The Three Teachings: Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism in Imperial China

For most of the imperial era, the educated Chinese described their inherited religious and philosophical traditions as the “three teachings” (sanjiao 三教): the teaching of the Confucians (ru jiao), the teaching of the Daoists (dao jiao), and the teaching of the Buddha (fo jiao). The phrase was already current by the sixth century CE, and it captured a basic fact of the religious life of imperial China: that three very different traditions coexisted within a single culture, addressed overlapping but distinct questions, competed for patronage and recruitment, and yet over many centuries found ways to share vocabulary, borrow techniques, and form a common intellectual world. None of the three was ever dominant in the way that, say, the Catholic Church was dominant in medieval Europe, and the syncretic Chinese culture of the late imperial period was in some sense the product of their long coexistence.

This page treats the three teachings in depth. The first section examines Confucianism — its origins, its classical texts, and its development through the Han, Song, and late imperial period. The second introduces Daoism — the legendary Lao Tzu, the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi, and the religious movement of the Celestial Masters and the organized Daoist church. The third examines Buddhism, the foreign religion that became thoroughly Chinese. The fourth section traces the long process of the merging of the three teachings into a common intellectual and religious culture. The larger frame is set by the overview of Chinese philosophy and religion, the state cult and imperial ideology place the three teachings in their political context, and the folk religion and practice address the religious world of the village and the household that the three teachings did not quite contain.

Confucianism: The Teaching of the Sages

Confucianism is, in origin, a teaching about how to live and how to govern, transmitted by a tradition of scholars who traced their lineage back to the sage Kongzi (Confucius, 551–479 BCE). Confucius himself did not claim to be an innovator; he described himself as a transmitter of the rites (li) and the moral order of the early Zhou. The Confucian teaching centered on the cultivation of the moral self, the practice of ritual propriety in everyday life, the maintenance of proper relations within the family and the polity, and the rectification of the moral order through the example of the cultivated person and the virtuous ruler.

The Classical Canon

The Confucian tradition in its imperial form rested on a canon of classical texts (jing). The traditional Five Classics (wu jing) were the Book of Changes (Yijing, later central to the Neo-Confucian metaphysics), the Book of Documents (Shang shu), the Book of Odes (Shijing), the Book of Rites (Liji), and the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu) with its commentary the Zuo Zhuan. By the Song, the canon had been expanded to the Four Books (si shu) — the Great Learning (Daxue), the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong), the Analects (Lunyu), and the Mencius (Mengzi) — and the synthesis of Zhu Xi (1130–1200), which made these Four Books the foundation of the curriculum, became the basis of the state orthodoxy for the rest of the imperial period.

The Confucian classics were read, memorized, and recited in schools across the empire. They were also commented on, in a tradition of exegesis that produced a vast scholarly literature. The imperial examination system, which selected officials on the basis of their mastery of the canon, made the classics the most important texts in imperial China: the most printed, the most studied, the most memorized, the most glossed, and the most ideologically charged. By the late imperial period, the most common book in the empire (after the almanac and the day book) was a printed edition of the Four Books with Zhu Xi’s commentary.

The Confucian Philosophical Tradition

The Confucian tradition, while it centered on the classics, also produced a long line of philosophers. The two most important early interpreters were Mencius (Mengzi, c. 372–289 BCE) and Xunzi (c. 313–238 BCE). Mencius developed the doctrine of the four beginnings (si duan) — the incipient moral feelings of compassion, shame, modesty, and the sense of right and wrong — and argued that human nature is fundamentally good, though it can be corrupted by bad environment and bad teaching. Xunzi, by contrast, argued that human nature is fundamentally bad, and that the cultivation of moral order requires the deliberate shaping of the self through ritual, learning, and the example of the sages.

In the medieval period, the most influential Confucian thinkers were Han Yu (768–824) and Li Ao (d. c. 844), who revived the Mencian tradition in response to the Buddhist and Daoist challenge, and the Song Neo-Confucians, who produced a comprehensive synthesis of Confucian ethics, Buddhist and Daoist metaphysics, and the inherited classical tradition. The most important of the Neo-Confucians were Zhou Dunyi (1017–1073), the brothers Cheng Hao (1032–1085) and Cheng Yi (1033–1107), Zhu Xi (1130–1200), and Lu Jiuyuan (1139–1193), with the latter splitting the school into the rationalist Cheng-Zhu tradition and the idealist Lu-Wang tradition. The Ming saw the development of the Wang Yangming school (Wang Shouren, 1472–1529), which emphasized the innate moral knowledge of the mind and the unity of knowledge and action.

