[00:00:00] ANNOUNCER:
The Agnes and Constantine Foerster Lectureship was established in 1928 by Miss Edith Zweybruck in honor and memory of her sister and brother-in-law. It was her request that in each academic year, at least one lecture be given on the immortality of the soul or some kindred spiritual subject, not as a part of the regular college course, but by an authority specially qualified and specially appointed for the purpose. Today’s invited authority is Professor Kristofer Schipper, Professor of Chinese Religions at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris.
Professor Schipper will speak on how to become immortal without really trying, Taoism, and the nature of ritual. It is a privilege and a pleasure to introduce Professor Schipper. He is the world’s leading scholar on Taoism, a subject in which there is much interest in Berkeley.
He is also the first sinologist who gives a Foerster Lecture. Schipper studied in Paris with Dumézil, Rolf Stein, Kaltenmark, and other luminaries. As a Fellow of the École française d’Extrême-Orient, he spent many years in southern Taiwan, where he was adopted in a traditional Taoist family and ordained as a Taoist master in 1968.
Professor Schipper has been compiling a critical bibliography of the Taoist canon, altogether 1,500 works. The first stages of this monumental work have now been completed. As chairman of the Foerster Committee, I can always use my elbows and introduce a Forster lecturer.
But in the case of Professor Schipper, I also feel that I’m a little bit his colleague, not in Sinology, but in his other field, which is ritual studies. You know that departmental divisions are somewhat arbitrary. If there were a department of ritual studies, which God forbid, there are enough departments, Both of us might be in it.
Note that the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where Professor Schipper teaches Chinese religions, has, in its infinite administrative wisdom, acknowledged that religions are practical. That is, they deal with not only with ideas and words, but with activities, that is ritual. Finally, I am sure you did the right thing when you decided to attend this lecture because of the following special feature of Professor Schipper’s work.
When he speaks about the subject, Kristofer Schipper has a human con-concern and speaks with a human voice, and this is uncommon among scholars of the humanities. Professor Schipper.
(applause)
[00:02:51] KRISTOFER SCHIPPER:
In the faraway mountains of Ku-shih, in the north, live holy men. Their skin is like ice and snow, and they are shy as virgins. They do not eat grains, but breathe the wind and drink the dew.
They ride on clouds, which are drawn by flying dragons, roaming freely in the realm beyond the four seas. Nothing can harm such persons. Even in a great flood, with the waters reaching the sky, they will not drown.
Even when the heat is extreme, melting metals and stones, Scorching the earth, they will not be burned. Such holy beings are like birds. They rest a moment and feed like little ones.
Then they fly away without leaving it any trace. When the world has the way, the Tao, they prosper along with other beings. But when the world is without the way, they merely cultivate their power through leisure.
And when after a thousand years, they have enough of this world, they leave it to join the other immortals on high, flying away on a white cloud towards the Land of the Ancestor. With these words, the great Taoist mystic Chuang Tzu, who is supposed to have lived during the fourth century BC, describes the immortals. That is, those who have obtained the Tao, the way, and thus, in other words, have become one with nature.
And although Zhuangzi does not explicitly say so in the very incomplete version of his book that has come down to us, it is very likely that he knew the story of the great ancestor of Taoism, that is Laozi, the old master, the sage who, after having lived in this world during several hundreds of years, had left it in order to return to the mysterious mountain Kunlun, the mountain of the immortals. According to the legend, the old master was seen for the last time by a barrier keeper who guarded a mountain pass at the western frontier of China. When the sage came to this pass on his way to the Kunlun Mountains, the barrier keeper recognized him as a saint.
He made him stop and beg to receive his teaching before leaving the world. And it was then, only then, that the old master expounded his words in a way which could be understood by ordinary people. This final teaching resulted in the small collection of sayings of altogether no more than about five thousand words, which are a profound– of a profoundly paradoxical nature.
This collection has become known as The Book of the Way and Its Virtue, or Tao Te Ching. And as every one of you will know, this is today the Chinese book most translated into Western languages. But what interests us here today is not this book, although I may quote from it from time to time, but rather what may be seen as the background of it and of Taoism in general, which is to say the way of immortality.
According to the same legend I mentioned a short while ago, Laozi, when he had finished dictating his spiritual testament, crossed the mountain pass and continued his way until he reached the region of the setting sun and the Kunlun Mountain,
(coughs)
which means the mountain of chaos, Hundun in Chinese. This sphere of death and rebirth, that great cosmic womb that is the origin and the end of all things. Lao Tzu reached there his ultimate goal, returning to the great beginning of heaven and Earth, and as the Chinese say, the myriad things.
According to Taoist cosmology, in the beginning was chaos, confusion, a womb containing undifferentiated energies or breath This state of entropy constitutes the first and also the fundamental state of the Tao, the way, which is the immanent process of cyclical time in the universe. Under the influence of this natural process, the primordial chaos revolves and comes to maturity. The energies contained in the sphere exert a centrifugal momentum which causes it to open up.
