The Many Faces of Daoism: Modern Reception and Scholarly Perspectives

Over the last two centuries, “Daoism” has been discovered anew, interpreted in new ways, translated, and even reinvented in very different cultural and intellectual settings. The question “What is Daoism?” has been raised in 18th-century European salons and missionary reports from 21st-century feminist workshops, in diasporic temple noticeboards, where handwritten announcements are posted next to photocopied leaflets, in therapists’ consulting rooms, which borrow Daoist cultivation techniques, and so on. The answer is still not clear. It is not easy to define “Daoism” in a way that corresponds to its modern life. Daoism did not enter the modern world as an untouched and intact tradition; it has been and and is continually being formed and re-formed through social, scholarly, translational, and practical encounters, each of which affects the very basis of Daoism.

This Special Issue, entitled “The Modern Reception and Interpretation of Daoism in East Asia and the West: A Comparative Perspective (19th–21st Centuries)”, is a collection of seven articles that deal with the same topic from different angles. The authors reject a single master narrative (be it secularization, conscious or linear modernization, or a simple philosophical abstraction) and, instead, they reveal the multiplex perspectives shaped by everything from translation to migration and diaspora, and from social reform to methodological reflection. The main idea of this volume is: do not treat Daoism as an essence to be excavated but as a field of meaning continually produced through interpretation.

One contribution deals with the question of how Daoism came to be known by Western scholars. Yu Zhang, Xiaolan Zhou, and Jingyi Liu describe the process of the development of “Taoïsme” in 18th- and 19th-century France. They show how missionary reports, Enlightenment debates, and early sinological work contributed to the formation of Daoism as an object of study. The lesson here is that Daoism was not “discovered”; it was constructed based on Christian theological concerns and the comparative categories which were available to European thinkers at the time. The early framing of the subject, however, was such that it privileged philosophical texts—above all, the Daodejing—while ritual life, communal institutions, and other lived practices often remained in the background. We can still find traces of this in current scholarship.

When it comes to the question of how the text is mediated and interpretive choices are made, the work of Xiaoxiao Xin, Pan Xie, and Qinling Wang on Robert Henricks’ English translation of the Guodian Laozi is a good example. Their philological research reveals that the choice of translator represents a commitment not only to a specific notion of textual authority but also to a particular approach to situating early Daoist thought within the broader history of early Chinese intellectual history. The authors assert that translation is not a neutral act; indeed, how Daoist texts are translated into globally available idioms impacts their reception in the modern world and continues the protracted process of academic knowledge development. Consequently, reception did not end in the 19th century but instead is revisited each time a text is translated, commented upon in annotations, or presented in a classroom.

From the perspective of translation studies, Filippo Costantini’s paper “Dao in Transition: Comparative Reflections on Laozi’s Italian Translations in the Interwar Period” sheds light on the divergences and concurrences that shaped the reception of Daoism in Europe, particularly in terms of how intercultural engagement with non-Western philosophies in the early 20th century was simultaneously molded by ideology and academic systemization. Through a comparative analysis of Laozi’s interpretations in two distinct Italian translations from the 1920s—one produced by the esotericist Julius Evola and another by the sinologist Alberto Castellani—Costantini argues that, on one hand, the reception of Daoism in Italy was shaped by the proliferation of scholarly sinology and the rise of international esoteric currents of thought; on the other hand, it is discussed how the esotericist Evola borrowed extensively from a German translation to build his transcendental individualism in which the Dao functions as a dialectical concept and the sage as an “Absolute I”, whereas the sinologist Castellani aimed at philological rigor by translating directly from Classical Chinese. Comparing Evola’s and Castellani’s interpretations of the notions of Dao and the sage, Costantini concludes that, among other aspects, the text functioned both as a mirror for ideological positions and as a window for scholarly study.

One article focuses on East Asian and diasporic formations where Daoism has been reassembled under the influence of migration, colonial governance, and the rise of the new urban order. In this Special Issue, Qi Zhu and Minzhi Zhu consider how Daoist institutions in Singapore between the 1880s and the 1930s changed with over time. Rituals were revised, moral campaigns became integrated with urban development projects, and worship networks evolved across regions through transregional contact and movement. Their findings show that though Daoist practice in the diaspora could vary dramatically from that of the mainland, it represented not so much a diluted tradition but more a living and transformative religion.

