- perfection. This tendency led, in the 12th century, to the appearance in northern China of new Daoist schools, the most important of which is the school of the “Way of Complete Perfection” (quanzhen jiao). It has been the leading Daoist movement down to the present day. This school devotes its principal attention to moral self-perfection and to the Daoist practice of contemplation; it is also characterized by the requirement of obligatory monastic profession for the clergy (daoshi) [Torchinov, Ye. A. Daoism and Traditional Chinese Systems, in: Lu K’uan Yü. Daoist Yoga: Alchemy and Immortality. Moscow, 1982].

11.13 Shinto: The Way of the Kami

Shinto is the traditional religion of Japan. Its origins are not self-evident, and there are a number of opposing views on the question. It is clear, however, that Shinto unites within itself many beliefs of an animistic and shamanic type that have existed in Japan from earliest times, as well as numerous Buddhist layers. The formation of Shinto as the national and state religion of the Japanese, however, is dated only to the period of the 7th–8th centuries AD, when the country was united under the rule of the sovereigns of the central region of Yamato.

For a long time the traditional Japanese beliefs had no name, but with the spread of Buddhism, in opposition to it, the term Kami-no-michi (literally “the way of the kami [gods]”) arose. The Chinese equivalent of this term, with the same meaning, was Shen Dao, which has entered European languages as Shinto. Tatyana Grigorieva, in her book The Japanese Artistic Tradition, writes: “The word Shinto (literally ‘the way of the gods’) is borrowed from the Yijing (the Book of Changes): in the first part of the ancient commentary Tuan Zhuan, the characters shen dao (Jap. Shinto) are used to explain the way of the heavenly deities, which expresses itself in the regular alternation of all things, in the change of the seasons, and also in the fact that the perfectly wise, through knowledge of the ‘way of the gods,’ is able to preserve order in the realm.”

The principal sources for the mythology of Shinto are the collections Kojiki and Nihongi, composed in 712 and 720. In them oral traditions were recorded, combined, and reworked. The Kojiki (“Record of Ancient Matters”) is a collection of records of events of the beginning of time, compiled by order of the emperor Tenmu. The Nihongi (“Chronicles of Japan”) is likewise a collection of records of times past, but composed in the Chinese language in 720. Later there would appear the mythological collection Kogoshui (807) and the collection of liturgical prayers Engishiki (10th century).

11.14 The Highest Kami.

The self-designation of Shinto — Kami-no-michi, the way of the gods — points to the word kami. Kami are spirits or gods. The Kojiki recounts the birth of the first of them after the separation of heaven and earth. Why they appeared and what they did is not known. Nothing can be said with certainty about the character of these deities, except that they were unmarried and, as the Nihongi clarifies, of the male sex, “produced solely by the yang principle.”

According to ancient Japanese conceptions, the world is structured in two ways. The first, vertical — often compared with the shamanic conceptions of the Altaians — was characteristic of the tribal union of Yamato. The second, conditionally horizontal, similar to Polynesian beliefs, places the land of the gods, which is also the land of the dead, not in the sky but beyond the ocean. The two coexisted peacefully, overlapping one another.

The Japanese cosmos is structured vertically into three realms:

1. Takamagahara (The Plain of High Heaven), where the celestial kami dwell.

2. Ashihara no Nakatsukuni (The Land of the Reed Plains), the earthly realm.

3. Yomi-no-kuni (The Land of the Yellow Springs), the subterranean world of the dead.

The Kojiki says that below is the Land of the Yellow Springs (Yomi), also called the Land of Roots or the Land of Valleys, the subterranean world. Above it lies the Land of the Reed Plains. At the top is the Plain of High Heaven, where the Sun goddess Amaterasu dwells. In their descriptions, all these worlds differ little from one another and resemble our own world. There too are seas, rivers, forests, and so on. On the whole, this corresponds to shamanic conceptions of other worlds.

On the Plain of High Heaven, formed from the light particles at the separation of chaos, there appears a god, Ame-no-Minakanushi (Lord of the Sacred Center of the Heavens), and two more deities, Takamimusubi (God of High Sacred Creation) and Kamimusubi (God of Divine Creation). These three deities are similar to the “Three Pure Ones” in Daoism. Curiously, the role of all three is unclear, since they hide themselves and do not manifest.

In time, from the not-yet-hardened earth there appears something like “shoots of reed.” These turned into two deities, Umashi-ashikabi-hikoji (Beautiful Shoots of the Reed) and Ame-no-tokotachi (Eternally Established in the Heavens), also hidden and unmanifest.

