the three teachings

there’s an old chinese saying that a person wears a confucian hat, daoist robes and buddhist sandals. it’s a joke about people who mix everything, and it’s also just… an accurate description of how religion in china has worked for about 1,500 years.

if you grew up somewhere where religions are clubs (you’re in one, you’re not in the others), china will scramble that instinct. you’ll walk into a buddhist temple and find a daoist god of wealth in a side hall (our how to read a chinese temple guide helps you tell whose hall is whose). you’ll see a family burn incense to guanyin in the morning and sweep their ancestors’ graves in the afternoon, and nobody thinks that’s a contradiction.

so instead of three separate essays, here’s a map of where the ideas actually live.

the three teachings, mapped

tap a practice to see why it sits where it sits. notice how crowded the middle gets, and how much lands in “folk,” the popular religion of gods, ghosts and ancestors that sits under and around all three.

confucianism: the ethics of showing up for people

confucius (kong qiu) lived from about 551 to 479 bc in the small state of lu, in today’s shandong. he wasn’t a prophet and didn’t claim to be. he was a teacher and would-be government adviser who mostly failed to get the jobs he wanted. his students collected his sayings into the analects, and those short, sometimes cranky lines ended up shaping east asian society more than almost any other book.

the big ideas: ren (humaneness), li (ritual propriety, the idea that doing the right ritual the right way actually shapes who you are) and xiao (filial piety). society works when every relationship, from parent and child to ruler and minister, is carried out well.

is it a religion? honestly, scholars still argue about it. confucius famously steered clear of talking about spirits (“we don’t yet understand life, how can we understand death?”). but there are confucian temples, state sacrifices to confucius went on for some two thousand years, and ancestor rites are deeply religious in feel. the chinese language even has two words for it, rujia (“the school of the ru”, a philosophy) and rujiao (“the teaching of the ru”, closer to a religion). the safest answer is “both, depending who’s asking.”

daoism: go with the grain

daoism starts with two strange, beautiful books. the daodejing, traditionally credited to laozi (a figure whose dates, and whose existence, historians can’t pin down), probably took shape around the 4th century bc. the zhuangzi is funnier and weirder, full of butterfly dreams and a cook who carves an ox without ever dulling his knife because he follows its natural joints.

the core idea is the dao, the nameless “way” everything flows from, and wu wei, effortless non-forcing action. water is soft, but it carves canyons.

then, in the 2nd century ad, zhang daoling founded the way of the celestial masters, and daoism became an organized religion too, with priests, scriptures, rituals and a huge heavenly bureaucracy of gods. the jade emperor, the city gods and the god of wealth all live here, alongside practices for health and long life. that’s the daoism you’ll meet in temples.

buddhism: the import that went native

buddhism came from india along the silk road. tradition says emperor ming of the han dreamed of a golden figure, sent envoys west, and in 68 ad founded the white horse temple in luoyang, named for the horse that carried the scriptures. it’s often called china’s first buddhist temple, and you can still visit it.

at first it was a hard sell. monks shaved their heads and stayed celibate, which looked like an attack on filial piety, since no sons means nobody to feed the ancestors. so chinese buddhism adapted. translators borrowed daoist vocabulary to explain foreign ideas. stories like mulian, a monk who goes to hell to rescue his mother, made buddhism look extremely filial. the bodhisattva avalokiteshvara slowly became guanyin, the gentle, female-presenting figure of mercy you’ll see everywhere.

the most famous fusion is chan, which japan later exported to the world as zen. it traces itself to the legendary indian monk bodhidharma, and to the 7th-century master huineng. its love of paradox and spontaneity, and its suspicion of scripture, owes a lot to zhuangzi. a lot of scholars describe chan as what happens when indian buddhism and chinese daoist sensibility have a kid.

the three teachings at court

for centuries, emperors staged formal debates between buddhists, daoists and confucians, and the rankings shifted with each dynasty. around the new year of 574, after one of these debates, emperor wu of the northern zhou ranked confucianism first, daoism second and buddhism last. that summer he went further and banned both buddhism and daoism, sending monks and priests back to lay life. the tang royal family claimed descent from laozi (surname li) and mostly favored daoism, though empress wu zetian backed buddhism, and in 845 emperor wuzong ran a huge suppression of buddhist monasteries.

then came the synthesis. neo-confucianism, above all zhu xi (1130–1200), absorbed buddhist and daoist metaphysics (principle, li 理, and material force, qi) into a revived confucianism. zhu xi even recommended “quiet sitting,” which looks a lot like meditation. his commentaries on the four books became the basis of the imperial exams from 1313 until the exams ended in 1905.

by the ming, the phrase sanjiao heyi, “the three teachings are one,” was a whole movement. lin zhao’en (1517–1598) founded an actual three-in-one religion, and temples started seating the buddha, laozi and confucius side by side. the hanging temple in shanxi (the cliffside one in the photo up top) has a three teachings hall that does exactly this.

how to behave in a buddhist temple

• step over the threshold, don’t step on it. those raised wooden sills at hall doors are meant to be stepped over.
• incense is optional. many big temples (like beijing’s lama temple) hand out free sticks with your ticket. three sticks, held at forehead height, a small bow, place them in the big burner outside, never inside the hall.
• don’t photograph statues inside halls if there’s a sign, and there often is. outside is usually fine.
• walk clockwise around stupas and altars, especially in tibetan buddhist temples.
• dress modestly-ish: shoulders and knees covered is respectful, though you’ll see plenty of tourists who didn’t get the memo.
• don’t touch monks or nuns, and don’t point your feet at a buddha if you sit down.
• the 1st and 15th of the lunar month are the busiest days. lovely energy, long incense queues. big holidays too — see chinese festivals through the year.

how to behave in a daoist temple

basically the same rules. daoist temples (guan 观 or gong 宫) are often a bit more relaxed and a bit more colorful. you may see priests with their hair in a topknot, which is how you tell them apart from shaved-head buddhist monks. fortune sticks (qiuqian) are common, and if you try it someone may offer to interpret your poem for a small fee. totally optional.

how to behave in a confucian temple

confucian temples (wenmiao or kongmiao) are the quietest of the three, more like a solemn academy than a place of daily prayer. there’s no clergy and usually not much incense. you’ll see stone tablets listing past exam graduates, old cypress trees, and in exam season, students tying red wishing cards near the main hall. bowing is nice, and nobody expects you to do more.

the big one is the temple of confucius in qufu, shandong, his hometown, a unesco site together with the kong family mansion and the cemetery where he’s buried. it’s an easy high-speed train hop from beijing or shanghai. check the train guide.

what this means when you visit

if you’re wondering what people actually believe, as opposed to what the textbooks say, we went digging through the survey data in what do chinese people actually believe?. spoiler: very few people call themselves religious, and lots of people burn incense.

temples in our city guides: beijing, xi’an (the big wild goose pagoda was built for xuanzang’s sutras, brought back from india), chengdu (wenshu monastery’s teahouse is elite) and shanghai (jade buddha temple, plus the city god temple by yu garden).

the vibe check

confucianism tells you how to be a good person among other people. daoism tells you how to stop forcing everything. buddhism tells you why you suffer and how to let go. china mostly decided you don’t have to choose. walk into any temple with that in mind, step over the threshold, and you’ll be more in tune with the place than half the tour groups.

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