Religion vs Dao: call for a shift in terminology

(Simultaneously published under “Academic Works in Religious Studies“)

Religion vs Dao: call for a shift in terminology

Is the word “religion” satisfactorily able to describe what it purports to? I think not.

We’re not able to agree on a definition for religion. We can list “religions”, but then we run into disagreements. For example, is Confucianism a religion? It teaches ancestor worship, rituals, and veneration of a universal principle “Heaven” that controls human destiny. But the same people you might consider to be most influenced by “Confucianism” will insist that it isn’t a religion, but should rather be considered　儒家思想 “Confucian Thought”.

Politics — by which I mean both the social negotiation of values and ideas, and also governmental affairs — figures strongly in how we use these terms. A king wants a divorce, popularizes the notion of a split between Church and State, and now in the US it’s still considered standard to pretend we can schizophrenically split our existence into our “private religious life” and our “public life” as separate and unrelated domains. Other cultures that didn’t inherit that particular bit of European history may find this kind of split unrealistic. So now in the English language, using the word “religion” implies a semantic tension between “religion” and “secular”, mutually exclusive co-existing aspects of life.

But what if you don’t consider yourself to be split up? What if you feel you’re just one person, with one heart, one mind, and one tongue? You may have a single 道 (“Dao” also spelled “Tao”), a Way that you follow, and it informs your opinions on ethics, politics, society, and life.

People of non-English speaking cultures may simply not experience the religious/secular semantic tension when using words that we translate into English as “religion”. Language is like this: Words are nodes in a net of interrelated concepts, with each word playing a part in defining the meanings of the others. VisualThesaurus.com has a GUI that visualizes language as a network of concepts. What makes translation between languages difficult is that the networks of the two languages around a given word will not always have the same shape. Brot is the German word for bread, but the concepts associated with bread are not the same as those associated with brot. If you try to translate a line of text that makes a pun in English relating bread (the food) with bread (or dough, both slang for money), you’ll run into exactly this kind of problem. Translating religion is just as tricky. Each culture has a different concept, yet we’ve been translating them all as “religion” as if the various concepts could all be mapped onto the same semantic network.

Unlike “religions”, everyone has a Dao. Whether it’s informed by a sacred text, exemplar sage, philosopher, or favorite athlete, we all inherit opinions, values, and practices. We all have beliefs about the world. Our beliefs are the structure in which we develop our values about what’s better or worse (I don’t want to simplify a continuum by calling it Right and Wrong), preferable or better avoided. Once we’ve developed values based on our beliefs, we tell ourselves and others what should be done. Once you have a “should”, you have a Dao — a Way. Everyone thinks their Dao is the best (or else they would follow the one they thought was superior) and everyone who isn’t a sociopath wants to help their friends by teaching them the better Way. Everyone proselytizes.

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Take John, for example. John believes that family togetherness is a good thing, and uses the seasonal ritual of “Thanksgiving Dinner” to bring his family together for a ritual meal. John used to think the best Way to cook a Thanksgiving turkey was by baking it at a high temperature. One year by watching a cooking show, he was initiated into the advanced technique of using the broiler at the very end to make the skin a bit more crispy. Is John tolerant of the turkey-cooking beliefs of others? Of course he is. That doesn’t mean that he thinks all Ways are equally valid, though. John knows that his Way of cooking the turkey is the best, and that’s why he does it the way he does. And if he saw someone he loved on the path of culinary perdition — boiling the bird — he would lovingly proselytize the gospel of the oven and broiler. He naturally hopes to lift his friend out of ignorance and barbarism to the light.

For several years, John had heard that far away in a strange and foreign place, namely the South, there were people who practiced a different Way: deep-frying. He never thought much of it. Those people were different, after all, and had strange and barbaric ways. John knew he was on the right path. And yet…

One year, John’s friend Mary revealed to John that she had converted to deep-frying.

“What, you!?” John asked. “But… You’re not Southern!”

Mary admitted that she too had once thought it to be a strange and foreign Way. One could express interest or even demonstrate sophistication at cocktail parties by pretending to be open-minded about it, but one would never actually practice it themselves. After all, it was the Way of the Southerners, wasn’t it? Happenstance led to Mary dining with a Southern family one year for Thanksgiving, and her perspectives were changed forever. And now she insisted that not only was it not barbaric, but it was not just for Southerners! John was intrigued. He knew Mary to be a reasonable lass, and her adoption of this foreign Way left him puzzled and curious.

John started paying attention to what he heard about deep-fried turkey. He even read recipes and reviews. And then… Fate: Wal-Mart had a turkey deep-fryer set on sale for $10.

John experienced a powerful conversion the moment he tasted the light and crispy skin of the turkey along the outside of perfectly moist and tender meat. It was not at all oily as he had thought it must be. John became a true believer and an adamant proponent of his newly adopted Way. He knew that if his family and friends would just forget about the rumors and just try it for themselves they would receive the same joy and pleasure that he had found in this new Way. He realized that in fact he himself had been the one following a barbaric and uncivilized Way of dry tasteless meat, and he had never known his ignorance until he found something better.

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Would we call this “religion”? No, certainly not, although it clearly has important similarities in form and function. And we can learn valuable lessons by using this example. Using an ostensibly “non-religious” example lets us explore several concepts that are key to the study of religion without the complex baggage that is often associated with those concepts. It allows us to recall that “religions” are human pursuits, and that all human pursuits involve beliefs, values, and opinions that one naturally wants to share with and teach to others.

I propose that while using the term “religion” will either artificially limit the domain of investigation or will lead to objections from readers who think that our use of the term in one or another topic is inappropriate. The usefulness of the term is already limited by the fact that some people consider themselves to have a religion while others don’t. What we study is a kind of thing that everyone has. Beliefs, values, opinions, and teaching are inescapable processes of the human mind. These are the things we study, and to refer to the entire process as a whole, we can use the term Dao, or Way.

We can ask “what Dao are you on?” And they might reply, for example “I’m on the Dao of the Catholic Church,” “I’m on the Dao of the Sage Mu,” or “I’m a lone wolf. I don’t follow nobody’s Dao but my own. I believe that such-and-such, and I value whatcha-ma-call-it, so I encourage people to XYZ….”

Occasionally abandoning the word “religion” allows us to distance our conversation from the semantically associated concepts of “faith,” “ritual,” and other spooky sounding stuff so that we can instead return to a straightforward discussion of what someone “thinks” and “does”. Borrowing the word Dao in this way won’t upset the way it has been traditionally used in Chinese, nor is it a total shock to the English language, which as already appropriated the word for use in the titles of numerous self-help books. The word Dao simply means way or path, and since most cultures are familiar with the metaphor of life as a road or journey, the word Dao is an excellent choice for describing what type of life-road one chooses to walk.

必也正名乎

“We need to straighten out these words, yo.”

– Confucius

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Copyright © 2011 Brendan Newlon

 

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