MAPPING AND REFRAMING DAOIST ECOLOGICAL THOUGHT IN SACRED LANDSCAPES, HUMAN - NATURE RELATIONS, AND TOURISM: A BIBLIOMETRIC SCOPING AND INTERPRETIVE REVIEW

Abstract

Scholarship linking ecology, sacred landscapes, pilgrimage, and tourism has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, yet Daoist ecological thought remains comparatively under-theorized within this applied conversation. This article maps that emerging conversation and offers a focused Daoist interpretive reading of its core works. Bibliographic records were drawn from Scopus (exported March 2026); after cross-corpus deduplication and a conjunctive keyword filter, a Daoist-relevant analytic set of 595 English-language documents (2005–2025) was assembled. The study combines a descriptive bibliometric scoping layer with a close interpretive reading of a hand-screened set of anchor works, read through five Daoist categories (ziran 自然, wuwei 無為, relationality/ganying 感應, restraint/zhizu 知足, and sacred landscape/dongtian fudi 洞天福地) organized as four tensions. Throughout, bibliometric mapping is treated as a scoping device rather than as the evidentiary core of the argument. The bibliometric picture shows a young, rapidly growing conversation led by philosophy and religious studies venues, in which Daoism is most often discussed comparatively, and its connection to applied tourism scholarship remains thin. The interpretive reading shows that, where the connection exists, Daoist categories offer an alternative vocabulary of nature as relational field rather than resource, attunement rather than control, sacred presence rather than attraction, sufficiency rather than growth. The article contributes a reflexive map of this conversation for Daoist studies, evidence of its underdevelopment, and a Daoist-informed interpretive heuristic. It does not claim that Daoism is inherently ecological, and it is limited to English-language, Scopus-indexed sources.