The energies flow out and take form. For a short moment, they radiate an intense light and manifest themselves in the form of strange signs. These signs, the spontaneous writings, are the names, the quintessence of all beings in the world which is now being created.
According to this cosmology then, in the beginning was not the word, as in our traditions, but the sign, the image, the cosmic writing of the so-called real writs. I will speak again about these later. One short moment, these archetypal signs illuminate the universe.
Then the energies start to differentiate. The lighter energies, called yang, rise up and form heaven. The dark and heavy ones, called yin, sink downwards and form the earth.
The two opposites unite in the center, and thus this center forms the third modality. From the interaction of the three modalities, all things are created, and a myriad beings appear in a long rhythmic sequence of greater and greater differentiation, each being participating in the powers of yin and yang, which have united for a given period in order to create its form. In this created universe, man has no particular or privileged status other than the fact that his constitution is particularly complex and reflects an advanced process of differentiation.
Thus, following an ancient Taoist formula for the ritual of consecration of the body, we are a combination of five viscera, six receptacles, seven governors, nine palaces, skin and arteries, muscles and bones, marrow and brain, nine openings to keep and to protect, twelve dwellings for the spirits At the left of my body reside the three heavenly souls, at the right, the seven earthly souls. The body has three stories and each story has eight luminants. So altogether these have twenty-four gods, one thousand two hundred projections, twelve thousand vibrations, three hundred and sixty articulations, and eighty-four thousand pores.
Thus, the separation of the undifferentiated energies from the primordial chaos results in ever more complex forms, which develop according to emble-emblematical numerological sequences. The concentration of the elements making up the human body is, however, of a short duration only, as the immanent principle of cyclical time, the Tao, continues forever its action. This action, I may recall here, is characterized by the alternating cycle of the two complementary phases, negative and positive, the well-known yin and yang.
Their mutual action is in all things, and their alternation is the first law of Taoist cosmology. When yin attains its summit, it changes into yang, and vice versa. This cyclical movement of transformation never ends and constitutes the life cycle of all beings.
Each being has its own cycle, its own way. “Who lives longer?” asked Zhuangzi. “A one-day fly or a thousand-year oak?
A mushroom or Peng Zu, the Chinese Methuselah?” It’s all the same. They all live one cycle, one life, one death.
One time yang, one time yin. That is the way. The transformational process through a continuous cycle of complementary opposites, complementary opposites.
The relative duration is of no importance, as each thing in the universe has its own lifespan, and there is no fundamental difference between one cycle and another. All this is also expressed in the words the old master said to the barrier keeper. There was something chaotic and yet achieved, which existed before there were heaven and earth.
There was silence and vastness, standing alone, uninfluenced, making cyclical movements which pervade everything so as to become the mother of the world. I do not know its name, and will simply call it the Way. When the Way made things, at first they were indistinct and confused.
Yet in the midst of this confusion and indistinction, there appeared images. And to gain from them there were things. Things have genes, genes which are real, irreducible, and among which exist correspondences.
Thus it has been from the ancient times until today, forever determined. I was reading from the twenty-fifth and twenty-first chapter of the Tao Te Ching. Here we have expressed with great conciseness what we may call the epistemological background of the Taoist search for immortality.
In this cosmology, we do not find a transcendent principle, but only an immanent one to be ap-apprehended in the continuous flow of energies passing through cyclical movements of transformation. Here then, we also have the idea expressed in the famous parable of Zhuangzi, who dreamt he was a butterfly. This short piece, I’m sorry, which was so popular with the flower children in the sixties, is generally known in an incomplete version, and I hope you will bear with me if I quote it here in extenso.
“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly,” fluttering about like a butterfly should, happy and free, and not knowing that it was I. Suddenly, I woke up and realized with a start that it was I. Who knows now if I was dreaming that I was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that it was I?
Until here the passage is generally known. Now comes the less known conclusion. Zhuangzi says, “However, between me and the butterfly, certainly there must be a difference.”
This then is what is called the transformation of things, wu hua in Chinese. The same expression, transformation of things, is what Zhuangzi applies to the cyclical movement of life and death. One time life, one time death, one time death, one time life.
This is the transformation of things. This sentence echoes the famous phrase of the I Ching: “One time yin, one time yang, that is the way.” To follow this cycle is to grasp the rhythm of nature, or in Zhuangzi’s own words, to follow the great teacher.
This teacher of mine, this teacher of mine, he is older than the highest antiquity, but he does not think himself long-lived. He covers heaven, supports the earth, carves and fashions countless forms, but he does not think himself skilled. Those who try to dominate nature with their skills, Zhuangzi says again, will in the end be defeated by nature.
