Taiping Jing 太平經: A Source for the Institutionalization of Religious Daoism

Abstract

During the first centuries of our age, the decadence of the Han government contributed to a society receptive to salvific ideas and in turn, favored the advent of millenialist movements. These organizations, with its values well rotted in Daoist cosmology, would develop a new discourse around the ideas of moral and social responsibility, would install a personified source of authority in the figure of the master and would propose a critical alternative to the prevailing Confucian orthodoxy. In this paper I analyze the role of the Taiping Jing «The Scripture on Great Peace» as the textual source of authority for the aforementioned processes and its importance to unite and institutionalize the Daoist movement to allow it become what some authors would label as «religious Daoism».