Daoism without Dao in ancient Japan
I will present “Daoism without Dao in ancient Japan” tomorrow morning at Asian Conference on Ethics, Religion and Philosophy, at the Ramada Osaka, Osaka, Japan.
http://acerp.iafor.org/Program.html
The abstract is as bellow.
The current trend of the study of Daoism in ancient Japan can be divided into two aspects. One is to continue to indicate what elements of Daoism have been absorbed by ancient Japan. Researchers have consciously tried to provide more arguments on how these elements have entered and affected Japan, rather than related studies of last period. The other is to explain why Japanese envoys to Tang turned down the offer to send Daoist priests to Japan made by Emperor Xuanzong of Tang in 753. These two aspects seem self-contradictory as they show that Daoism was rejected by Japan officially but meanwhile, many elements of Daoism existed in ancient Japan. Shimode Sekiyo once figured out the kind of Daoism practiced in ancient Japan is Folk Daoism (Shimode, 1974:226). But in fact, his research could not interpret the elements of Daoism that could be found at the official level in ancient Japan. In this paper, I want to make the overall picture of Daoism in ancient Japan more clear. I focus on the understanding of Daoism by the Japanese Ritsuryō state 律令国家 and the founder of the Shingon Esoteric Buddhism真言密教, Kūkai空海(774-835), as the two subjects both have shown their understandings of Daoism as a religion. Japanese Ritsuryō state regarded Daoism as the religion representing Tang Dynasty and thought the content of Daoism was the methods of the Daoist master道士法. Kūkai considered Daoism as a technique toward immortality in his essay Sangō shiiki 三教指帰and chose Buddhism as his belief in the end. The common point of the two understandings of Daoism is there isn’t a core divinity concept of Dao but only the techniques of Daoism. Based on this, Daoism without Dao never really existed in Japan as its own separate, organized religion although it had an unmistakable influence on Japanese religion culture via its methods of various techniques.
