The Daoist Who Wasn't There pt. 2
~ "Beside the Point" is the Point ~
Part II restores the compass. It clarifies why the old divide between philosophical & religious daoism/Daoism still matters, and how blurring it distorts everything from qigong to taijiquan. This essay cuts through Golden Age fantasies, imported metaphysics, and modern branding to recover the natural-philosophical thread — the living dao that listens, acts, and keeps both feet on the ground.
Every tradition begins as a wilderness. Before the tidy stories and Golden Age fantasies, before later generations projected their own hopes and habits backward, there was only a tangle of experiments— people trying to make sense of a world in motion. In Part I, we tried to clear some of that distortion, the allochronic habit of treating the past as a single, unified tradition. In Part II, we now turn to what grows out of that distortion: the categories and confusions that took shape later, and how they still color what we think “Daoism” is. As Paul Fischer argues in The Creation of Daoism, much of what we now call “Daoism” was shaped by later interpretations and misreadings— distinctions that became blurred over time. As he puts it:
“I understand that religious Daoism has suffered ridicule at the hands of scholars who preferred philosophical Daoism to religious Daoism. I also understand that religious Daoism covers a variety of complex entities. It is also true that philosophical and religious Daoism share an interest in meditation (or at least mental concentration) and health—as do many traditions in the ancient world. However, these considerations are beside the point: the differences simply and vastly outweigh the similarities. Religious Daoism has anthropomorphic gods, ordained priests, temples, liturgies, community rituals, talismans, ideas of sin, confession, forgiveness… in short, all of the things that make it religious. Philosophical Daoism has none of these.”
— The Creation of Daoism
Fischer doesn’t hedge—he says the quiet part out loud: the overlap isn’t the point—the difference is. And that difference has become easy to miss. Most modern scholars, wary of rigid categories, now prefer to blur the old distinction between daojia (philosophical daoism) and daojiao (religious Daoism), arguing that the boundaries were never clear in practice. Fischer’s essay pushes back— reminding us that while these terms may be imperfect, the distinction they name still matters. For much of modern history, people outside the academy have tended to collapse everything under the single word “Daoism”, as though religion, superstition, and natural philosophy were all just flavors of the same tea. They’re not. And understanding why they’re not is the first step toward seeing how a living philosophy of practice eventually clothed itself in the robes of religion.
When I first read Fischer’s line, I didn’t hear contempt for religion; I heard clarity. He isn’t resurrecting an outdated taxonomy or defending some rigid “philosophical vs. religious” divide. He is simply drawing attention to two currents within the same great river ~ one that flowed toward embodied inquiry and natural philosophy, and another that organized itself around cosmic hierarchy, ritual order, and physical immortality. Both are part of China’s vast cultural fabric, and both shaped the practices we inherit today. But to conflate them is to lose orientation. Without that compass, it becomes difficult to tell when we’re studying the dao as lived process and when we’re venerating the Dao as celestial bureaucracy.
And this is where old school dao takes its stand. It isn’t an argument against religion per se, nor an effort to strip the sacred from practice or overlook the meaningful role ritual can play in daily life. It is a way of restoring that compass ~ of reorienting to those ancient patterns of living, sensing, and meaning-making so we can discern what kind of knowledge they were cultivating, and what kind they were not. Once that orientation is clear, it becomes much easier to see how the old blur between philosophy and faith shows up again in the modern worlds of qigong and taijiquan. In the West especially, these arts are often packaged as “Daoist,” wrapped in language of lineage, immortality, or secret transmission, as if that label alone guaranteed depth or authenticity. But beneath the branding, most of what survives comes not from temples or talismans, but from the old school daoists themselves ~ from the lived study of breath, balance, and change; or in the case of taijiquan ~ from the life and death experiences of seasoned warriors. The real work isn’t to defend one category over another, but to recognize what’s been lost in translation ~ and to listen for the rhythm of the living dao still moving through the practice ~
The pattern we’re tracing isn’t new. It began long before the West ever discovered qigong. During the late Han dynasty, the court historian Sima Tan (c. 2nd century BCE) was the first to gather certain texts under the label daojia— “the school of the dao.” He wasn’t founding a sect; he was filing a library. But that simple act of classification created a category that later generations would inhabit, ritualize, and eventually theologize. By the time of Zhang Daoling and the Way of the Celestial Masters in the late Han (2nd century CE), the Dao had become religion proper: registration, ritual, revelation (and revolution— but that’s another story, and one that would echo repeatedly through China’s dynastic history). What began as personal cultivation and moral attunement (de 德) had hardened into an administrative faith— a pattern that would repeat again and again whenever practice congealed into authority.