While those who, and I cite, quote, “Mount on the regulating principle of the universe and expounds the transformation of the energies will be wandering forever without end, without depending on anything. These same ideas, which are expressed in mystical terms by Chuang Tzu, may also be found in the mythology which surrounds the old master, Lao Tzu. He is shown as having a body which contains the entire universe.
He incarnates all the energies, the sun, the moon, the stars, all the time cycles, the mountains and streams, the forests and cities, palaces and fields. When living, all this is present within him, but at his death, the ten thousand things are separated and become the world as we perceive it around us. An old Taoist text makes the old master say of himself, “I transform my body, passing through death and living again.
I’m dying and am reborn. Again and again, I am a body.” Cosmogonic myth and cosmological theory are skillfully blended together in the passages in which Zhuangzi describes the old master in meditation.
When Laozi awakes from his trip into his inner world, he says, “Yin at its height is still and stern. Yang at its height is agitated and vibrating. The one comes from heaven, the other from earth.
The two intermingle, communicate, and unite in harmony, and from them all things are born. They then follow the cycle of decay and growth, of plenitude and emptiness, one time dark, one time bright. The sun shifts, the moon has its phases.
Each day all this happens, yet no one has ever seen it end. Life is bursting forth from the buds. Death means to return back home.
Beginning and end succeed and alternate in an unbroken cycle, and no one has ever seen it finished. If it is not in this, then where can be the ancestor on which all is founded? To wander in this realm is to dwell in ultimate beauty, in ultimate bliss.
Those who have attained this are called the ultimate men. In other word– words, immortals. The foregoing ideas imply that through the observation of nature, men can learn to adapt to it, and that through this adaption, by becoming one with nature, man may also master it.
Observing the time cycles in nature, Taoism contributed greatly to Chinese astronomy and hemerology. Basing itself on these observations, it developed a model of time with the help of which the life cycles of all beings could be described in similar terms. Thus, all time and life cycles nested from that of the grasshopper to that of the great constellations in an analogous way.
And because of these correspondences, time cycles were considered interchangeable. In other words, to master one cycle was equivalent to dominating all the others.
(coughs)
This first part has been on the epistemological background. Let us now look at a first application. Throughout history, Daoists looked for many ways to master time cycles.
Most prominent and well-known among these techniques was alchemy. In the light of the foregoing, we can easily understand the epistemological features of this kind of research. One aspect was the speculation about the life cycle of minerals.
These were, of course, reckoned to be far longer than that of any other organism,
(cough)
although remaining, like everything, subject to change. It was thought, for instance, that earth transformed into iron, which in turn would become lead, then mercury, cinnabar, and finally gold over a very long stretch of time. The alchemist, as Nathan Sivin has shown, considered himself able to reproduce this process in his laboratory and through an elaborate method of heating and smelting, also to speed it up.
The key of the procedure was the construction of the alchemical furnace and the crucible, which were built with forms and measures so as to make it represent a model of the universe. The furnace was to be square, imitating earth, and the crucible round like heaven. The firing of the furnace was done in a very complex way.
The amount of wood that was burnt each time was increased or decreased according to the day and the hour, so as to reproduce exactly the yin and yang cycle. This progressive time cycle of the firing of the furnace was matched, it was thought, with a regressive time cycle in the crucible. Indeed, the latter was filled at the outset with all kinds of minerals, mostly lead, cinnabar, and mercury.
And these substances would be to a large extent gasified and then evaporate through the openings of the imperfectly luted crucible. At the end of the process then, the crucible would be found to be almost empty. This reverse process in which something becomes nothing sustained the idea of the great cycle of minerals being accomplished, because where there had been solid things, these had now been dissolved in such a sub-subtle state, so as to have regained the original chaos of undifferentiated energy.
This mineral cycle, which would have taken millions of years in the, in macrocosm, was now accomplished thanks to the alchemist, alchemist’s efforts and his play with time in a matter of months. The alchemists themselves participated through fasting, prayer, breathing, and sex exercises in the process and could therefore boast to have also passed through it, and so have lived ten thousand times ten thousand years, wan wan sui. The fact that some of the gases, gas gases which evaporated from the crucible were highly hallucinogenic may well have added to this illusion.
The avowed aim of the alchemical procedure was to produce an end product which was the original chaotic substance, the fundamental life energy. And indeed, the crucible would yield some kind of residue, some fine oxidated lead dust so highly toxic that even a small amount when ingested would cause sudden death and thus enable the alchemist to realize his own life ti-cycle too. One time life, one time death, and thus become one with nature in a perfectly ritualized way.
So spectacular and prestigious was the search for the elix- for the elixir of immortality along these lines that alchemy became the hallmark of Taoism. The difficulties were great. Many mineral substances used by Chinese alchemy, as I said, were toxic, and many other ingredients were prone to explode during the heating process.
