Daoism in Japan: Chinese Traditions and Their Influence on Japanese Religious Culture ed. by Jeffrey L. Richey (review)

Though there is no dispute that Daoism is present in Japanese culture, the degree and importance of its influence has been the subject of ongoing scholarly debate. One problem has been dislodging its specificity from the broader mass of Chinese culture that has entered Japan over 15 centuries. This very span of time admits a complicating plurality: Daoism in China was multilayered and changed over time, while its products, which first arrived in Japan as part and parcel of the ritsuryō state, went on to appear piecemeal chiefly through textual sources over the centuries. Thus, the first question we have to ask is what among the “amorphous fragments of Daoism” (in the phrase of Herman Ooms in this volume) widely scattered throughout the Japanese religio-political landscape should be more properly regarded as part of the general Chinese cultural heritage, and what belongs indubitably to Daoism? A case in point is subjects related to cosmology, yin and yang, the five phases, divination, astronomy/astrology, the Yijīng, and the like. These entered Daoism as part of Chinese traditional culture. When we find them in Japan, are they to be considered “Daoist”?

This question seems to have exercised many of the contributors to this volume. Jonathan Smith, for example, writes, “Although it is clear that yīnyáng astromancy and the cosmology on which it is premised are related to Daoism, it is less obvious how to define ‘Daoism’ itself” (p. 12), and he resorts to contrivances like “Daoist” (using quotation marks) and “Daoist-flavored” when he uses the term. Michael Como speaks of “deities from the Daoist or at least the Chinese pantheon” (p. 27) and of “a milieu that was closely influenced by Chinese astrology and Daoist practices” (p. 32). Similarly, Matthias Hayek describes “mantic knowledge, derived in part from Daoist traditions transmitted from China,” but in the course of his chapter the word “Confucianism” appears more often than “Daoism” (p. 209). Miura Kunio points out that certain elements of Daoism, such as immortality beliefs, a number of Daoist scriptures, and the Kōshin cult, were transmitted to Japan (p. 83) but the broader structure of calendar-making, astronomy/astrology, and divination that entered Japan in the seventh century belonged to a broader Chinese technical and cultural context. Herman Ooms employs the adjectives “Daoisant” and “so-called ‘Daoist,’” and he cautions against using the term retrospectively about practices that “did not arrive as part of a fully fledged religious or sectarian system” (p. 37).

The editor of this volume, Jeffrey Richey, admits the difficulty of discussing “whether and how phenomena might be understood as ‘Daoist’ in any sense” but judges the time ripe to present “a sample of current scholarship” and bring to scholarly attention directions for future research (p. 2). He uses two metaphors to describe the influence of Daoism on Japanese religious culture: a river, once in full flow, creating new landforms, which was later buried from view, and only recently has become partially visible again; and a ghost, whose recent transformation makes it seem startlingly contemporary (pp. 1, 4). Unlike Endō Shūsaku, for whom Japan was a swamp that sucked in and rotted everything planted in it, an environment in which religion (notably Christianity) could not survive, Richey sees Japan as a “conjuring culture” which “has performed that most Daoist of feats: as a result of its alchemical interaction with Chinese and other cultures, it has refined and transformed itself in order to attain full integration with ever deeper historical, social, and spiritual realities.” This has given Daoism “a kind of immortality beyond China’s borders” (p. 6).

These metaphors, though, however deftly woven, do not compensate for the fact that we do not emerge with any clear idea of what Daoism is, other than “a highly diverse but loosely unified body of traditions whose practitioners find themselves ‘agreed that...