Daoism: The Teaching of the Way

Daoism is, in origin, a teaching about how to align the human with the natural, transmitted in a tradition of texts and practices that included the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi, the texts of the religious Daoist church, and a vast repertoire of meditation, alchemy, and ritual. The legendary founder of the tradition was Lao Tzu, a figure of the sixth century BCE credited with the Dao De Jing and presented in some traditions as a contemporary of Confucius. The historical Lao Tzu, if he existed, is unknown; the Dao De Jing in its received form is a product of the Warring States period (c. fourth century BCE), and the Zhuangzi is a layered work of the fourth through second centuries BCE.

Philosophical Daoism

The Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi are not religious texts in the ordinary sense. They are philosophical and literary works that develop a distinctive vision of the natural order and the proper relation of the human to it. The central concepts are the Dao (the Way), de (the virtue or power of the Way), wu wei (non-action or non-coercive action), ziran (spontaneity or self-so-ness), and the recurrent imagery of water, the female, the infant, the uncarved block, and the valley. The Zhuangzi in particular is a work of great literary brilliance, full of parables, paradoxes, and philosophical jokes, that has been read for two thousand years as a kind of Daoist scripture.

The “philosophical Daoism” of the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi had a long influence on Chinese literature, art, and political thought. The poets of the Tang and Song drew on it. The painters of the literati tradition drew on it. The political theorists of every era returned to it for the critique of artificial government and the praise of simple rule. The Daoist sensibility — the lightness, the distrust of artifice, the love of the natural — is one of the most distinctive features of Chinese culture.

Religious Daoism

The Daoist religion (dao jiao) is a different phenomenon. It emerged in the second century CE, in the wake of the collapse of the Han, as a movement of popular religious organization, messianic prophecy, and healing ritual. The first Daoist church, the Celestial Masters (Tianshi) movement, was founded by Zhang Daoling in Sichuan around 142 CE, and the movement spread rapidly through the north and northwest in the early third century. The early Celestial Masters’ church organized a theocratic state in Hanzhong under the rule of Zhang Lu, which was eventually conquered by Cao Cao in 215 CE.

The religious Daoist tradition produced a vast institutional structure of clergy, scripture, and ritual. The Daoist canon (Dao zang) was edited into its modern form during the Ming and contains hundreds of texts: philosophical treatises, meditation manuals, liturgical prescriptions, hagiographies of the immortals, and alchemical recipes for the elixir of immortality. The Daoist priests performed rituals at temples, in private homes, and at the imperial court, including the jiao (offering) and the chai (purification and retreat). They diagnosed illness and misfortune by reading the I Ching and the body, and they wrote talismans (fu) to be pasted on walls and doors.

The Daoist religion had a complex and sometimes difficult relationship with the imperial state. The Tang emperors claimed descent from Lao Tzu and patronized the Daoist church; the Song, Yuan, and Ming maintained Daoist temples at the capital; but the Daoist church was also the object of periodic suppression, most spectacularly in the Yuan persecution of 1255 and 1281, when certain Daoist texts and rituals were banned and the Daoist clergy was forced to give up some of its most important scriptures. The late imperial Daoist church was a relatively small but persistent presence in Chinese religious life, with a particularly strong following in parts of the south and the southeast.

Buddhism: The Teaching of the Buddha

Buddhism entered China from the Buddhist world of Central and South Asia, beginning in the first century CE. The religion was at first foreign, and it was at first treated as a kind of exotic Daoist cult, identified with the immortality seekers of the Daoists and the yin-yang specialists. It was the object of several major persecutions, including those of 166 CE under the Han, 446 CE under the Northern Wei, and most spectacularly 845 CE under the Tang emperor Wuzong. Between and around these persecutions, Chinese Buddhism grew into one of the great religious civilizations of the pre-modern world.