Through a period of hundreds of years of alchemical research and through a nearly endless process of trial and error, the Daoists did not really succeed in making the pill of immortality, but did produce a number of interesting byproducts such as gunpowder, hallucinogenic mineral drugs studied by Rudolf Wagner, and ingredients for the mummification of corpses. In the long run, all aspects of Daoism became more and less, more or less related to alchemy. Even the ancient meditational practices, such as Zhuangzi had described in his portrait of the Old Master, were reevaluated as spiritual or inner alchemy.
This highly symbolic– symbolical procedure had great success with outsiders and Daoist amateurs, and is often, often regarded today as the mainstream of Daoism. For the general public then, Daoism and alchemy became almost synonyms. This, in turn, greatly influenced the way Daoism was perceived abroad, and many abroad and many eminent sinologues such as Joseph Needham or Arthur Waley just saw in each Daoist an avid searcher after immortality through some kind of mystical empiricism.
This also explains why Arthur Waley, when he published his translation of the travelogue of a great Taoist master called Master Long Spring, Chang Chun, who in the beginning of the thirteenth century traveled through Central Asia to the court of Genghis Khan in a bid to forestall the slaughter of Chinese populations, population through the imminent invasion of the Mongol army. Why then Waley gave to this translation the title, The Travels of an Alchemist? In fact, Master Longspring never practiced any ordinary alchemy, nor was he apparently much preoccupied with the search for immortality– for the search for immortality.
When, after a trip which had lasted more than one year, he stood before the Great Khan. The first thing the latter asked him was, “What drug of immortality have you brought to me from afar?” The master replied, “I have means to protect life,” but no elixir that will prolong it.”
The Khan then asks, “The people call you the Immortal. Did you choose then this name for yourself or did others give it to you?” The master answered, “I did not give this name to myself.
Others gave it to me.” So afterwards, Genghis conforms to the established custom and also calls the patriarch by the title of Divine Immortal. But as the ma master himself had said, and as is confirmed by the rather detailed historical sources we have at our disposal concerning this great Taoist, he did not practice alchemy nor any other technique aiming at the prolongation of life.
Instead, his activities were almost entirely devoted to the practice of ritual. The master spent indeed most of his time celebrating great services, often lasting many days at a time in the classical liturgical tradition of Taoism. This fact, in view of the general accepted ideas about Daoism, may be seen as rather exceptional.
In fact, it is not at all. When in nineteen sixty-three I for the first time met real Daoists, I found to my surprise that they too were exclusively practicing liter- ritual. And although they belonged to an entirely different school, as Master Long Spring did, the classical liturgical tradition which they upheld was essentially the same.
This continuous and central liturgical tradition does also occupy a very large part of Taoist literature. In fact, more than half of the one thousand five hundred different works in the standard collection of Taoist books directly concern liturgy. In comparison, writings on alchemy or other techniques related to the search of immortality only form a small part.
And although it may now come as a surprise to Genghis Khan, and also to us, that Master Long Spring did not practice alchemy, but exclusively liturgy, the liturgical tradition appears to be the mainstream of Taoism and not a sideline. Moreover, as we have seen, in spite of the fact that Master Long Spring did not have nor cared for the elixir of im– elixir of immortality, he is considered by his contemporaries to be a divine immortal. This point is also confirmed by today’s traditions.
Today, the master two– masters are too called immortals in connection with their liturgical status as officers of the Dao. They are called Immortal Inspector, Immortal Minister, Immortal Governor, Immortal Prefect, etc., depending on their rank in the immortal hierarchy. This quality is theirs by virtue of the sacrament of transmission.
To have received this sacrament is a prerequisite for the capacity to perform ritual. My last words will now be on ritual. So here we may observe something, something which is the opposite of what we expected and even assumed.
Immortality appears not as a goal to be pursued through great efforts and difficult, dangerous researches, researches, but as something that can be simply obtained through ritual. And this is not only true for the initiated masters, but seems to be something open for everybody, even without having asked for it. There are many examples of people who, mostly unwittingly, obtained immortality.
Once there was an old man who suffered from continuous trembling, which made his teeth clatter. Now, clattering or grinding one’s teeth happens to be a ritual act that calls up all the spirits and energies of the body. The old man, therefore, had these continuously on the alert, and not a single one could leave his body.
As a result, he could not die and went on living indefinitely. Among other famous examples, we have people who were great whistlers and just dominated the circulation of pneumatic energies in their body, or those who just chanced to enter into the right holy place, or who by accident found a ritual instrument or writing such as a talisman or even a whole book without having looked for it or even being able to read it. All these people became immortal without really trying.
