Writing and order
Later, writing became a way of recording pedigrees of aristocracy and the chronicles of the actions of monarchs, including omens for those actions. Later still, writing had become a more general means of record: for instance, the recording of ritual songs and proverbial stories (the Book of Songs--the Shi Jing), or, in conjunction with systematising methods of divination, the casting of yarrow stalks (the Book of Changes--the Yi Jing). What was later to be called the teaching of scholars (rujiao)--which in foreign languages is called Confucianism--made ritual its central tenet as well as the object of reflection and philosophy.

a number of masters spreading their teachings in the years in which Chinese writing as we now know it was formed. By their time writing had also become a means of reflection. The writings of the masters were reflections on ways of divining invisible forces. They were philosophical treatises addressed to a new class of literate attendants and advisers to the courts of military and aristocratic rulers. Confucius' writings made Rites (Li) the way to keep in order and in mind the hierarchical and patriarchal arrangement of an ideal social world and a reverent relation to the dead. The rites not only of honouring ancestors and of linking families by marriage but also those of greeting and seeing off guests, and of sustaining propriety and obligations that distinguish different social relationships from each other, regulated the imperial court and the world from its human centre.

Evolution of Daoism

Stephan Feuchtwang

Printed talisman and charm. Woodblock figuring Celestial Master Zhang in his Daoist mantle.

Another elaboration of customary rituals into philosophy and orthodoxy later came to be known as Daoism. In this case, the customary rituals turned into a teaching were rites of popular cults to divinities and demons for healing and revelation. Apart from these rituals, but connected to them, Daoism has three discernible sources. One is a metaphysical reflection on ways of knowing and harmonising with the invisible forces of Nature that produced the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. Another is the discipline of observing, divining and drawing upon those forces by shamanic trances and other systems of divination and magic. The earliest part of one of the two oldest Daoist written classics, the Zhuangzi, is probably a reflection on shamanic trances.

The third source and strand of Daoism is composed from rituals and stories of the divinities of popular cults and their magicians. Magicians (fangshi) promised ways of achieving immortality both to the nobility and to ordinary people. One example is the Way of the Celestial Master, whose non-celibate priests lived among ordinary people. They cultivated long life and immortality by fasting, confession and other disciplines including meditation, not simply as self-cultivation but also as a service to a local community. That local community was formed in communal feasts usually associated with offerings to local divinities, revealing their messages through mediums, and healing by hearing confessions of misdeeds. The Celestial Master's Way influenced imperial courts through a written record of its Way, the Classic of Great Peace (Taiping Jing). But it remained close to the popular cults.

The way of the Celestial Master was mixed with elements of Buddhism when it became the official religion of the emperor of the non-Chinese Toba dynasty in northern China from 424-448 CE. Buddhism had been newly introduced from India as an already instituted teaching called the Teaching of the Buddha (fojiao). The Way, probably for the first time, then became known as the Teaching of the Way (daojiao) and its practitioners as masters of the Way (daoshi) just as Buddhist monks were already named masters of Buddhist teaching (foshi). Both teachings were set alongside the longer established teaching of the Confucian classics (rujiao). The supremacy of Daoism among them did not last; the succeeding Toba emperor declared Buddhism the state religion. But Daoism was taken up by the emperor of another of the divided states of China, who was probably the first to order a compilation of Daoist texts, the Numinous Treasure, including revealed scriptures, pharmacopeia, and collections of talismans, completed in 471.

Orthodoxy and control
From then onwards, until the present, state sponsored collections of the texts of the teachings, or religions, of China served two purposes. One was to maintain at court a sacred authority by which a reign was inaugurated and legitimated. The other was the reverse, to establish and control a teaching by state authorisation of the contents of selected writings that were by this act made orthodox, to be treated as a canon. This authorisation was a form of registration alongside the selective recognition and registration of practitioners. In their turn, the selected practitioners from the fifth century onwards denounced the popular cults that had not been transformed by written texts and a canon into a formalized teaching, or religion. They denounced these cults as 'excessive' (yin), by which was meant that people ate meat, enjoyed themselves, and paid out for the festivals resources that could have been available for taxation. 'Excessive' also meant that the oracles of their mediums and the divinities they petitioned were beyond the registered texts.

Stephan Feuchtwang

A figure of the Three Offices, fearsome controllers, from a Heavenly Kings Temple in a 1967 procession of a local territorial guardian god in a town near Taibei.

Orthodoxy was established and maintained not only by compiling canons of various teachings, but also by collecting and issuing court-approved versions of texts that conveyed knowledge of things and events, framing them in catalogues of the holdings in the imperial library. These acts of imperial scholarship were themselves a ritual of reverence and of revelation.