Is Daoism a religion or a philosophy?

Most English-language introductions divide Daoism into two: daojia, the philosophy of the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, and daojiao, the organised religion with priests and gods. Readers are then told the first is the pure original and the second a later accretion. That story is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western construction.

Louis Komjathy states it flatly: the division is "a modern Western fiction, which reflects colonialist and missionary agendas," and treating it as real "should be taken, ipso facto, as indicative of ignorance concerning Daoism." Kristofer Schipper made a related point earlier, and the split is now widely described in the field as sinological dogma rather than as description.

What is true is that Daoism contains both philosophical writing and religious practice, as most large traditions do. Christianity has Aquinas and it has Sunday services. Nobody suggests the theology is the authentic Christianity and the liturgy a corruption of it.

The Daozang — the Daoist canon, some 1,400 texts — makes no such separation. It holds cosmological treatises, ritual manuals, alchemical instructions, and hagiographies of immortals, filed together because the tradition regarded them as one body of knowledge.

So: if you want the Daodejing without the temples, you can read it that way, and people have for a long time. Just do not mistake that reading for the tradition. It is a selection from it.