Taoism: The Enduring Tradition (review)

A good indication of the state of Daoist Studies in the English-speaking world is that its leading scholars cannot even agree on how to spell the English word for the tradition they are studying. I almost wish Russell Kirkland had called his book The Tao of T or T: The Enduring Tradition to signify the book's steadfast resistance to the academic fads and cultural trends (to which I and many others have suc-cumbed) that have turned Taoism into Daoism. If scholars cannot agree on this small detail of orthography, no wonder that the general public has a view of Daoism-if it has any at all-that is even more confused. Kirkland is deeply worried about the potent cocktail of ignorance, commercialism, and colonization that has enabled the popular Western imagination to construct a view of Daoism that bears little or no resemblance to the historical reality of China's indigenous organized religion. His goal is to bring new scholarship into the public domain and to move public discourse to a new level. His passion for the task at hand is evident throughout. The result is a stunning and unorthodox book by an academic who is clearly committed to clarifying the broad cultural consequences of scholarship.

Before explaining why this book is stunning, it is worthwhile explaining why it is unorthodox. Perhaps the term unorthodox is to be applied to Daoist studies with some caution, since it is doubtful whether there is anything that might constitute a normative orthodox tradition of scholarship. Let us assume, however, that the bulk of studies have operated out of a classicist historical framework, seeking to construct an interpretation of Daoism in terms of its 'origin' and subsequent historical 'development'. My own book on Daoism, though explicitly taking a thematic approach, succumbs frequently to the force of history in seeking to explain the tradition as a whole in terms of core motifs and values embodied in the classical traditions.

Kirkland's book, on the other hand, deliberately eschews any attempt to generate a historical narrative of Daoism that might privilege any claim to 'original' or 'classic' status. His hermeneutical argument in chapter . is that all facets of Daoism deserve equal consideration and are to be considered in the light of the whole. His target is not only the romanticizers, popularizers, and commercializers who have given us the Tao of Pooh, Steve, and Elvis, but also the dominant sinological approach that has privileged the classical Dao of Laozi and Zhuangzi and preferred, perhaps for political reasons, tradition over modernity. Kirkland, therefore, does not seek to explain the present in terms of the past, but rather the past and the present together in terms of the whole evolving complex. In so doing he denies normative status to any particular version of Daoism, whether ancient or modern, northern or southern, male or female, intellectual or practical, and he deliberately eschews the modern presumption of historical progress and the corresponding fallacy of the authenticity of tradition. He does so because Daoists, unlike Christians or Buddhists, "never felt obliged to hew their beliefs and practices to any putative 'standard.' The diversity of Taoist beliefs and practices cannot reasonably be explained in terms of orthodoxy versus non-orthodoxy, of orthopraxy versus non-orthopraxy" (p. 12). What counts, for Kirkland, are those elements of the tradition that have endured throughout its history, regardless of whether they conform to any particular ideological stance or theoretical framework.

Chapter 2, "The Classical Legacy," therefore, aims to overturn the sinological approach that has vested authority in the concept of a 'classical tradition'. Kirkland writes: "'Classical Taoism' never existed, either as a social entity or as a set of coherent ideas or values" (p. 21). In a single sentence he thus consigns to the dustbin every single world religions textbook. It is these moments of shocking and brilliant clarity that make this book stunning, in the proper sense...