That same rhythm of confusion and rebranding plays out today. The West didn’t invent the “Daoist brand”; it reimagined it and re-packaged it through its own lens, and then exported that image back to China. The modern language of “energy” is a perfect example ~ qi recast through the late-19th-century vitalist imagination—the élan vital of Bergson’s Europe mirrored in the new language of bioelectric force. As David A. Palmer shows in Qigong Fever, the loop completed when the Chinese Communist Party adopted this Westernized, “scientific” vision of qi to modernize and market its cultural heritage to the world.
“The qigong sector formed itself around this inspiring and legitimizing discourse, bringing into its fold an assortment of practices which had long been disdained, excluded or marginalised not only by Western science and medicine, but even by modern Chinese medicine and by its predecessor, literati medicine, for centuries: incantations, divination, magical battles, martial arts, trance, inner alchemy and so on. The rejects of the great official medical institutions, hoping to rid themselves of the odious label of ‘superstition,’ huddled under the banner of qigong, which gave them a new identity as ‘gems of Chinese civilisation,’ and which was at the same time a ‘cutting-edge scientific discipline.’”
— Qigong Fever, pp. 118–119
Once an art is sanctified by myth or market, the pattern repeats itself: it stops listening. The language of experience gives way to the language of ownership— systems, certifications, hierarchies. The dao turns into dogma. And yet, within every system, something living endures: a rhythm of knowing that keeps turning practice back into experience, and experience back into understanding.
And that rhythm is exactly what Paul Fischer was pointing toward when he said the similarities are “beside the point.” His bluntness wasn’t dismissal— it was diagnosis. What matters isn’t how philosophy and religion overlap, but how easily we lose orientation when we stop seeing their difference. That difference, properly understood, is not a division but a compass. It helps us locate where we are in the field of practice— whether we’re working through the physical, the philosophical, or the symbolic. And it helps us call out the *bullshit* for what it is, and the perennial weeds it keeps seeding.
Peter Lorge highlights the same pattern in martial arts history— another domain where myth has so thoroughly overgrown the terrain that most people can’t tell the folklore from the facts. As he writes in Chinese Martial Arts: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century:
“Much of the current understanding of Chinese martial arts in the West comes from the particular circumstances of late 19th and early 20th-century Chinese history, and the representation of the Chinese past in martial arts films… Familiar fabrications—Shaolin is the source of Chinese martial arts, the Daoist Zhang Sanfeng invented Taijiquan, or Chinese martial arts is about peace and self-cultivation, not violence—are repeated so often and so confidently that they appear to be true. They are not, and these misconceptions undermine not only our understanding of the place of martial arts in Chinese history but also the actual practice of martial arts.”
What Lorge is describing is simply that same allochronistic pattern by another name: the refusal to take off one’s golden-age-tinted sunglasses and meet the history on its own terms. The modern qigong and taijiquan worlds inherited these misconceptions wholesale— through films, manuals, marketing, and the West’s hunger for both “ancient wisdom” and “spiritualized exercise.” And here again the irony repeats itself: China learning to repackage its own traditions through Western eyes. As medical historian Paul Unschuld notes:
“A contradiction has developed between the widespread desire in Western industrialized nations to use ‘Traditional Chinese Medicine’ as an example of a physical and spiritual alternative to ‘Western medicine’ and the official Chinese policy of integrating this same TCM into the biomedical explanatory framework of Western medicine, particularly the desire to market Chinese-style pharmaceuticals worldwide after they are legitimated according to the most up-to-date biological criteria.”
— Traditional Chinese Medicine: Heritage and Adaptation
The point couldn’t be sharper: the same pattern holds ~ myths don’t just travel; they amplify. Western audiences crave ancient authenticity, while modern Chinese institutions seek to reframe that same “ancientness” through scientific legitimacy. Both sides are chasing images rather than histories, and the result is a hybrid world where practices of real depth are clothed in stories that float free of their origins, often detached from history and reality in all manner of ways. And when a story becomes structure, people often end up confusing the presentation for the actual practice ~ in Zen parlance, mistaking the “finger for the moon.”
This is why distinguishing daojia from daojiao matters— not to rank traditions, but to understand their shared ground and their very real differences: the conditions that shaped them, the aims that guided them, and the pressures under which they evolved. Without that clarity, the same misunderstandings Lorge identifies in martial arts spill easily into qigong, neigong, meditation, and the wider yangsheng world. Add to this the countless definitions of what “Daoism” is supposed to be—together with the whole spectrum of syncretic blends, therapeutic imports, and New Age hybrids—and maintaining the natural-philosophical orientation of old school dao becomes even harder.
