Source: TW
I was reading Goossaert’s excellent Making the Gods speak, when an interesting thought came on me. Unlike Buddhism, the corpus of canonical texts for Daoism has never really closed. I was reading Goossaert’s excellent Making the Gods speak, when an interesting thought came on me. Unlike Buddhism, the corpus of canonical texts for Daoism has never really closed.
Making the Gods speak traces the history of divinely revealed texts through Chinese history- divinely composed texts that came to the mortal world. It could be as simple as a god/immortal handing a human being a sacred book (many examples) or a human encountering a god and receiving a revelation (as is the case with the beidou jing)- or indeed, practises like 扶乩 spirit writing which continue to this day.
What Goossaert points out, however, is that Chinese Buddhists usually shied away from such revealed texts, preferring to stick with the words of the words of the Buddha as embodied in the Buddhist Canon. By contrast, as late as the Qing dynasty, whole compilations of Daoist scripture- like the Daozang Jiyao 道藏辑要 were created under the auspices of Lu Dongbin, who made his intentions known through spirit writing. Creative Daoism - Monica Esposito - Google Books https://books.google.com. The end result of this is, that in China at least, the Corpus of daoist texts would be neccessarily more varied than the buddhist canon.
However, as with all things there are blurred boundaries. Tibetan buddhism has a long tradition of such revealed texts- terma -(actually written by buddhas and hidden ’till the world was ripe for them). Likewise you have buddhist themed texts revealed though fuji that was revealed in the 1970s;
Likewise you have buddhist themed texts revealed though fuji that was revealed in the 1970s; Journeys to the Under-World - Wikipedia, although admittedly the text mentioned above is of a distictly folksy form of buddhism (and its reputation tanked after the guy who was the medium was jailed for sexual assault).
The other major point about this is that the majority of ‘Daoism’ by whatever definition- is actually contained in texts other than the Dao De Jing. As this book shows, people regularly got new daoist texts by retrieving them from lakes, or copying writings on cave walls… and so on. In short, there was a continuing process of revelation of holy texts. The Dao De Jing was never the end of Daoism, but rather its beginning; the seed that grew into a rambling many-branched tree that as yet we struggle to grasp…
Thus, we do ourselves a great disservice to ignore all this later material. To dismiss this later material as ‘corruption’ or ‘invention’ not only restricts our view of daoism, it would be to ignore how daoism functioned as a religion.