Among all these instances, a great number concerned persons who, by accident, entered another realm of time and just changed their life cycle. The famous story tells us of a woodcutter named Old Wang, who happened to pass by a grotto where a couple of young children were playing a game of Go, of Weiqi in Chinese. Old Wang laid down his ax and looked for a while at the game.
One of the youngsters gave him a piece of dried fruit, which, when he ate it, dissolved all his hunger and thirst. After a while, those present said to him, “You have been here long enough. Why don’t you go home?”
Old Wang picked up his ax and found that the handle had completely molded away. When he reached his home, several centuries had elapsed during his absence. Thus, a simple game of Go in the great nature where the immortals dwell corresponds to several centuries in our puny, puny world.
Not everyone has the luck of our woodcutter, and all the instances I just mentioned belong, of course, to the realm of the exceptional. It is much less hazardous, and also often far more dignified, when immortality in a similar effortless way is obtained through a solemn liturgical service conferring the sacrament of transmission. But you may well want to ask, how can this be?
I must admit that I myself find it also difficult to understand. In general, in our academic circles, ritual has been dealt with in a rather offhand manner, at least as far as human rituals are concerned, because animal rituals have been and continue to be studied extensively. But human rituals, such as our sacrament of transmission are often said to be just a metaphor or a series of symbolical actions or again, a matter of belief, something called religion or magic.
Personally, I find this way of dealing with human ritual not very satisfying. When we look at rituals of our own tradition, such as coronations, marriages, or the kind of solemn sacrament of transmission that bestows infallibility on the Roman Catholic Pope, these rituals may be metaphorical or symbolical, or just religious or magical, as long as they are in the process of being performed. However, when we look at the results and the ways the way they sometimes interfere with our lives, it would seem that these kinds of rather reductionist approaches are inadequate.
I’m sure that all of you here will agree that the marital stage, for instance, is not just a metaphor. Like the teeth-clattering old man, once one has entered into the sphere of ritual, there is no easy way to get out of it. It is a fact that ritual is a difficult and insufficiently researched field, not only for what ritual does or is supposed to do, but even more so for what ritual is in itself.
The problems besetting the study of ritual are numerous, numerous, and I surmise that many of us here, and this includes myself, have problems when it comes to the study of human rituals, especially those rituals that, like the Sacrament of Transmission, explicitly defines itself as a ritual. Rituals, unlike theories or myths, are difficult to think. They are more easy to do.
So the simplest way out of my present quandary may well to report here briefly how it is done. The sacrament of transmission consists essentially in copying out a large number of sacred texts and other writings, and then, instead of transmitting them to the disciple who is to receive the transmission, to burn them and pour water over them, or, as the Taoists say, to transform them. The written documents are at first placed according to a prescribed pattern in a hall or a room so as to stake out a sacred area.
This action is called the construction of the altar, something to be compared to the building of the stove and the crucible in alchemy. When at the end, the documents are taken away and destroyed, that is called the dispersion of the altar. Among the written documents, there exists a certain hierarchy.
Some are fundamental, while others are derivative in nature. The fundamental documents are very peculiar. They are composed of signs which look somewhat like ordinary Chinese characters, but that have no precise word value and are by definition illegible.
These illegible writings are called the five real writs, and they are considered to be the original revelation of the cosmic energies. Placed on the four corners and in the center of the sacred area, they are the most important elements for the construction of the altar. These real writs made their appearance spontaneously, as I have said earlier, being the very first things to emerge from the primordial chaos.
They correspond to the images mentioned in the Tao Te Ching, who said, “In the midst of this confusion and distinction, there appeared signs.” Another text gives us a more detailed account of how this happened. The universe had not yet taken root.
Sun and moon did not yet shed their radiance. Obscure, dark, no originator, no lineage. Then marvelous writs appeared, then present, then absent.
Yin and yang nurtured them into distinctness. The great yang assisted them in obtaining brightness. Thereupon these marvelous writs began to turn.
These auspicious images started their revolution. Riding the clockwork, responding to the cycle, they then became permanent. When heaven and earth obtained these writs, they also became permanent.
When the sun, the moon, and the stars obtained them, they became radiant. Marvelous writings, so luxuriant, their light penetrating into the realm of the highest purity, illuminating the dark beginning. As yet, their colors were yet not fixed, were not fixed, and the shape of the characters was bent and crooked and th-thus impossible to understand.
The Tao of the original beginning forged them in the lodge of pervading yang, smelted them in the hell of streaming fire, and thus brought out their perfect script. Dazzling brightness shone forth from them, and when they began to shine, the myriads of divine ancestors came to pay homage. Flying through the air, dancing in the void, circling through the palace on high, burning incense, scattering flowers, they chanted the marvelous stanzas contained in these writs.
Then, when the way of original beginning took up its mandate, the supreme immortals wielded their writing brushes. The jade concubines shined their– concubines shined– shake their winnows. Gold was melted into tablets, and the writs were engraved therein.
