The Clash Between Daoists, Buddhists, and Modern Humanists
Comparing these countercultural and mainstream philosophies
Daoism shares with early Buddhism an elitist disdain for worldly egoism. Both Eastern philosophies are countercultural, but they filter the prophetic perspective through ancient Chinese and Indian mindsets.
For instance, the Dao De Jing speaks dismissively of “the masses”: “Highest good is like water: water benefits the things of the world and does not contend. Dwell in places that the masses of men despise.” And “the sage desires not to desire and does not value goods hard to come by; he learns not to learn and redeems the errors of the masses.”
Similarly, the early Buddhist text, the Dhammapada, says, “Follow not the vulgar way; live not in heedlessness; hold not false views; linger not long in worldly existence…Come! Behold this world, which is like a decorated royal chariot. Here fools flounder, but the wise have no attachment to it.”
Examples could be greatly multiplied, but the point is that these are both Eastern Axial Age expressions of the older shamanic function, as Thomas McEvilley implies in The Shape of Ancient Thought. In the broadest sense, shamans were societies’ first respected outsiders, emerging as they did in the Upper Paleolithic, as shown in early…
