new understandings of the text historically ascribed to
him, the Daode jing(The Way and Its Power), to Zhang
Daoling, the first Celestial Master and founder of
Zhengyi (Correct Unity) Daoism, in 142 C.E. Likewise,
the term Daoistwill refer to those—generally priests,
but also a few lay practitioners—who devoted their
lives to Daoist practice.
These are necessarily vague definitions, for Daoism
was never a single ism,since its organization, doctrines,
practices, and even history were constantly being
reimagined; nor did it require, except in its earliest
stages, strict adherence to a creed. In the process of its
unstructured development, Daoist practice came to in-
corporate a wide spectrum of beliefs, attitudes, and
goals, all allegedly finding their source in the Dao. In
fact, the endurance of the religion in Chinese society
stemmed from its permeable belief system and relative
lack of organizational structure. These features soft-
ened the religion’s outlines and allowed for strategies
of eclecticism and co-option that assured the spread of
Daoism, though Daoists were few, throughout two
millennia of Chinese history.
As the Chinese struggled to understand the Buddhist
religion, they naturally did so on their own terms, most
often through recourse to indigenous traditions of prac-
tice and worship. Buddhist sutras had to be translated
into Chinese, and Buddhist doctrine had to be explained
in native terms. Daoism either informed or recorded
native understandings by adapting Buddhist doctrine
and practice to its own uses. As a result, literally every-
where one looks in the record of Chinese Buddhism—
RITUAL, iconography, monastic economy, PHILOSOPHY,
and even translation and the creation of sutras—one
finds elements that might be elucidated by reference to
Daoist parallels. While successive dynasties, and some
Buddhists as well, sought to clarify the boundaries be-
tween the two religions, beyond the walls of the
monastery this attempt proved less than successful.
Proponents of the Daoist religion brought further
political pressures on Buddhism. Often, Daoist orga-
nizations defined themselves with respect to devotees
of popular sects and Buddhists, whose practices did not
accord with theirs. By redefining the doctrines and
practices of other religions in their own terms, such
Daoist groups would attempt to supplant them. In the
case of Buddhism, the goal was to replace the foreign
religion with a “more authentic” Chinese version. Sev-
eral imperial moves to repress the Buddhist religion
are directly traceable to this attempted co-option.
The interplay of Buddhism and Daoism can thus be
characterized as a complex dance of appropriation and
accommodation, interspersed with periods of suspi-
cion and antipathy. This entry will present in di-
achronic perspective a few of the highlights of this
diverse history.First to sixth centuries C.E.
The earliest interactions between the two religious
complexes reveal Chinese attempts to naturalize the
foreign religion. The putative use of “Daoist” terms to
translate early Buddhist scriptures has perhaps been
overemphasized, since the Daoism of the first to the
third centuries could claim little unique religious ter-
minology beyond that found in the Daode jing,the
Zhuangzi,and other widely used texts. It is nonethe-
less significant that both religions drew upon a com-
mon fund of Chinese terms, with their established
connotations, to express their central concepts. For ex-
ample, Buddhist vihara,or monasteries, and Daoist
meditation chambers were both called jingshe,a term
that originally designated a pure chamber used in
preparation for ancestral sacrifice and that later re-
ferred to a Confucian study hall.
Several of the earliest mentions of Buddhism in
Chinese historical texts record that the Han emperor
Huan (r. 147–167) performed joint sacrifices to the
deified Laozi, the Yellow Emperor, and the Buddha.
Around the same time, the notion arose that Laozi,
who was reputed to have disappeared in the west af-
ter composing his Daode jing,had become the Bud-
dha. This legend was repeated, and greatly expanded,
in Daoist sources, including a circular distributed
among Zhengyi groups in northern China in 255, to
show the superiority of Daoist practices over those
crafted specifically for unruly barbarians. Around
300, a scripture was produced, the Huahu jing(Scrip-
ture of [Laozi’s] Conversion of the Barbarians). This
text, with later accretions, continued to play a role in
religious controversy into the fourteenth century.
Versions of the legend were also taken up in early
Buddhist apologetic treatises and indigenously com-
posed sutras, where it was argued that Laozi and other
venerated figures of Chinese history were in fact dis-
ciples of the Buddha.
By the latter half of the fourth century, Daoist scrip-
tural traditions originating in the south reveal the ex-
tent to which Buddhism had come to transform
Chinese worldviews. The Shangqing (Upper Purity)
scriptures revealed to Yang Xi (ca. 330–386) show
vague traces of Buddhist concepts, such as REBIRTH.DAOISM ANDBUDDHISM