These writs are the high text of the nine heavens, not things that can be understood by human spirits. Heaven treasures them, and thus can float. Earth hides them in its bosom, bos-bosom, and thus can be stable.
The high sages wor-worship them for obtaining perfection. The splendid virtue of these texts is the expression of the mysterious roots of the universe. Most vast are their prestigious powers, vaster than infinity.
How tremendous their transformation. Ancestors of divinity, they are unfet– unfathomable. Their ma-majesty outranges the stratosphere.
I will now presently show you a few slides of these, uh, writings. The text I just read is from the end of the fifth century AD, and it is still recited today during the rite of construction of the altar. The marvelous signs to which this text refers are also still used.
So I will just tell you. There we are. This is the type of mirph– metaphorical writing which corresponds to the text of the marvelous writs as I have described them along.
These are not the actual writings for reasons I will explain afterwards. The individual signs of the real writs can also be written separately on slips of paper, and then they represent the name of a spirit or of a god. These writing, writings are then called talismans of tesserae.
These can also be used in order to create a sacred area. Now, when these writings are oblate– are burned, you can tag on a message, and this message is then written, uh, to the side of this, uh, of this writing. These messages do not say more than just, “We have done this ritual and, uh, we want to obtain the merit for that, uh, derives from it.”
This kind of messages or petitions are extremely numerous in Daoism. Now, the fundamental writs, as I have said, were used for are used for the construction of the altar.
(coughs)
In this case, what you see here is not this mysterious writing, but just a piece of white paper with some ordinary characters written on it. The characters say, This is the real writ of this and this area, and we hope the ancestors will write on it. This is because in the tradition in which I was schooled, the real writs are considered to be too holy to be written by ordinary people, and thus the divine ancestors of Daoism are requested to do it for us, which they will eventually do with the brushes you see here in this bushel of rice, and with the inkstone at their disposal, but of course this writing is to be unseen by human eyes.
Other writings in the altar are documents which are intended to all the gods who will come in the altar when the altar is established. For each of them, there is a particular message which is, uh, inscribed with their name, and these messages are put in envelopes, and these envelopes are put upright like kind of paper stele. Here you have an example.
These two are burned at the end of the, uh, service. And here you have the Daoist masters themselves, who enter into the sacred area. Although today they do not fly, their robe is called the robe of feather, the feathered robe, or the robe of descent.
And in all respects, in all, as you can see, they dress like divine ancestors. Here, in an act of homage, just as this text said, which I translated. Or burning incense while grinding one’s teeth.
Or doing the dance called Pacing the Void. Or doing dances of Scattering Flowers with a Banner.
(coughs)
Or doing very lively dances with fire. Or doing masked devil dances. These are the kinds of scriptures which are recited and from which the text, uh, comes which I have just quoted.
These scriptures, too, will be burned at the end of the service. Here you see the oblation of writs in the altar itself, in the, uh, sacred area. In one bowl there’s fire, and then in another bowl there is water which will be sprinkled over it.
And this is the well-known oblation of writings, or the sacrifice of writings as everyone can see it in China, normally outside the sacred area, where messages and other forms of writing are burned together with sacrificial money. This is the end of the slides. The mysterious real writs, which were created from the formless, now return through this sacrifice to that primordial state where they came from.
A cycle has been accomplished. The oblation through fire and water of writings is the climax and the essence of the ritual. Daoism has no other form of sacrifice than this sacrifice of writings.
Daoism is forever linked to writing. It seems possible to me that this sacrifice of writings has its roots in the rites of ancient China and may even be linked to some aspects of the early history of writing in Chinese culture. Although many points remain obscure, there seems to be some agreement between historians that Chinese writing was linked originally to the interpretation of mantic signs produced by nature or through transformational processes that aim at producing cracks on animal bones which were submitted to fire and water.
The signs would then be interpreted by a diviner who would sometimes note this interpretation on the oracle bone itself. This notation might perhaps be considered a transposition or a translation of original mysterious signs. It is noteworthy that, according to the legend, Laozi himself was a diviner.
His particular task seems moreover to have been that of a keeper of scriptures, which may indicate that his function of diviner was especially linked to writing. Whatever this all may be, it is a fact that Laozi in early Daoism is above all a revealer and transmitter of texts and other writings, not only of the famous Tao Te Ching, but also of the kind of sacred signs used for the establishment of the altar and the tesserae we have just seen. The early tesserae supposed to represent– were supposed to represent the names of spirits of holy mountains, and the possession of such a talisman enabled the adept to enter into these mountains and to live there with the immortals, like the woodcutter in the story.
These signs also allow the dead to return to the land of Yonder, to the realm of chaos and undifferentiation, where their vital energies are fused and molded into new forms. This accounts for the presence of Lao Tzu’s tesserae in tombs dating from the beginning of our era. These tesserae are accompanied by written contracts which confirm the purchase of a resting place for the dead person from the spirit of the mountain.
