Daoism: Philosophical and Religious Customs and Notions

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Shangqing School
Lingbao School
References

Introduction

Daoism generally denote a diversity of associated philosophical and religious customs and notions. These customs have impacted East Asia for over two thousand years and some have increase globally. The Chinese word Dao denotes “path” or “way”, while in Chinese religion and philosophy it has attained more conceptual notions. Daoist politeness and ethics highlight the Three Jewels of the Tao: empathy, self-control, and humbleness. Daoist consideration concentrates on wu wei (non-action), impulsiveness, alteration and blankness / supremacy. An importance is located on the connection between people and nature, and that this link diminishes the necessity for rules and arrange, leading one to a better realizing of the world and one’s surroundings.

Shangqing School

Early Daoism was mainly Celestial Master Daoism. Nevertheless, Daoism’s including social attendance is because of the way it was reformed by Shangqing (“Upper Clarity”) experts, who practiced purified technologies, harbored imaginary anticipations about their religious, and in effect physical, progression, and had at their service a large and multifaceted pantheon of divinities, who infrequently select to disclose texts to chosen intermediaries, among them Yang Xi, author of most of the Shangqing scriptures. The Upper Scripture of Purple Texts engraved by the Spirits is gained from a being more distant and majestic than those religions that the former scriptures were obtained from, and the procedure for getting the text would have been far beyond the quite walker figures of the early extents of “early Daoism”:

Then he (this is the Grand Lord Azure Lad of the Eastern Seas) mounted his cloudy chariot, composed of dark-blue auroras and the flowing effulgence of his three spirit registers. He threw across his shoulders the halcyon-plumed dragon cloak of flying azure and, leading a retinue of a thousand Perfected from the Mulberry Groves, proceeded on high to visit the Golden Porte of Upper Clarity.

Shangqing practice estimates meditation technologies of hallucination and breathing, as well as physical trainings, as resisted to the use of alchemy and trinkets. The presentation of the sacred canon acts a partially significant role. The practice was significantly unusual, contrary to the communal practices in the Celestial Master School or in the Lingbao School. Employing from high social ranks, during the Tang Dynasty, Shangqing was the leading school of Daoism, and its impact is found in literature of that time period.

A focus was set on individual meditation in the Shangqing School, different to the ritualized scheme of the Celestial Masters. Shangqing meditation was mainly a lonely issue, and concentrated on mental apparition of spirits and gods. There was also no necessity to contemplate at a temple; one’s own home was fine. Deities lived within the body and could offer good fitness if meditated upon. Each deity lived in various parts of the body. By the means of studying the accounts of deities in the canon, adepts would consider the inside of their body and keep the deities in their appropriate location. This would entail the body’s toughness. While it started as a school focused on the personality, the school changed increasingly until talismans and rites turned to be a more significant component.

Lingbao School

The convictions of the Lingbao School were grounded on the Buddhist notion of rebirth. The school’s cosmology was also impacted by Buddhism, but still supported many Daoist convictions, entailing the notion that the world appeared from the Single Breath, and that a disaster would happen that only a restricted few could evade by the means of faith. Its pantheon is alike to Shangqing and Celestial Master Daoism, with one of its most significant gods being the idolized form of Laozi. Alongside Laozi, other minor gods subsisted, some of whom were in charge of arranging spirits for reincarnation. Nevertheless reincarnation was a significant concept in the Lingbao School, the former Daoist belief in getting immortality lingered.

Both Buddhism and the Lingbao School split the idea of the Five Paths of Rebirth. These were rebirth into earth penitentiaries, as a hungry ghost, as an animal, as a man or as an extraterrestrial creature. After death, the adept’s body would be alchemically restored in the Palace of Supreme Darkness positioned in the north, and in the appropriately named Southern Palace in the south. The transformation of the body entailing the two steps; the yin elements of the person were purified in the Palace of Supreme Darkness, chased by the yang elements in the Southern Palace. The Lingbao notion of rebirth is a sinicization of Buddhism, mixing customary Chinese notions with newly arrived Buddhist suggestions.

Certain customarily Daoist ideas were maintained in Lingbao cosmology, such as the notion that the world created from the Single Breath, and then was split into heaven and earth. Nevertheless, the Single Breath is subdivided into three breaths that match the three deities, the lords of the Celestial Treasure, of the Sacred Treasure and of the Divine Treasure. During the following three cosmic ages in the three Daoist paradises, these three lords commenced the educations of the Dadong (Great Grotto), the Dongxuan (Mysterious Grotto) and of the Dongshen (Divine Grotto). These three studies form the grounds for the later categorization of texts in the Daozang.

Apocalyptic ideas that appeared in Shangqing Daoism were expanded fully by Lingbao Daoists. Lingbao cosmology presumed that time was separated into cosmic sequences that were associated with the Five Phases. At the end of a space era, the emperor of the color that was connected with that era would go down onto earth and disclose a teaching that would hoard a fixed amount of people from death. There were two kinds of cosmic epochs, short ones that were distinguished by a surplus of Yin power, and long ones that were featured by an overload of Yang energy. At the end of a short era, the moon would provide a flood that corroded the mountains, reasoned the Nine Breaths of the cosmos to be renovated and the ten thousand emperors to change their position. At the end of a long era wicked beings were unleashed, heaven and earth were turned upside down, and metals and stones melted jointly. The people who pursued the correct teaching disclosed by the emperor would be collected up by the Queen Mother of the West and conveyed to a ‘land of bliss’ that would not be influenced by the apocalypse.

References

Guangting, Du. Divine Traces of the Daoist Brotherhood: Records of the Assembled Transcendents of the Fortified Walled City. University of Hawaii Press, 2006.

The Wondrous Scripture of the Upper Chapters on Limitless Salvation.

Kleeman, T. Early Daoist Scriptures The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 59, No. 1., pp. 143-145. 2000.

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Daoism: Philosophical and Religious Customs and Notions

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