“Healing Tao USA” and the History of Western Spiritual Individualism

Abstract

Daoist practices and concepts of self-cultivation have become increasingly popular in the West in the past decades. Whether these practices, and the organizations that promote them in the West, can even be called “Daoist” is a matter of controversy among scholars and practitioners. This article argues that, in the transnational diffusion of cultural and religious concepts and practices, it is inevitable that they will be transformed as they become embedded in a new social and cultural context. Based on an ethnographic study of “China Dream Trips” organized by Healing Tao USA, one of the most influential popular Daoist organizations in America, we highlight how Daoist identity and practices have been appropriated into a long Euro-American tradition of spiritual individualism, transmuting the ontological core and orientation of the Chinese Daoist tradition in the process. Healing Tao USA, like other proponents of America’s “religion of no religion,” upholds the promise of a new synthesis between Oriental spiritual technologies and Western psychology, freedom and sexual liberation–a holistic culture that can transform the world by transcending the dogmatism of organized religion and the mechanistic materialism of secular culture. From a sociological perspective, however, it appears that “popular American Daoism” may well reproduce and reinforce the cultural structures that it claims to overcome.