(coughs)
Finally, these tesserae are capable of marshaling the powerful presence of nature spirits and thus have the function of protective talismans for those that live in this world. A combination of five of these holy signs corresponding to the names of the gods of the five holy mountains, the Marchmounts, as they are currently called by Berkeley sinologues, was certainly one of the most widely used talismans for domestic protection in ancient China. The name of this talisman was The Chart of the Real Form of the Five Sacred Peaks.
This name shows us that the eligible signs were considered as the real form, that is the fundamental structure, the inner texture of the great landmarks of the world. The five guardian mountains, which like those bushels of rice you saw on the altar in which the real writs are posed, define and sanctify the sacred area or the human world. The signs that reveal the hidden but powerful patterns of nature, the real, that is the redu-irreducible forms of life.
These talismans appear to have been very much in vogue in the early centuries of our era. But with the changes in society which were caused by the consolidation of the imperial bureaucracy during the great dynasty of the Han, the ideas about the sacred signs transmitted by Lao Tzu also changed. They now no longer allowed merely the communication with the great forces of nature, such as the gods of powerful mountains, but also with the representatives of a celestial bureaucracy, which, as a parallel power to the imperial administration, conferred legitimacy on the non-official organizations, which, on the local level, attempted to establish politically autonomous groups resisting the totalitarian state.
This stage of Taoism, known to historians as the movement of the Heavenly Master, masters, laid the groundwork for the liturgical tradition as we know it today, which is the abundance of metaphorical bureaucratic transactions. The numerous petitions, memorials, and other paperwork which characterize today’s services stem from these times. The unabated hatred of Chinese officialdom for this liturgical tradition also begins here.
Two centuries later, during a period of disunity in which the imperial state had almost vanished, a wave of nostalgia for the ancient regime provoked a fresh reading of the timeless mystical science. The result was a highly sophisticated new rendering of classical Cha-Daoist text, text using a very poetical language. These are the famous Maoshan revelations so masterfully studied by Michel Strickmann.
During approximately the same period, Buddhism at last gained a real foothold in China, and many Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese. Thus, another scriptural tradition appeared which had to be assimilated. The mystical signs were interpreted, interpreted once more in a different light, and now they yielded a discourse which was so similar to Buddhist sutras that the specialists of today sometimes have difficulties in telling the two apart, and so on.
At each period of its historical development, Daoism readjusted its interpretation of the mysteries and produced corresponding new texts, and thus the bulk of Daoist books grew from a few score in the ancient times to several hundreds in the sixth century, and then to several thousand in the thirteenth century, before the beginning of the protracted process of the persecution of Daoists in modern China, which started with the destruction of Daoist books by Kubilai Khan in twelve hundred and eighty-one. Yet all these texts continued, at least for those which were called scriptures or writs, to be considered to be derived as translations or human renderings as some form of, of some form of primordial real writs. In keeping with wisdom of that unknown American schoolboy who once wrote that poetry is a thing you make prose of.
The mainstream of Taoist literature remained the product of liturgy and was used as an oblation rather than for the st- for study and instruction. Indeed, the sacrifice of writings is often called to publish, and this expression may remind us that the function of Taoist liturgical texts were not altogether so different from our academic literary products, which are meant to shed new lights on the puzzling problems that arise in our minds, but which, as soon as we have published them, are often already outdated. During today’s sacrament of transmission, in principle, all Taoist texts are considered to be transferred to the disciple.
Of course, such a book– bulk of books cannot just be copied out for each occasion. The disciple is therefore considered to receive not the texts themselves, but the gist of them. This then takes the form of repertoires called registers Or simply
(cough)
some kind of catalogue of books. In former times, the transmission of these catalogues seemed to have been a reality, but nowadays they too have become fictional documents. Yes, sometimes one gets the feeling that Taoism is not very serious.
The fact remains, however, that today every document involved in the making of the Sacred Area, the real writs, the talismans, the petitions, the memorials, the paper steles, and also the very scriptures which have been recited during the service are solemnly sacrificed. And all this still represents for an average service two or three months of steady copying by hand by a qualified scribe. And of all this, the disciple receives, in fact, nothing at all, except a diploma stating that the ritual of transmission has been performed on his behalf.
It had– it has added nothing to his knowledge, yet it has made him immortal. The explanation, as it can be obtained through circumstantial but pertinent information from the Taoist sources themselves, I would like to recall that the Taoists did not write in general any commentaries on their rituals, reflects the same logic as alchemy, a play with time. The real writs appear at the very birth of the universe.
They are then stabilized and smelted into gold so as to last an eternity. The moment of their final disintegration and reabsorption into chaos marks the end of this world. Those who have participated ritually in this cycle of transformation, of concentration and dispersion, have taken a fabulous trip through time.
