Taoism and the Arts of China

"The T is from an older system of romanization, the Wade-Giles. It’s always pronounced Daoism, even when it’s rendered with a T in the Wade-Giles system. This is a super cool book about art and Daoist aesthetics. Even though this is a book-centered interview, I wanted to articulate dimensions of the Daoist tradition that aren’t just literary. It’s one of these fallacies that’s been baked into the Western reception of Daoism, that it’s somehow about books. The earliest sinologists engaging with these Daoist texts were Protestant missionaries who brought all of their Protestant baggage, the sola scriptura , with them: ‘Where is the Bible of Daoism? Once we have its Bible, then we can understand it.’ But, as I said, that fundamentally does not map onto the reality of the chaos of Daoist history. Also, in terms of what appealed to me about Daoism, aesthetics was way at the top. Daoist aesthetics really did make their way into Western culture during the counterculture, through Chinese art, even in a silly way through Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan films. There are a couple of books on Daoist art, but I chose this one partly because it has this wonderful introduction by Kristofer Schipper, who was probably the greatest sinologist of the 20th century. He was a Dutch guy and very funny. He did incredible, groundbreaking studies on the Daoist canon. He gives this synoptic introduction to the Daoist tradition you can read, and then the book also—even if you don’t read anything and just page through it—will give you a sense of the expansive and vast aesthetic tradition. The other thing I really love about this book is it has a whole chapter on the god Zhenwu, who is the patron saint of Wudang Mountain, where I lived. Zhenwu is the quintessential exorcist in Daoist religion. He is often depicted in bare feet, with his hair down, and holding a sword. He has a wrathful gaze and often has a spirit army behind him—hundreds and hundreds of demons. He goes around China, defeats a demon, binds it, and then turns it into one of his helpers. Zhenwu was the symbol of the north in Chinese history. The Mongols had conquered China and when the Ming dynasty then kicked out the Mongols, the Ming emperors viewed this warrior god from the north as the one who helped them. In the stories of the Ming defeating the Mongols, it was a bit like Constantine at the Battle of Milvian Bridge. There were apparitions of Zhenwu on the battlefield, helping them defeat the Mongols. That’s how Zhenwu became the head of the Ming Dynasty Daoist pantheon. They created all the temples of Wudang, where I lived, as a talisman cast into the earth to support this god. So there’s a rich iconographic tradition with this particular figure. He’s a heavy metal dude. Yes, paintings and sculptures. With the chaos of the 20th century, a lot of the great Chinese art survived in diaspora communities. So they’re at the Grand Palace Museum in Taipei, the amazing museum in Seoul, Korea, in Tokyo and at the Guimet in Paris. Some things did survive in Wudang. A number of monks from my lineage buried hundreds of bronze statues when everything was being melted down in the 1950s to meet the metal production quotas in the Great Leap Forward. China wanted to outdo Britain as the world’s number one steel producer and they did do it, but at a great cost. The monks saved a bunch of statues from being melted down in that period. Wudang had a weird relationship with the Cultural Revolution , partly because one of the early Communist cadres learned martial arts there in the 1930s. He had an affinity for it and protected a lot of the temples through that most chaotic of periods. Yes, there’s a museum in Wudang that has a lot of these bronzes on display. A lot of them were just put back in the temples where they were supposed to be and had been since the Ming Dynasty, when they were cast 600 years ago. So my reason behind picking this book is just to give people a view into the Daoist aesthetic tradition, which is rich. Yes, in the Zhenwu chapter. There’s a series that was commissioned by the third Ming emperor, the Yongle Emperor, who built Wudang. When the temples were being built in the early 15th century—1412 to 1413 were the promulgation dates for the major temples—there were well over 100 sightings of lights in the sky, spinning wheels shooting out electricity. They were interpreted as apparitions of this god, Zhenwu, who was showing his favor and support for the construction of the Wudang temple complex. I actually gave a talk at the Esalen Institute about what were straight-up UFO tales from the early 1400s in Wudang. When the initial reports made it to Beijing, it was highly ambiguous. The emperor sent inspectors to Wudang to investigate. They went around collecting all of these stories. They collated them, took the 17 most compelling ones, and wrote them up in an official document about apparitions of the god Zhenwu in Wudang mountain. Initially, the document was secret. Then, about 30 years later, they made it public and said, ‘All of this is in support of the Ming dynasty.’ Once they figure out a story to tell, it turns into a piece of imperial propaganda. They made woodblock print images of how people described these apparitions at the openings of the different temples. It included the materialization of a bell and a massive column. It’s very, very strange stuff. Then, 100 years later, a whole novel is produced for mass consumption, telling these stories of great apparitions in support of the Ming Emperor. There are beautiful color copy versions of these apparitions in the book, but the only original is in Beijing. It’s a scroll of 30 or so scenes, and it is still held at the White Cloud Temple or Baiyunguan, in Beijing. The White Cloud Temple was commissioned by Chinggis (Genghis) Khan when the head of Daoism, Qiu Chuji, met with him out in Uzbekistan in the 12th century."