Eye on religion: by the brush and by the sword: Daoist perspectives on the body, illness, and healing.

Daoism (Taoism) has been called China's indigenous high religion, and stands alongside Confucianism and Buddhism as one of the Three Teachings (sanjiao) of that civilization. While many readers in the West may possess at least a passing familiarity with classical texts such as the Daode jing (Tao Te Ching) and the Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), Daoism as a religious tradition remains largely terra incognita in the public consciousness, not to mention seemingly indistinguishable from broader "Chinese" or "Eastern" world views. Indeed, due to various circumstances attendant upon the intersecting intellectual histories of China and the West, generations of observers have tended to denigrate Daoist ritual, healing, and exorcism as degenerate superstitions fallen off from a supposedly pristine, but in fact wishfully imagined, philosophical core. Even those sympathetic to Chinese medicine may unwittingly inherit such longstanding ideological biases in embracing only specific techniques (acupuncture, herbology) or abstracted principles that conveniently mirror certain idealized sensibilities (harmony, balance, holism), while rejecting traditional forms of ritual practice, pantheons, or cosmologies as just so much cultural baggage. Closer study of the historical, textual and ethnographic record relating to Daoism reveals, however, the contours of a complex religious tradition with distinctive views of the body, illness, and healing.

From the standpoint of medical practitioners, it will prove helpful to understand the metaphysical as well as soteriological (perspectives on the nature of liberation or "salvation") frameworks that patients with a background of engagement in Daoist or traditional Chinese medical practices may bring to their understanding of illness and healing. Within such frameworks, the body is viewed, not as a self-enclosed system, but rather as nested within familial, societal, and cosmic networks of influence. Knowing about such underlying world views may yield insights into their concomitant therapeutic entailments--in terms of the diagnosis, etiology, epidemiology, and proper (not just "clinical," but ethical and ritual) treatment of disease--that may seem quite divergent from the background assumptions and resulting practices of Western-style medicine.

Longevity and Transcendence

It may be helpful to distinguish between broader Chinese medical views and the cultivation of longevity, and from the Daoist soteriological quest for immortality or transcendence. Indeed, the former may be seen historically as having provided a repertoire and matrix for the development of the latter.

Chinese longevity and medical practices have included such areas as dietetics, herbology, alchemy, sexual practices, gymnastic arts, acupuncture and moxibustion, pulse diagnosis, and techniques of controlling the body, breath, and mind. Such practices are operated on a body that is understood not only as a configuration of organs or visceral systems (zangfu), but also as a network of vital conduits (jingmai) whose elements included the proper circulation of qi (vital energy), the refinement of jing (quintessential qi), and the operations of the shen (numen). These bodily systems were seen as microcosmically situated within and operating according to the logic of traditional Chinese metaphysical frameworks. These frameworks included the alternation and interpenetration of yin and yang; the Five Phases (wuxing) of wood, fire, metal, water, and earth; and the sexagesimal progression of the system of the heavenly stems (tiangan) and earthly branches (dizhi) that mapped out space and time. The Daoist tradition, while drawing on the aforementioned world views, aimed for its part at a thoroughgoing transformation of the human body into an immortal or transcendent state, one unfettered by the limitations of ordinary mortal existence, and united with the Dao itself.

Wen and Wu: Civic and Martial Spheres of Power

Articulations of power in traditional China have often balanced wen, that which pertains to the written word, the brush, and a civic culture and ethos, with wu, that which pertains to the sword and a martial culture and ethos. Wen and wu may serve as fruitful root metaphors that open a window not only onto the governance of the body politic in China as a whole, but also onto the cultivation and cure of the human body.