They have survived this world and now belong to another. This explanation may sound trite and poetic. It does not explain, for instance, why the sacrament of transmission had become– has become the Taoist ritual par excellence, and why this ritual can now be used for almost all other, other purposes too, for the benefit of the living and for the repose of the dead, for obtaining peace and prosperity and posterity and rain and sunshine and for the consecration of temples and houses and for the expulsion of disease.
In all those cases, the merit of the great transformation of the writings is applied to these particular cases. This all may seem a bit far-fetched. These kinds of rituals have caused many serious people to shake their heads and say, “This is degenerated Taoist religion.”
These rituals have nothing to do with the real old philosophical Taoism, the only valuable Taoism, that of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu.” My personal opinion is that the problem is a little bit– is a little more complicated than that. Of course, Taoism has changed very much during the last twenty-five centuries, but this change may concern more the intellectual side of Taoism than the ritual one.
Regarding the question whether Taoist ritual is as old as philosophical Taoism, I see two elements that might be put forward for an affirmative reply. The first one we have already considered. It concerns the very ancient date of the practices related to the ritual use of writing.
And in this respect, like in so many others, Taoism may have transmitted rites and practices that belong to to to these old strata of Chinese culture. The other aspect bring– other aspect brings us back to the old Master Lao Tzu and his legend. Tradition makes him also an expert on ritual, and no one less than Confucius turned to him for advice on this subject.
The great historian of ancient China, Sima Qian, who lived during the second century BC, reports this and tells us that when the two sages met, Lao Tzu said to Confucius, “Your wisdom comes from those who have already died and whose bones have already withered, and of whom only words remain. Don’t you know that a gentleman must move, must move with his times and adapt to the circumstances? Real treasures are hidden, but you instead ostensibly show your great virtue.
This haughty bearing, this way of exerting yourself, striving to the utmost to succeed, all this is just no good for your body. That is all I have to say. Confucius then takes his leave and says to his disciples, “Lao Tzu, whom I saw today, is like a dragon who rides the winds and soars up to heaven.”
You will recognize this now as a familiar way to describe an immortal. The gist of Lao Tzu’s word to China’s great professor is, by clinging to ancient precepts, a separation occurs between spirit and matter, between body and soul. Such wisdom is not only useless, it may even be dangerous.
Outwardly, we should adapt to the circumstances, which is of no importance as the real value lies within ourselves. The model of the world we perceive is our body, and just by listening to it and contemplating it, our body will make us understand everything which we need to know. But like the real rhythms, like the images of the real form, this knowledge cannot be caught with words.
This conviction is expressed in the well-known Taoist saying, “My fate is within my body, not in heaven.” Our fundamental fate is linked to our life cycle, which leads us from nothingness to being in our prenatal experience and from being to nothingness in our postnatal life. One time life, one time death, et cetera.
In this context, the concept of immortality is a paradox. And Taoism responds to this paradox with another paradox. The first paradox is, although I know that man by nature is mortal, I will do whatever I can to become immortal.
The counter-paradox is, although time cycles of nature are constant, and some of them so long as to equate eternity in human terms, in order to be one with nature, I must die. This counter-paradox is in keeping with the words of the Tao Te Ching when it says, “In the pursuit of learning, one knows more every day,” but in the pursuit of the way, pursuit of the way, one loses every day. Losing and losing until reaching the state of non-action, and when this state has been reached, everything can be activated.”
The practice of Taoist ritual can be said to represent a zero degree of learning, a paradoxical action of non-action. The wholesale oblations of all the doctrines, discourses, and theories of bygone days, which brings us back to ourselves, to where we are already, making us realize all that we have always known here and now in the endless maelstrom of the universe. When Zhuangzi’s wife died, Huizi, a disciple of Confucius, went to present his condolences.
He found Zhuangzi sitting with his legs sprawled out, pounding on a pot and singing. Huizi said, seeing this stupid behavior, “You lived with her,” she brought up your children and grew, grew old with you. That you do not weep at her death is something, but this pounding on a pot and singing, isn’t that going too far?”
“You are mistaken,” said Zhuangzi. “When she died, of course, I was very sad. But when I looked at the beginning, when she was not yet born, and not only not, not yet born, but when she did not yet have any form, and not only not yet any form, but not yet any energy.
There, in the middle of indifferentiation and obscure chaos, a change took place, and there was her energy. This energy was transformed, and there was form. This form then changed, and she was born.
And today, yet another transformation, and she is dead. All this is like this change of the seasons, spring and summer, autumn and winter. She is now resting in peace in a vast mansion.
Pursuing her there with cries and lamentations would mean that I did not understand our destiny. Such are the rites of nature and the nature of ritual. Thank you.
(audience applause and cheering)