The Tao Te Ching in Taoist Practice

This page follows the process step by step: how the author became a god, how the text became a scripture, what the religious commentaries did with it, how it is used in temples now, and what all this means for someone who came for the philosophy.

What the text does not contain

It is worth being clear about the starting point. The received text contains no deity, no prayer, no ritual instruction, no priesthood, no temple, no afterlife, no salvation, and no claim to revelation. It never says who is speaking. It does not ask to be believed.

Everything that later Taoism built on it therefore came from outside the text. This is not an accusation; adopting an authoritative text and reading one's own concerns into it is normal religious practice everywhere. But it does mean that the religion's use of the book is a historical development to be described rather than a meaning to be uncovered.

The author becomes a god

The first step is the deification of Laozi, which was under way well before any organised Taoist movement existed.

By the Han period he was receiving cult, and an emperor of the second century offered sacrifice at a place associated with him. Around the same time the founder of the first organised Taoist community reported a revelation received directly from him, appearing not as a philosopher but as a divine being with instructions. From that point on there are two Laozis: a figure to whom a text is attributed, and a deity who continues to speak.

He was eventually installed among the highest figures of the pantheon, understood as an eternal principle that takes human form in successive ages in order to transmit teaching. This resolves the biographical problem by dissolving it: the man at the frontier pass becomes one appearance among many, and questions about his historical existence stop being relevant to the religion.

In temples today he appears as one of a group of three high deities, usually shown as an elderly figure holding a fan. The halls devoted to that group are among the largest in major temple complexes, including on Wudang Mountain.

The text becomes a scripture

The decisive move was the reading of the text as containing instructions rather than observations.

A commentary produced within the early organised movement, recovered in the twentieth century from a cache of manuscripts, does exactly this. It treats the Tao as a personal being capable of issuing commands, converts descriptive passages into precepts, and attaches a set of rules of conduct for community members. Where the received text observes that something is so, this commentary reads it as instructing that something be done.

This is a very different operation from philosophical commentary, and it is worth understanding what it accomplishes. A community needs rules, and rules carry more weight if they come from a source everyone already respects. Reading the classic as a rule-book gives the movement's discipline the authority of an ancient text.

Alongside this, the text entered the formal apparatus of transmission. In the classification of the Taoist canon it heads a division of its own, and the conferral of that division's texts formed part of ordination at particular ranks. Receiving the text was not a matter of buying a copy; it was a formal transmission with a ceremony attached, and this is characteristic of how scriptural authority worked in Taoism generally.

Recitation and copying

The religious use of the book has always been at least as much oral and physical as interpretive.

It is chanted. Chanting a scripture is treated as an act with effects, and correctness of pronunciation, tempo and arrangement matters, as it does throughout Taoist liturgy. The text's rhythmic and rhymed form, which is invisible in most translations, makes it well suited to this, and it is likely the form was shaped for oral transmission long before anyone thought of it as scripture.

A short related scripture attributed to the deified Laozi, concerned with clarity and stillness, is more central to the daily services of most temples than the Tao Te Ching itself and is far shorter. Visitors who hear chanting at a morning service are more likely to be hearing that.

Copying the text by hand has been a devotional act for many centuries, and it was also a state activity: emperors ordered copies distributed and had the text carved on stone pillars and steles, several of which survive. Memorising it was ordinary among clergy.

The commentary traditions

Different religious readings produced substantially different books, and three lines account for most of the influence.

One reads the text as being simultaneously about governing a state and governing a body, treating the two as parallel operations with a shared vocabulary. On this reading passages about restraint in policy are also passages about restraint in expenditure of vital resources, and the book becomes a manual of longevity. This commentary was enormously popular and shaped the way the text was read in practice for centuries.

Another reads it metaphysically, as an account of the relation between what is undifferentiated and the differentiated things that arise within it. This is the philosophical line, and it is the source of much of what modern Western readers find in the book.

A third, later, reads it as a coded description of internal alchemy, with the terms of the text taken as names for stages and components of a physiological process. This reading requires the framework described on the pages about the Book of Changes in Taoist practice, and it is unintelligible without it.

These three are not degrees of accuracy. They are different projects, and all three have been carried out by capable people.

The text inside the liturgy

In actual practice the classic occupies a smaller place than its reputation suggests, and this is worth knowing before visiting a temple.

Taoist liturgy is dominated by other material: petitions and memorials addressed to specific deities, invocations, purification formulae, scriptures concerned with particular functions, and long ritual sequences for the dead or for the protection of a community. Most of this has no connection to the Tao Te Ching at all.

Where the classic appears, it appears as one venerable scripture among many, and often in the form of short excerpts. A visitor expecting to find a religion organised around close study of this one book will not find it. What is organised around the book is a much smaller world: certain lines of transmission, certain kinds of scholarly clergy, and the philosophical tradition outside the temples.

What you will actually encounter

Practically, in a working temple, the classic shows up in a few recognisable ways.

Lines from it are carved on gates, screens and rock faces, and are among the most common inscriptions on Taoist mountains. Copies are printed for free distribution near entrances. The deified author is enshrined in a major hall. The title appears in the names of buildings and of monastic ranks. And clergy will often know a good deal of it by heart, without necessarily treating it as the source of their practice.

What you will not generally encounter is preaching from it, exegesis for lay audiences, or any expectation that visitors have read it. Lay Taoist participation is not organised around reading.

What this means for a reader of the philosophy

Three consequences follow, and they are the reason this page exists.

First, the religion did not grow out of the philosophy. It took the philosophy up. The book was already several centuries old and already prestigious when a movement adopted it, and adoption is a different relation from descent.

Second, the religious readings are not corruptions. They are what happens to any text that becomes a scripture, and some of them are intellectually serious. Dismissing them because they are not what a modern philosophical reader wants is a form of the prejudice described on the page about philosophical and religious Taoism.

Third, and most practically: if you read a translation based on a religious commentary without knowing it, you will get a book about cultivating the body or about ritual discipline and assume it is the classic. Check which commentary your translation follows. That single habit prevents most of the confusion in this area.

Key points

• The received text contains no deity, ritual, priesthood or afterlife; everything the religion built on it came from outside.
• Laozi was receiving cult before any organised Taoist movement existed, and was eventually installed among the highest deities.
• An early community commentary converted descriptive passages into precepts and attached rules of conduct, turning the classic into a rule-book.
• The text entered the formal transmission system, so receiving it was a ceremonial act rather than an act of reading.
• Three major commentary lines — longevity, metaphysical, and alchemical — produce substantially different books from the same characters.
• In actual liturgy the classic is one venerable scripture among many, and a much shorter text attributed to the same figure is more central to daily services.