In the Nihongi these five deities are not found. In the Kojiki, however, they are present, and in Shinto they bear the common name “the Distinct Deities of the Heavenly Recess” (Kotoamatsukami). The Kojiki then recounts the appearance of two more solitary deities, Kuni-no-tokotachi (Eternally Established on the Earth) and Toyokumono (Abundant Clouds over the Plain). After them, seven pairs of gods are born.

The most important figures in the mythology of Japan are the last pair of these seven, Izanagi and Izanami (Jap. “the first man” and “the first woman”), male and female deities of anthropomorphic form; they will bring forth many other gods. It is Izanagi and Izanami who are the creators of the world; from Heaven they make the islands, the lands, the seas, and so on. Later Izanagi will give birth to the triad of higher deities: the Sun goddess Amaterasu, the god of the Moon and Night Tsukuyomi, and the god of storms and water Susanoo, as well as the spirits of the sea, wind, mountains, and trees. Amaterasu and Susanoo are in fact the principal characters in the mythology.

11.15 Kami.

We do not find in Shinto any “canonical” definition of what the kami are. They are spirits, forces, deities. Yet the company of these deities includes figures not only of indigenous Japan but of Buddhism and, in part, of Daoism. “Shinto’s special relations with Buddhism are indeed unusual, and they can no longer be explained by the typical properties of Shinto as a communal or polytheistic religion. The matter lies not only in the quantity of borrowed Buddhist deities that have become very popular in Japan alongside the local kami, but in the fact that Buddhism filled, within itself, a whole lacuna in the Japanese worldview, taking under its control everything connected with death and posthumous existence,” notes A.A. Nakorchevsky [Nakorchevsky, A.A. Shinto. St. Petersburg, 2003, p. 69].

One of the most important peculiarities of the Japanese kami is that there is no clear boundary between the kami and human beings. The Japanese gods often appear as heroes, as people; they are not transcendent, and in this sense they recall shamanic spirits and, in some respects, ancient demigods.

In Shinto the genetic connection between gods and human beings is particularly emphasized — human beings were not created by the kami but born of them. And not only human beings. All things were born, and therefore kami inhere in all things. The kami are the spirits of nature. Nakorchevsky sums up this idea: “All nature is animated; there is no clear boundary between living and non- living nature — what differs is only the degree of ‘aliveness.’ In every stone, every leaf of a tree, in the wind, not to mention animals, plants, and people, a spiritual principle is present; all is alive. For from the Japanese myths we know that all nature, including what we usually classify as non- living — for example, the islands, the mountains, the trees — was in the literal sense of the word born, and not at all created, by the divine couple Izanagi and Izanami. Therefore any thing, however motionless and lifeless it may seem to us, possesses to one degree or another this living principle. In other words, in everything there are kami” [Nakorchevsky, A.A. Shinto. St. Petersburg, 2003, p. 82].

On the whole the kami may be classified, in a conditional way, into several kinds:

1. Nature kami. The guardians and inhabitants of localities or the souls of departed ancestors; often they have no proper names, iconographic features, or fixed altars.

2. High kami, such as Amaterasu. These have names, individual representations, and a cult.

3. Borrowed kami. These too have names and individual representations, but they entered Shinto from other religions. An example is the seven gods of fortune. Daikokuten, one of the seven, is “the Great Black One.” Originally he was the Indian deity Mahakala. From the Indian pantheon Mahakala passed into the Buddhist pantheon as one of the protectors of the Buddhas, and subsequently passed into Japan. Altars are built in honor of these kami, sometimes inside the temples of the high kami.

4. Historical kami, associated with persons who once lived. Many shrines, chapels, and altars exist for these kami. An example is Tenjin (“spirit of heaven”), the Shinto deity of learning, poetry, and calligraphy, in this capacity Sugawara no Michizane, a 9th-century scholar and poet, is venerated.

Another Shinto term is tama. Put briefly, tama is life, vital force. The modern Japanese word tamashii (soul) is derived from it. Tama and kami often appear as synonyms. The Japanese ethnographer Orikuchi Shinobu, whom we have already mentioned, holds that tama is the older word, and that kami appeared later for the designation only of good gods, whereas the word mono (or mononoke) was used for evil ones [Nakorchevsky, A.A. Shinto. St. Petersburg, 2003, p. 86]. On the whole, one may say that the kami are those in whom tama is concentrated. If the kami are good, then evil spirits are the mono already mentioned; but there are also goryō, principally the souls of evil people who have turned into vengeful spirits.

