On “Daoist Medicine” 道醫

I make the following selection of resources available for your own consideration of this topic. Please click the underlined titles below to access the texts:

Daoism and Medicine by Michael Stanley-Baker, chapter from the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine, 2022

Open source access, PDF embedded, and download link available.

‘Daoist medicine’ is itself a modern term and that it introduces certain biases. This word (in Chinese), and its medieval Chinese analogue daoyi 道醫, is nowhere to be found in the Daoist canon itself, nor in other major historical collections (Stanley-Baker 2019b). This neologism privileges early ‘science’, a move expressly intended by Gai Jianmin 盖建民 (Gai 2001: 6–11), who argued that it could be used to promote more research and prove the relevance of Daoism in the modern scientific world. This is fine and laudable but has the unintended effect of tacitly separating out ritual as a discrete domain, in ways that do not account for how early practitioners organised knowledge. No historical figure or writer used this term before the twentieth century, and this fact alone indicates that it is a modern, academic, retrospective, analytical category, but not a term of art from the past.”

Common Misconceptions Concerning Daoism (‘Taoism’) by Louis Komjathy, excerpt from The Daoist Tradition, 2013

“Chinese medicine is not Daoist. This misidentification, and the construct of “Daoist medicine,” most often comes from a conflation of correlative cosmology (see above) with Daoism. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is, in fact, a modern form of Chinese medicine created by the Chinese communist government and influenced by Western biomedicine and a scientific paradigm. In terms of classical Chinese medicine, there is some overlap between the two traditions, but little research has been done on this topic.”

Introduction to “Yellow Thearch’s Basic Questions” by Louis Komjathy, Handbooks for Daoist Practice Vol. 1, 2023 (no link)

“Since the publication of the Handbooks for Daoist Practice (2003/2008), there also has been increasing reference to and invocation of the neologism (new word) of so-called “Daoist medicine” (daojiao yixue道教醫學) in the modern world. (For a critical discussion see Stanley-Baker 2019). Like other popular constructions of “Daoism”, this often involves a conflation of traditional Chinese views with Daoism and/or various, often anachronistic reconstructions à la modern “Classical Chinese Medicine (CCM)”, especially in TCM and East Asian medical schools and complete with fictitious “lineages.” (Komjathy, 409).

Towards Western Daoism by Louis Komjathy 康思奇, Ph.D. ,Center for Daoist Studies 道學中心

“Daoism (Taoism) is an indigenous Chinese religion deeply rooted in traditional Chinese culture, including aesthetics, art, language, literature, and ritual. At the same time, Daoism has now become a global religion characterized by multiculturalism, multiethnicity, multilingualism, and multinationalism. As such, it is the object of various Western fabrications, fictions, and fantasies rooted in colonialist, missionary and Orientalist legacies.

For connoisseurs, popularizers, and spiritualists, “Western Daoism” refers to their own appropriative agendas, intellectual constructs, and/or commercial ventures, often with accompanying hybrid spirituality and spiritual colonialism. This even includes individuals with mistaken views and/or no formal standing in the tradition, not to mention insight and practice-realization, composing quasi- manifestos on topics like “being Daoist.”

Such individuals usually are living through and perpetuating the Three Poisons (sāndú 三毒) of power, sex, and money, and injuring other individuals in the process, sometimes with devastating and traumatic consequences. In the language of Chinese Daoism, such individuals are “eating Daoism” (chī dàojiào 吃道教). For Americanists (scholars of American religion), “Western Daoism” (i.e., “white Daoism”) most often designates Western adaptations of Chinese Daoism, especially transformations based on American values (secularized Protestant Christianity). The latter include anti-clericalism, anti-institutionalism, anti-ritualism, egalitarianism, individualism, self-power, transcendentalism, and the like.

In both of these cases (popularizers and Americanists), “Westernization” (cf. Orientalism) is shorthand for crazy things that white people do to other people’s cultures and religions, “Asian” and Daoist ones in the present case. For conventional Sinologists, “Western Daoism” usually refers to Popular Western Taoism (PWT), a new religious movement (NRM) with little to no connection to Daoism as such.”