The Chinese Schools of Buddhism

The Chinese Buddhist tradition is conventionally divided into a number of schools, each with its own doctrinal emphasis and lineage of patriarchs. The Tiantai school, founded by Zhiyi (538–597), systematized a single comprehensive teaching around the Lotus Sutra and the practice of chan meditation. The Huayan school, with its sophisticated philosophy of interpenetrating particulars, was systematized by Fazang (643–712). The Faxiang (Yogacara) school, the most philosophically rigorous, was the Chinese form of the Indian Yogacara tradition. The Chan (Zen) school, with its anti-textual, anti-ritual iconoclasm, its emphasis on direct mind-to-mind transmission, and its literary art of the gong an (in Japanese, koan), became the most distinctive Chinese contribution to world Buddhism. Pure Land Buddhism, with its devotional practice of calling on the Buddha Amitabha (nienfo or nianfo), grew in parallel with Chan and was, by the late Tang, the most popular form of Buddhism among the laity.

The Chinese Buddhist tradition also produced a vast literature of commentaries, histories, hagiographies, and devotional works. The Chinese Buddhist canon (Da zang jing) is one of the largest bodies of religious literature in the world, with more than 2,000 individual texts in more than 10,000 juan (fascicles). The printing of the canon, in particular the Korean Tripitaka (the Jingjin Tripiṭaka) of the thirteenth century and the Ming and Qing editions, was one of the great publishing projects of the imperial era.

Buddhism in the Late Imperial Period

By the late imperial period, the Chinese Buddhist tradition had settled into a pattern that endured to the modern period. The Chan and Pure Land traditions dominated the monastic world; the Vinaya (monastic discipline) tradition provided the institutional framework of the monasteries; and the great public monasteries, supported by imperial patronage and by donations from the faithful, were the most visible Buddhist institutions in the empire. Buddhist lay life included a wide range of practices: the chanting of sutras, the invocation of the Buddha’s name, the support of monasteries, the release of animals, the making of donations, the participation in festivals, and the practice of meditation.

Buddhism was also, by the late imperial period, deeply integrated with the other two teachings. Buddhist monks and Daoist priests often served the same communities; the Buddhist and Daoist clergy were sometimes confused in popular speech (the term seng dao, “monk and priest,” is a single phrase); and the great festivals of the Buddhist calendar — the Buddha’s birthday, the Ullambana festival, the anniversary of the death of the founder of a particular monastery — were public events in the religious life of the community.

The Merging of the Three Teachings

The most distinctive feature of the Chinese religious tradition, in the long run, was the merging of the three teachings into a common intellectual and religious culture. The process began early. The Daodejing and the Zhuangzi were read in Buddhist monasteries; Buddhist translators used Daoist vocabulary to render Sanskrit terms; the Confucian scholars of the Wei and Jin used the I Ching and the Daodejing to elaborate a metaphysical framework that the classical Confucians had lacked. By the late medieval period, the three teachings were already a single, internally differentiated, religious and intellectual culture.

The Confucianization of the Three Teachings

The Confucian state, especially after the decision of the Han emperor Wu to make Confucianism the state orthodoxy, had a powerful interest in absorbing the other two teachings. The imperial state maintained a system of registration and licensing for Buddhist and Daoist clergy; it imposed limits on the number of monasteries and on the ordination of monks and nuns; and it required that Buddhist and Daoist clergy be subject to the same general laws of the empire. The Confucian state also patronized Buddhist and Daoist ritual, especially the great services for the dead, the imperial prayers for rain, and the rituals for the salvation of the empire at moments of crisis.

The Confucian scholar-official, for his part, was expected to be broadly educated in the three teachings, to read the Buddhist sutras and the Daoist classics, to appreciate the value of meditation and the contemplative life, and to integrate the best of the three teachings into his own moral and intellectual formation. The ideal Confucian of the late imperial period was not a sectarian; he was a cultivated man (junzi) who knew the three teachings and who could use the resources of all of them in the service of moral and political life.

The Popular Synthesis

The popular religious life of the Chinese village was, in some sense, the practical realization of the syncretic ideal. The village temple housed statues of the Buddha, the Laozi, the City God, the Earth God, the God of Wealth, and the Goddess of Mercy, with the family tablets of the lineages on the back wall. The same village might celebrate the Buddhist Ullambana, the Daoist Double Ninth, the Confucian Qingming, and the local festival of the City God in the course of a single year. The syncretic culture was not, in this sense, the product of a deliberate program of religious unity; it was the way that Chinese religion was actually lived, by the elite and the common people alike.