Michael Visits the Taoist Temple

Chapter Four of the Daodejing:

The Way is like an empty vessel;
No use could ever fill it up.
Vast and deep!
It seems to be the ancestor of the myriad creatures.
It blunts their sharpness;
Untangles their tangles;
Softens their glare;
Merges with their dust.
Deep and clear!
It seems to be there.
I do not know whose child it is;
It is the image of what was before the Lord himself!

Today I met my student Guo Jinjie, who has accompanied us on many trips, and we took a bus to the nearby Taoist temple.

Here you see the outer wall with the traditional yin-yang symbol that identifies it as Taoist.

Unlike the Buddhist temple next door to our residence, the Taoist temple doesn't get many visitors. In fact, we were the only people there besides the Taoists. Guo Jinjie says that while many Chinese are Taoist in a folk manner, they do not come to the temples for rituals as they do in the Buddhist temples.

Here is a nice shot of the temple front with the mountains in the background. The building to the right of the main shrine is where the Taoists live. There are five of them that live there.

Around back, we have this pretty amazing feature. It is the entire Daodejing carved into the side of the mountain. While Taoism as a folk religion is probably more than three thousand years old, the Daodejing is the central work of Taoist literature. It is said to have been written by Laozi and probably dates to the second or third century BC. The book is only 5000 characters, but still it's pretty amazing to see it carved into the mountain.

While the temple is about 500 years old, Guo thought that the carving of the Daodejing was only about 100 years old. Here is a slightly closer look at the characters along the lower right hand side of the work.

Like all traditional Chinese writing, it reads from right to left, and from top to bottom. So you begin in the upper right hand corner and read down the column to the bottom. Then you move to the next column to the left, start at the top and read down to the bottom again.

I thought that this dragon in the corner was worth a look.

This is the outer gate that leads to a complex of rooms in the old part of the temple. The red door beyond the gate leads to the cave that was the original dwelling of some Taoist monk centuries ago.

Here is the door to the cave. You can see that the cave is carved right into the mountain.

And this is the tiny cave room. I've been in it before. This time the door was locked so I put the camera through the barred window and snapped the picture. I don't know what it was like for the old Taoist back in the day, but he didn't have too much room spread out. However, a big principle of Taoism is to live in harmony with nature and the old monk would have had plenty of that out here.

Going back into the main temple, here is one of the many side altars with statues of various gods and offerings of fruit and other food and drink laid out on the table. There were about a half-dozen of these in the temple.

Below is a shot of the main altar. The supreme god is in the center with the white beard. You can see the Yin-yang sign above his head. There is also one on his garment. I can never remember his name. Much of this comes from old tales and folk practices. The gods protect people and can offer prosperity, longevity, and even immortality if things are done right.

Below is a shot of the Taoists performing the rites. We got there at about 4:40 pm because we knew that the rite started at 5 pm. There was no one there but the three Taoists, Guo and myself. The rites lasted for about 30 minutes. There was a lot of drumming at different tempos by the guy on the right. The guy in the center used several different chimes and a gong. While they were rhythmically drumming and chiming they were chanting at various different paces. Sometimes the chants were long slow refrains in which they held notes for a long time; at other times the chants were really rapid and they were reading scriptures at a quick pace.

The girl on the end was obviously in training, as she didn't do much chanting and looked lost much of the time. I did like that she had basketball shoes on under her robes. The main priest, on the right, was barefoot even though the floor was a bit cold as it was a windy night on the mountain.

After the rites, the Taoists invited us in for tea. They spoke no English (and I am not confident that they spoke Mandarin either). The two male priests looked to be in the their thirties. The young female Taoist looked to be in her early twenties. All were a bit younger than I had expected. They said that there were five of them living there, but as is often the case, some of them had to go and perform rites at somebody's funeral. They said that overall there are about fifteen different Taoists in the community who can come in and perform the ceremonies. They are held at 5 am and 5 pm every day.

Afterwards I asked Guo if the Taoists believed in the particular gods whose statues were displayed there, and he said that he didn't think that they did. They were Taoists of a more philosophical and literary sort, and they use the rituals to help learn the Taoist texts and to get in touch with heaven and earth. There is another Taoist shrine about one kilometer away that is a "local" shrine - meaning that it is dedicated to a local god recognized in that neighborhood only and that is maybe an older but more superstitious version of Taoism.