other such shifts. These changes in external conditions are much more episodic.
Intellectual changes, typically in the form of concrete religious doctrines or of
lifestyle ideologies, come about when a new kind of structure is created. Once
in place, they are likely to remain conservative as well as concrete, like the
patterns of Taoist religion or gentry lifestyle. Once laid down, these are anchors
of intergroup conflict rather than items of cultural capital to be parlayed by
intellectuals into an ever-lengthening sequence of conceptual abstractions.
I have of course been speaking in ideal types. There is usually some overlay
between autonomous intellectual networks and direct class influences. Even
the most inwardly directed networks will incorporate some items of class
culture, if only as starting points on which to play inner intellectual games.
And direct class control of the intellectual world usually allows some degree
of structuring by the law of small numbers. The relative degree of innovation
or stagnation of intellectual life at the level of abstract philosophies depends
on the degree of inner autonomy along this continuum.
The development of Taoism is a good place to explore the conditions of
low intellectual autonomy from lay influences, and the ways different class
cultures affect intellectual life in such circumstances.
From Anti-Confucian Opposition to Taoist Church
“Taoism” is perhaps the most controversial category of Chinese historiogra-
phy. The concept tao was the common property of virtually all intellectual
factions in the Warring States. In the Analects it is used to refer to the proper
course of human conduct, which the Confucians identified with the “way of
the ancients” (Graham, 1989: 13). At the opposite pole, the Legalists also made
use of the concept in grounding their doctrines. As late as 1200 c.e., the
movement that we call Neo-Confucianism and that gained official status as
interpreter of the Confucian classics was known by its contemporaries as
tao-hsüeh, the tao study or school. The writings of Chuang Tzu and the Tao
Te Ching are mixtures of various elements from the philosophical field of their
times and do not constitute a united front with the doctrines and practices of
the contemporary magicians and shamans that might also be called “Taoist.”
According to this line of reasoning, Ssu-ma T’an’s category “Tao-te chia”—
“school of the Way and its Power”—which later became “Tao chia,” is merely
a bibliographical classification. As Strickmann and others (Strickmann, 1979:
166–167; Zürcher, 1959: 87; Sivin, 1978) have stressed, this kind of “philo-
sophical Taoism” is so different from the religious Taoism which built up
during the Han as to be incomparable. These scholars advocate reserving the
term “Taoism” for the Taoist church from 150 c.e. onwards. In particular the
so-called neo-Taoism of the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove” and their
Innovation by Opposition: Ancient China^ •^165