What so often follows is that simple, secular practices of health and coherence become wrapped in religious rhetoric or supernatural pseudoscience, when what many students want is simply relief from pain, increased vitality, and a bit of peace in the midst of their stressful lives. As the ordained Daoist priest (Huàshān 華山) and scholar Louis Komjathy reminds us:
“At the farthest end of the appropriation/fabrication spectrum is a new religious movement that I have referred to as ‘Popular Western Taoism’ (PWT), with ‘Taoism’ (intentionally and inaccurately) pronounced with a hard ‘t.’ To use traditional Daoist categories, PWT has a different ‘lineage,’ one with little to no connection to Daoism as such. Some PWT adherents, following typical Orientalist logic, even absurdly suggest that they are practicing ‘original’ or ‘pure Daoism,’ which the religious tradition supposedly lost.”
— Daoism in America: Fact and Fiction
When an American Daoist priest can say this with a straight face, it tells us something important: the problem isn’t only that Western fantasies distort Daoism, but that they throw a thick fog over the very practices people are trying to learn. Confusion spreads not because the practices lack depth, but because people lose the ability to understand where these arts actually came from, and how they most likely evolved.
And that loss is not trivial. When we can’t tell history from fiction, or metaphysics from physiology, we end up practicing with borrowed assumptions instead of embodied understanding. The arts lose their footing; the craft loses its compass. That’s the real cost of allochronism and Golden Age thinking— not that the stories exist, but that they distort the very inquiry that once made these traditions alive.
This is how I shaped old school dao: not for defending another orthodoxy, but in restoring the clarity that lets practice breathe again. To keep our practice rooted in the natural philosopher’s dao, without letting religious cosmologies or modern fantasies pull it off that ground. When we know where we’re standing, the windows open ~ the physical, the philosophical, and the symbolic fall back into alignment, and coherence becomes possible again.
It isn’t an argument against religion per se, nor a critique of people who choose to follow a religious Daoist path—traditional or invented. It’s simply a recognition that these frameworks move according to different aims, and that old school dao aligns with the natural-philosophical thread—not the supernatural or superstitious ones, nor the modern pseudoscientific versions that often masquerade as “Daoist.” What matters is seeing how patterns travel, how ideas mutate, and how meaning gets lost or found across centuries of transmission. In that light, old school dao is the reminder that philosophy, practice, and myth are not the same thing ~ and that knowing the difference is what lets us practice with both feet on the ground.
What this clarity returns us to is the thread that never relied on superstitious claims, miracle language, or fabricated lineages ~ the natural-philosophical current running through the early traditions and continuing into the present. It’s a way of working that begins with the body-mind and the world as they show themselves, without importing the superstitious and pseudoscientific layers that accumulated later. When we hold those distinctions steady, the classical texts speak in their own register, and the practical intelligence at the heart of the tradition becomes visible again ~ an intelligence concerned with perception, conduct, and coherent action, not with celestial hierarchy or supernatural attainment.
In Fischer’s words, this is the ethos of philosophical Daoism, aka, old school dao
“Philosophical Daoism is a philosophy of remaining calm yet focused, of prizing humility, tranquility, and skillfulness in response to an ever-changing world.”
— The Creation of Daoism
With the ground cleared and the compass restored, Part III turns toward the practice that follows from it ~ the quiet, natural-philosophical thread that runs through the early texts. It asks what this orientation offers a modern practitioner: how coherence, attention, and responsiveness become a way of living rather than a story about the past.
Bibliography
Paul Fischer. The Creation of Daoism: A Study in Tradition, Change, and Continuity.
Routledge, 2017.
David A. Palmer. Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China. Columbia University Press, 2007.
Peter Lorge. Chinese Martial Arts: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Paul Unschuld. Traditional Chinese Medicine: Heritage and Adaptation. Columbia University Press, 2018.
Louis Komjathy. Daoism in America: Fact and Fiction. University of California Press, 2015.
*On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt*
Frankfurt’s now-classic essay provides the philosophical definition of bullshit as a category distinct from lying — a mode of speech unconcerned with truth altogether. This analytic distinction supports my critique of modern qigong, martial-arts, and “Daoist” marketing narratives, where vague metaphysics and confident assertions float free of historical or empirical grounding. I invoked it in the text to clarify that the term “bullshit” is not casual insult but a precise philosophical tool for diagnosing distortions that arise when myth, market pressures, and spiritual branding replace genuine inquiry.
Harry G. Frankfurt. On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.