Wen has manifested itself in primarily bureaucratic terms. This vision of the cosmos, in which human life was governed by ledgers of merit and sin maintained in otherworldly offices, was an early feature of the Chinese world view that was adopted and elaborated upon in Daoism. The body, structurally divided into units such as the three cinnabar fields (dantian) of the upper, middle, and lower regions, or into the yin and yang visceral systems, was seen as the dwelling place for an array of corporeal gods who discharged official commissions in deference to a pervasive cosmic hierarchy. Daoist healing rites have thus been frequently conceived of as bureaucratic procedures, featuring a highly literate priesthood presiding over the ritual manipulation of written texts. These written texts might include memorials addressed to celestial authorities, talismans burnt and their ashes mixed in water to be ingested, or seals of celestial majesty affixed not only to ritual documents but also to the clothing and at the dwelling places of the infirm.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Wu has manifested itself in an agonistic, apotropaic outlook on disease. In this view, the body is constantly under the threat of demonic forces that seek to undermine the integrity of the body and hamper the quest for transcendence. Early Daoist texts, for example, spoke of the Three Worms (sanchong), baleful demons that resided in the body and reported on a person's misdeeds so as to diminish one's allotted span of life. As the creatures subsisted on grains (also a metaphor for sedentary, "civilized" life), they could be expunged by pharmaceutical means, dietary austerities (such as the elimination of grains), and the adoption of more rarified nourishment. The material culture of ritual therapies might include purificatory water, magical plant and tree species, swords, seals, talismans, and mirrors.

Therapeutic Implications

Given the twin influences of wen and wu, Daoist priests today operate not only as bureaucratic functionaries but also as commanding generals in the struggle against individual and communal disease. In the early years of this present century, religious responses to the outbreak of SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) may serve to illustrate some of the therapeutic implications of Daoist world views. In Taiwan, local temples and communities could be seen sponsoring communal rites, many performed by Daoist priests, to procure divine blessings and avert calamities associated with the epidemic. Such rituals drew upon classical liturgies as well as a venerable tradition of plague festivals that have played a prominent role in the religious, social, and economic life of coastal communities in southeastern China for centuries.

Without going into an exhaustive historic or ethnographic treatment of such rites, we may draw from them to make some general observations regarding Daoist views of illness and healing: 1) illness and healing are seen as pertaining not simply to an atomistic individual, but to a cosmicized body embedded within ancestral, communal and cosmic relationships of rank and power; 2) epidemiology may be seen as exhibiting not simply a biologic dimension, but also a moral (illness as a function of individual, communal, or ancestral moral failure), and a demonological (illness as malevolent presences that may operate upon the individual or communal body) dimension in which an attempt is made to exert order over chaos; and 3) therapy is ritualized, with clerical specialists wielding liturgical technologies--by the power of wen or wu as potently activated by the writing brush or the sword in performative contexts--to set the patient and community right once more. Medical practitioners aware of these perspectives may be able to utilize them as resources to build conceptual bridges that enhance communication, diagnosis and treatment when working together with their patients who come from such backgrounds.

The preceding comments have heuristically set in relief certain aspects of Daoist thought and practice. In reality, however, religious world views have traditionally permeated everyday practice (not to mention each other) to such an extent that it is frequently difficult to identify a particular healing practice with any one religious tradition, whether Daoist, Confucian, Buddhist, or popular in nature. Individuals seeking out healing from a diversity of ritual specialists within the community often seem little concerned with establishing an exclusivistic religious affiliation of the type that seems an ideal of many Western monotheistic traditions. Such eclecticism reflects above all a search for efficacy, often expressed by the term ling, translatable as "numinous efficacy." What is more, the pursuit of remedies derived from Chinese religions in no way precludes the simultaneous adoption of modem medical practices. Medical specialists may thus encounter patients who, quite literally, inhabit multiple worlds. Cultivating intellectual curiosity and critical empathy can render such encounters into fruitful points of conversation that enable practitioners and patients to work with each other to promote health and well being.

Julius N. Tsai, PhD

From the Department of Religious Studies, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA.

Reprint requests to Julius N. Tsai, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, San Diego State University, AH-4231, 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego, CA 92182. Email: [e-mail]