Taoism: The Enduring Tradition

Taoism: The Enduring Tradition is Russell Kirkland's 2004 study of Taoism as a historical religious tradition in China. Its argument is polemical as well as descriptive: Kirkland holds that the picture of Taoism familiar in the West, built around a philosophy extracted from two early texts and set against an organised religion dismissed as later superstition, bears little resemblance to the tradition as its practitioners lived it, and that the responsibility for this is shared between popularisers and professional sinologists. He traces the lineages, practices, scriptures and institutions in their own terms and over their whole span, and treats the familiar division between philosophical and religious Taoism as an artefact of Western reception rather than a feature of the tradition. It is an academic work and is cited for that corrective.

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