11.16 Izanagi, Izanami, and the Myth of the Origin of Death.

The principal mythological drama of Japanese mythology unfolds between Izanagi and Izanami. They created the world, standing on a bridge of air stretched over nothing, and gave birth to many gods. But the last of Izanami’s offspring, the kami of fire, burned his mother so badly that, after unbearable sufferings, she died and descended to the Land of the Yellow Springs (Yomi), the world of darkness. Izanagi, seeing his wife’s death-agonies, mad with grief, cut off the head of his guilty son, the god of fire. He wept over his consort’s fate, and his tears became ever new kami. In her agony Izanami flowed with sweat, vomit, and excrement, which likewise turned into kami. Thus Izanami became an inhabitant of the subterranean world and, in a certain sense, its mistress.

The next stage of the drama strongly recalls Near Eastern myths of the descent of gods into the netherworld. Izanagi comes to his wife but does not see her, and she promises to beg the lord of the Yellow Land to release her to the earth — though not forever, because she, like Persephone, has already tasted the food of the subterranean world and cannot leave it altogether. But she sets the condition that she will return only if Izanagi does not look upon her.

After a long time Izanagi loses patience, and not waiting for his wife, descends into her chambers and looks within. He saw that Izanami was a decomposing, worm-eaten, stinking corpse. Noticing her husband, she flew into a rage, and from her decomposition, rotten flesh, and worms, a multitude of spirits of death arose, whom in her wrath she sent to kill Izanagi — a plot reminiscent of the wrath of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who likewise sends spirits of death against her consort Dumuzi.

Izanagi flees, having promised to give birth to many people; the enraged wife cries in response that she will kill them all. In the end he flees, divorces his wife, and performs purifying rites to wash from himself the traces of the Yellow Land; from his body are born the Sun goddess Amaterasu, the god of the Moon and Night Tsukuyomi, and the god of storms and water Susanoo.

A curious feature of the Japanese myth is that it is Izanagi — the male — who gives birth to them, but they nevertheless have a mother, namely Izanami, who abides in the world of darkness. This is clearly seen from the fact that Susanoo, as soon as he was born, at once began to weep, saying outright that he was grieving for his mother, who remains in the world of darkness — for which his father drives him away.

11.17 From Kami-Gods to Kami-People.

Further mythology is connected no longer with Izanagi but with Amaterasu, who gave birth to many kami, and with Susanoo, who is also the father of many spirits. This chain of god-spirits extends down to the first Japanese emperor, the divine Jimmu. Amaterasu hands over power over the earthly world to her son Oshihomimi (“Abundant Ear”), and he confers the power on his son Ninigi-no- mikoto, who descended to the Earth and married the daughter of one of the local kami, fathering three sons. The youngest of them, Hoori, having passed through many vicissitudes, fathered Amatsuhiko-Hikonagisatake-Ugayafukiaezu- no-mikoto, who became the father of the emperor Jimmu [For more, see Nakorchevsky, A.A. Shinto. St. Petersburg, 2003].

An important point here is that the heroes of these astonishingly complex and improbable myths — and we have outlined only in the barest sketch the genealogy of the first Japanese emperor, omitting all the subsidiary lines, episodes, and motifs — the kami, are not gods and are not immortal, but rather resemble Greek heroes. They lived, and on dying became spirits. The Hoori just mentioned, the grandfather of the first emperor, lived 580 years. Thus already in the first scroll of the Kojiki — and it is precisely with these events that it ends — we see the kami-gods gradually becoming kami-people. From the second scroll onward, the principal characters will be historical persons.

11.18 Brief Remarks on the Human Being in Shinto.

Conceptions of the human being in Shinto are complex and ambiguous, but a few thesis-like remarks may be made. The human being, in ancient Japanese conceptions, is by nature not distinct from the kami, and, as noted above, even the highest kami are like human beings. The human being is not created but born; he traces his genealogy back to the kami. On the ontological level this is explained by the presence in the human being of tama — that is, the same vital force as in the spirits. In other words, in essence, between people and deities there is no ontological gulf; and after death people, like Greek heroes, take on the spiritual being of kami, becoming helpers of the living, their intercessors against the evil mono.

The deceased are called hotoke — the same word as is used for the Buddhas — and this is an obvious but distorted influence of Buddhism. Yes, in Mahayana Buddhism all are Buddha; but only a few become realized Buddhas who have attained bodhi.

Conceptions of the lot beyond the grave in Japan are in a number of respects similar to the beliefs of Ancient China, Vietnam, and Taiwan. The soul of a person (tama), his vital force, remains on the earth and is propitiated by the descendants for a time, by means of sacrifices. It is to become a kami and remain with the descendants to help its clan. Such “calm souls” are called nigitama, in distinction from the “uncalm” souls, aratama.

In fact the same terms are also applied to the kami in general. Nigimitama is the calm, gracious state of a kami; in this state he does not in fact act. Aramitama is the state of an acting kami during a matsuri (rite).

