Religious Taoism Today

When I invoke Taoism, I almost always mean philosophical Taoism.  I tend to avoid the other side of the tradition, religious Taoism, not because I disrespect it (I don't) but because I have not studied it sufficiently to feel comfortable commenting upon it. My sense is that religious Taoism draws on the Chuang Tzu and Tao Te Ching and other texts and mixes ideas and images and personages there with a wide variety of indigenous Chinese spiritual beliefs and practices.  When Buddhism arrived in China it, too, was combined with various Taoist ideas and practices to further inform religious Taoism.  The religious practices of Taoism, in other words, are dynamic and flexible, adapting to broad cultural transformations as well as the more concrete and particular social changes wrought by modernization.

Thus I was happy today to see this NYT article today on shaman in Taiwan.  It does not identify the main subject of the article as necessarily a Taoist practitioner, but the idea of being surrounded by a spirit world and interacting with it in various ways is part of the religious Taoist outlook.  Taoism is mentioned in the syncretic stew that the shaman draws upon:

Many Taiwanese pragmatically switch among Taoist, Buddhist, folk and other beliefs and practices, depending on the situation, Mr. Ting said. And at least 70 percent of Taiwanese still adhere to some traditional ways, he said.

I do not find the idea of spirit mediums to be all that unusual.  Spiritual beliefs take many forms and the Taiwanese shamanistic practices described in the article are no stranger than, say, the idea of transubstantiation.

What I do find interesting, however, is the way in which religion continually remakes itself in the face of modernization.  Early theorists of modernity assumed that religion would give way to scientific rationality and secularism.  That has happened, to some degree, in Europe, but certainly not in the US.  And in Taiwan, and other Asian places, religion persists:

If the profession has evolved in tandem with changes in society, Ms. Chang [the spirit medium] said it was not only the jitong [shaman] who had adjusted.

She said that these days the gods were more likely to be consulted on thorny personal relationships than on physical illness.

“So now they give a different type of guidance,” she said. “The gods have changed along with the times and kept up with the trends.”

The gods change with the times... or, we remake the gods to suit our needs as they change over time.

Comments

[The Rambling Taoist]

I'm not a big fan of anything religious, but at least religious Taoism changes with the times. The Judeo-Christian perspective, on the other hand, seems mired in the ancient past without their current day adherents actually understanding how past social mores and culture impacted the formation of either religion.