AJourney totheWest is the fantastic mythological tale, which rightly occupies a preeminent place amongst the pantheon of classical Chinese literature. Sun Wukong, the Monkey King hero of the tale, was a magical being possessed
of considerable powers. He was also an incorrigible trickster. When he violated the laws of the Heavens, he was thrown into the so-called Crucible of the Eight Trigrams, where Taishang Laojun, a supernatural God, burned him in alchemical oil for 49 days. The supernatural God is none other but Lao Tzu. Ironically, despite such a characterization Lao Tzu himself and his teachings are very much anti-theistic in nature. He laid great emphasis not on supernatural beings in the Heavens but rather on the laws of nature and dedicated his whole life to seeking after the links in the cosmic chain that bound the Heavens and the Land.
Taoism is the only spiritual belief system which is native to China. Its ultimate origins are shrouded in the remote mists of history, but Taoism has always been associated with one man who is Lao Tzu.
Taishang Laojun is a respectful name of Lao Tzu in Taoism, the only Chinese native religion. Of the sites cited by the UNESCO as the World Heritages in China, five are associated with Taoism.
In any Taoist area of China, it is common to see a statue of an old man, with white hair and beard, long ears drooping down towards his shoulders. This is the traditional representation of Lao Tzu the man most closely associated with Taoist belief.
Mirages are caused by the reflection of light. Like wind, rain and lighting they are a natural phenomenon that seem unremarkable to us, living as we do in a world where everything can be explained scientifically. But in ancient times, such phenomena could be understood only in terms of supernatural spirits. They saw the Heavens as a faraway: an incomparably wonderful world, the domain of wandering and various supernatural beings. While fearing and worshipping such supernatural beings people also dreamed themselves of becoming a member of this pantheon one day. But how could this be achieved?
Some said if you prayed reverentially every day facing the Heavens, a supernatural being would come down to the Earth and bring you up to the Heavens; others maintained that by making and eating so-called immortal pills you could become a supernatural being and fly yourself to the Heavens.
For many thousands of years, the Chinese people subscribed to such beliefs and worshipped a whole galaxy of supernatural beings, ghosts and ancestors. Around the middle of the 2nd century BC, a man named Zhang Daoling, came across a book. It was only 5,000 characters long but still Zhang Daoling recognized its all-embracing importance. Zhang, who had been a seventh-rank county magistrate, cherished it as a book of the Heavens, and in his later years, taking this book as the highest holy scripture, founded a sect, to live by the ideas set down in this short book. The book was Tao Te Ching and its author was Lao Tzu, and the sect was named “Tao.”
We can say that the concept of “Tao” lies at the very heart of Lao Tzu’s doctrines, that is to say, all conclusions derive from the idea of “Tao” and all finally are reduced to the idea of “Tao.” The original meaning of the Chinese character “Tao” is “a road or path people walk upon,” the Tao of Lao Tzu is a sublimation and extension of that meaning.
At the very dawn of Taoism, as an organized spiritual belief system, the Taoist master Zhang Daoling gathered together the thoughts about Tao of Lao Tzu, which form the very source of Taoist thought. He also assimilated a wide variety of Chinese traditional folk religious beliefs and the persistent faith of Chinese in supernatural beings into a relatively systematic religion, where Tao was taken as the very essence of Taoism. And as Lao Tzu was the very living incarnation of Tao, then he naturally became the holiest presiding deity of Chinese Taoism.