It must be understood that broadly speaking, Chinese Buddhism and Daoism were not and had never been ideological “friends.” In fact, calling them “competitors” would be rather understating things – they were ideological foes, and along with the third philosophy in competition, Confucianism, frequently bitter – and at times murderous – enemies. Now, looking at the two philosophies today, it’s easy to point out that they actually share a lot in common – how could they not get along?! (right, just ask the Catholics and the Protestants)… but in fact, that superficial similarity is largely a product of their competition of the hearts and minds of the Chinese, and in particular the ruling class.

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Brief overview of Daoism

Daoism is native to China and stems from the teachings of (the most likely at least semi-apocryphal and compilation persona) Laozi (AKA Lao Tzu), and best compiled into the book of aphorisms and sayings, the Dao de Jing. Daoism tends to be a notoriously abstruse set of philosophies emphasizing such concepts as wu wei, meaning “action from inaction,” balance in all thing and in and with nature (the Yin/Yang symbol, for instance, is in fact a shameless appropriation by Neo-Confucians of the Daoist idea of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate, the Taijitu which shows the nature of all creation), and the fundamental unknowable nature of Reality (in fact, the opening lines of the Dao de Jing are:

道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名。無名天地之始；有名萬物之母。

The dao [path] that can be named is not the Eternal Dao; the name that can be named is not the Eternal Name. Conceived without name – this is the Originator of Heaven and Earth; Conceived with name – this is the Mother of all things.

Whew, pretty heady stuff. So heady that you might just need some time to think about it – and Daoism is totally cool with that. In fact, it actively encouraged its initiates to think long and hard about how they’d never understand anything about reality… by not participating in society, living far off in the mountains and caves beyond civilization, and staring at walls for months and years on end. They tended to let their hair and beards grow long and unkempt (interestingly this was deemed so central to Daoist monks that they were some of the only people during the Qing Dynasty to be exempting from the Queue tonsure laws) … and yeah, were weirdo wild men living in caves, often looking every bit like bigfoot or a troll. Do you see where I’m going with this?

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Somewhat Less Brief Overview of Buddhism

OK, so let’s get to Buddhism. Buddhism is not natively Chinese, but come from the northwest of India/Nepal, and generally accepted as having been conceived by Siddhartha Gautama round about the same time as Laozi and Confucius were having their lightbulb moments as well (in the 6th-5th c. BCE area). Buddhism arose largely as an ascetic challenge to the sacrifices and rituals of the Vedic Brahmanism that had been the dominant belief and social structure in the Indian subcontinent. The central tenants of Buddhism center around the ideas of impermanence, suffering, repeating cycles of life and death, and the ultimate goal of breaking free of that cycle though achieving attunement with the universe itself. The endless cycle of life, death and involuntary rebirth is called samsara, and is brought about by individual fixation on self and experiences. The ultimate goal of all this is actually to break the cycle altogether and leave the cycle of samsara for good: achieving enlightenment, and become oneself a Buddha by achieving nirvana: the imperturbable stillness of the mind after the flames of desire, aversion, and delusion have at last been extinguished.

So we can see that at their cores – in spite of their sometimes superficial similarities – they really do have diametrically opposed worldviews: Daoism says “You can only ever know that you can truly know nothing,” whereas Buddhism says that “total Enlightenment is not only possible, but [especially when we get the type that really took hold in China, the Mahayana School] achievable right here, right now, in this lifetime, if you try hard enough.”

In spite of the fact that Gautama Buddha achieved his enlightenment in the 5th century BCE, it wouldn’t be until the 1st century CE – during the Eastern Han Dynasty – that Buddhism really started making inroads into China via the Silk Road up from India, and across the Hindu Kush Range. In spite of the physical proximity of India to China, the Himalaya mountains proved a daunting barrier for philosophical transmission between the two cultures, and even beyond that one had to brave the deadly Taklamakan Desert to the Himalayas’ north – not to mention the thousands upon thousands of scary, mean Xiongnü tribesman who had a vested interest in stopping up all trade in and out of the Han for the first half of its lifespan. So it’s somewhat ironic – though not terribly surprising – that Buddhist proselytizers are thought to have reached as far West as Athens and Alexandria decades or even centuries before the philosophy became known in Chang’an or Luoyang.

Buddhism had a… tense… relationship with both the Chinese populace and its elite. It was a centuries-long on-again-off-again, I love you/I hate you torrid affair. Some emperors were very into the belief system – guys like Ming of Han, who supposedly had a mystical dream of the Buddha telling him to send scholars to the West to receive knowledge; or some accounts even of Wu of Han (though that seems less than likely); several of the would-be-emperors of the Period of Disunion following the Han were big into Buddhism as well, especially after the arrival of the monk Kumarajiva who was able to offer much better and more accessible translations of the sutras available to the Chinese populace after he was captured by Later Qin in the early 5th c. CE, who at last were like “OH! Now we get it!” and in many cases climbed aboard. This is most hilariously embodied by Emperor Wu of Liang who over the course of his reign in the mid-6th century not once, not twice, but three times tried to run away from the palace and join a monastery as a monk… and each time the palace was forced to “buy him back” from the monastery with a tremendous “donative.”

Buddhism really picked up steam, though, in the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), most famously Tang Taizong (who sent Monk Xuanzang on his literary journey), Tang Xuanzong (who received him back from said journey), and the Empress Wu Zetian (who actually went so far as to briefly declare herself a Boddhisatva).

But even though Buddhism was reaching a high-water-mark in terms of popularity in China, it was not without is harsh detractors. One particularly notable example is the court minister and staunch anti-Buddhist Han Yu, who memorialized the throne in 819 CE:

Your servant begs leave to say that Buddhism is no more than a cult of the barbarian peoples spread to China. It did not exist here in ancient times.

Now I hear Your Majesty has ordered the community of monks to go to greet the finger bone of the Buddha, and that You Majesty will ascend a tower to watch the procession as this relic is brought into the palace […]

Now the Buddha was a man of the barbarians who did not speak Chinese and who wore clothes of a different fashion. The Buddha’s sayings contain nothing about our ancient kings and the Buddha’s manner of dress did not conform to our laws; […] if the Buddha were still alive today and came to our court, Your Majesty might condescend to receive him, but he would then be escorted to the borders of the nation, dismissed, and not allowed to delude the masses. How then, when he has long been dead, could the Buddha’s rotten bones, the foul and unlucky remains of his body, be rightly admitted to the palace? Confucius said: “Respect ghosts and spirits, but keep them at a distance!” Your servant is deeply ashamed and begs that this bone from the Buddha be given to the proper authorities to be cast into fire and water, that this evil be rooted out, and later generations spared this delusion.”

Continued...