A particularly relevant contribution to contemporary discussions of affect, technology, and spirituality is the article by Leishu Wang, who interprets the growing experience of affective alienation as being closely tied to technologically mediated forms of life, where one’s emotional experience is increasingly shaped by abstraction, optimization, and external regulation rather than by lived immediacy and felt meaning. These reflections also touch on broader issues in contemporary cognitive science, where standardized tests and laboratory methods, while useful, often reflect culturally specific symbolic frameworks rather than cognition as it is actually lived, and emphasize the importance of engaging with alternative philosophical traditions in a globalized context.

Leishu Wang’s discussion connects closely with Paul D’Ambrosio’s article, “A Daoist-Inspired Critique of AI’s Promises”. D’Ambrosio points out that issues arising from AI cannot be solved by data alone. Algorithmic bias is only part of the problem; the bigger challenge comes from the huge amount of messy data that algorithms rely on, which reflects patterns in communication rather than the intentions of their designers. Daoist ideas do not reject looking for patterns or making predictions, but they treat them as loose guides rather than strict models. They emphasize the acceptance of complexity and uncertainty, letting go of rigid desires, reducing stress, and not interfering unnecessarily with natural processes. This perspective questions approaches that try to control or predict the world in ways that ignore context and the unpredictability of life.

In this Special Issue, the article by Jing Wei and Lifang Zhu about the motif of “women’s weaving” in Daoism and Christianity during Eurasia’s Middle Ages is also an important contribution from a comparative perspective. Despite not belonging to the same time period as the monograph’s central theme, the authors successfully demonstrate how gendered imagery translates across religions. The inclusion of this longue durée study reveals the editor’s commitment to long-term history and shows how historical texts and perspectives of past eras can inform contemporary comparative studies. The authors demonstrate that while the concept of “women’s weaving” became sacralized in both traditions, Daoism framed women’s textile work as a proactive method of spiritual development within a cosmological system that affirmed an immanent Dao, whereas Christianity characterized it as a moral practice of obedience in relation to a transcendent creator God and the Incarnation. According to the authors, these divergent understandings arise from different foundational cosmological concepts, understandings of the human body, and epistemologies of salvation, thus suggesting that the sanctification of women’s gendered roles functions as a mirror of diverging civilizations.

Taken together, the seven articles conceive Daoism not as something stable and unchangeable but as something that is continually being reassembled through reception, interpretation, and practice. The authors do not tell a neat or linear story of modernization, but, rather, they follow the various, often intersecting trajectories that are influenced by translation, diaspora, scholarly decision-making, and lived experience. Thus, Daoism may no longer be a fixed object but still is a moving target, a changing field of meaning negotiated by people of different cultures and methodologies.

In a way, this Special Issue is representative of the larger study of religious trends—plurality, reflexivity, and the recognition of historical contingency. If reception is constitutive, where might future work be especially fertile? One promising venue is the philosophical encounter between Daoism and European thought. The aim should not be to combine one into the other but to attend to genuine differences: How, for instance, does Daoist attention to complementary opposites and ongoing transformation (yin–yang) differ from the synthetic dialectics associated with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel? How did ideas like wu wei (non-forcing) or Daoist cosmology resonate with European critiques of alienation, instrumental reason, or state authority in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? These questions do not subsume Daoism into a European framework; rather, they reveal how its distinct metaphysics have been selectively received and redeployed during intellectual crises. Often, the most generative receptions are not acts of assimilation but confrontations that expose the receiver’s blind spots.

A few methodological takeaways emerge from the collection. First, reception is a productive analytic for tracking Daoism’s modern transformations because it redirects attention away from essentializing definitions. Second, the interdisciplinary character of contemporary Daoist studies is unmistakable here: history, philology, philosophy, and comparative religion all supply indispensable lenses. Finally, comparative work—whether East/West, premodern/modern, or Daoism/other traditions—proves valuable for situating Daoism within broader intellectual networks rather than isolating it.

Looking ahead, several directions seem ripe for future work. More research on diasporic and transregional contexts will deepen our sense of Daoism’s global presence. Continued scrutiny of translation and terminology is crucial as Daoist texts circulate through digital platforms and popular media. Interdisciplinary conversations with psychology, ecology, gender studies, and the medical humanities can further illuminate how Daoist thought and practice resonate in contemporary life. Comparative approaches that resist binary oppositions will help place Daoism within webs of exchange rather than on isolated islands. By assembling historical, philological, philosophical, and comparative perspectives, this Special Issue mirrors larger methodological shifts in the study of religion: toward plurality, reflexivity, and an appreciation of historical contingency. It aims to prompt ongoing reflection on how Daoism has been—and continues to be—interpreted, and how reception itself functions as a creative scholarly act shaping both our understanding of Daoism and the evolving field of Daoist studies.