11.19 The Service of the Kami.

Different kami of course require different forms of interaction. In one way or another, this presupposes sacrificial forms. There are social services and obligations at the level of society; there are also individual ones. By their significance and scale all Shinto rites may be divided into three principal kinds:

1. the daily veneration of the kami in the family, when the rite is conducted by the head of the family and the family takes part;

2. shrine rituals, conducted on special occasions by the clergy;

3. mass festivals, the core of which is also a shrine rite, but whose significance is great and in which all take part.

Let us briefly describe one variety of Japanese service, namely the Matsuri. Matsuri is a verbal noun from the verb matsuru, “to serve” — that is, service.

Interaction with the kami is mediated through matsuri (festivals/rites). The core structure of a Shinto ritual involves:

1. Purification (Harae): Cleansing the participants and the space of spiritual pollution (kegare) using water, salt, or the waving of a haraigushi (a wand with white paper streamers).

2. Invocation (Kamioroshi): Summoning the kami to descend into the sanctuary or a physical vessel (yorishiro).

3. Offerings (Shinsen): Presenting the kami with sake, rice, salt, and water.

4. Prayers (Norito): The recitation of ancient liturgical texts by the priest (kannushi).

5. Feasting (Naorai): The communal sharing of the offered food and sake, uniting the worshippers with the kami.

6. Sending Off (Kamiokuri): Respectfully returning the kami to their celestial or natural abode.

The word Matsuri usually denotes the last of the three, the mass shrine service of the kami. It involves elements very similar to, and often universal in, services before idols. There is ablution, complete or partial, often symbolic. Purification — a special blessing by the priest (kannushi) with a special staff bearing white paper streamers. During the great festivals, purification presupposes preparatory abstinence. “These purifying procedures are observed with particular care where the most ancient forms of matsuri have been preserved, when the kami is ‘brought down’ into a person who, for the duration of the festival, becomes the ‘body of the deity.’ The greatest number of such archaic matsuri have been preserved in Okinawa. During the matsuri Unjami and Idaiho, for example, the kami descends upon a group of women chosen as mediums, who for several weeks live apart from others in a special hut located outside the settlement. This is one of the examples of the longest purifying seclusion. In other places this seclusion (komori) lasts only a single night, but extends to all members of the community,” notes Nakorchevsky [Nakorchevsky, A.A. Shinto. St. Petersburg, 2003, p. 270].

The “calling down” (kamioroshi) is the rite of summoning the kami, in which the spirit is asked to come to those assembled. Where there is an image and the kami is expected to manifest, an idol is used; otherwise the idol may be absent, and everything takes place before the altar. Next comes the feeding, in which offerings are placed on the altar, and the recitation of the prayers (norito). The rite that follows is called tamagushi hōten — “branches with tama” — in which sakaki branches adorned with white paper streamers are offered to the kami. Then the offered food is taken from the altar, and all those present share in it and partake of it, thereby uniting themselves to the kami. Thereafter the service may develop differently depending on the festival, but the meal often leads to the concluding rite, the dismissal — except that in Shinto it is not God who dismisses those assembled, but those assembled who dismiss the kami spirit, or, more precisely, “raise” him: kamigaeri, the rite of raising the kami.

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Bocking, Brian. A Popular Dictionary of Shinto. Routledge, 1997.

Kohn, Livia. Daoism and Chinese Culture. Three Pines Press, 2001.

Kirkland, Russell. Taoism: The Enduring Tradition. Routledge, 2004.

Kohn, Livia, editor. The Taoist Experience: An Anthology. State University of New York Press, 1993.

Miller, James. Daoism: A Short Introduction. Oneworld Publications, 2003.

Pregadio, Fabrizio, editor. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Taoism. Routledge, 2008.

Robinet, Isabelle. Taoism: Growth of a Religion. Translated by Phyllis Brooks, Stanford University Press, 1997.

Schipper, Kristofer. The Taoist Body. Translated by Karen C. Duval, University of California Press, 1993.

Breen, John, and Mark Teeuwen. A New History of Shinto. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Hardacre, Helen. Shinto: A History. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Kasulis, Thomas P. Shinto: The Way Home. University of Hawai’i Press, 2004.

Kuroda, Toshio. “The Shinto Secularization: Shinto and Buddhism in Japanese History.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies , 1981.

Nelson, John K. A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine. University of Washington Press, 1996.

Picken, Stuart D. B. Essentials of Shinto: An Analytical Guide to Principal Teachings. Greenwood Press, 1994.

Teeuwen, Mark, and Fabio Rambelli, editors. Buddha and Kami in Japan: Ramifications of the Shinbutsu Shūgō Syncretism. Routledge, 2003.

  • 11.1-11.4
  • 11.5-11.8
  • 11.9-11.12
  • 11.13-11.15
  • 11.16-11.19

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