Daoism came to "Theorizing Religion" today, in the form of two chapters of James Miller's China's Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future. It was a way to introduce the "religion and ecology" discussion (still some seats in the class I'm teaching next semester on that topic), and to get at the "Daoism as a religion" question. The Harvard Divinity School MOOC series will run again next year, with a sixth course - on Sikhism. Why not consecrate Daoism the sixth world religion, as the Norton Anthology of World Religions did? But first we needed a sense of what Daoism is, no easy matter...Following Miller's lead I emphasized that Daoist practice is about experiencing the body in the world, the world in the body - and "the world" is not some amorphous blur but full of local landscapes and powers, just as time is not a gauzy mist but calendars with specific cycles where particular named forces are close or far. (It all waxes and wanes: yin yang.) For this reason, Miller argues, western categories of nature - human - supernatural don't know what to make of Daoism. By the same token Daoism offers a powerful alternative to understandings of "religion and nature" premised on the western categories, which are all about distinctions and boundaries (protecting nature!), not the flows of vital energy (qi) which are what it's all about. It makes for a different way of approaching ecology if the environment is in me, as Miller puts it, and a different form of education if this is something to be understood not intellectually but "aesthetically," in the way we feel our living.
Still, world religion #6? One student astutely observed that you couldn't possibly provide the aesthetic education in the significance of particular places and times through a MOOC. (I'd summarized an article by Yang Der-Ruey about how the conventional 9-5 M-F schools of the state-sponsored Daoist organization in China have killed Daoism by divorcing it from specificities of geography and calendar, leaving only the empty husk of abstract philosophy and arbitrary ritual.) But, we'll have to ask next week, can you really MOOC any religion without turning it into abstract philosophy and arbitrary ritual?
