A typical course for a would-be Buddhist was to study Confucianism first, switching later to Taoism, and finally settling in Buddhism. This pattern is a process of spiritual evolution typically found in the careers of Chinese Buddhists throughout all eras. Tao-sheng was no exception; he, too, passed through the secular stages of training (though they were relatively brief in his case) to arrive at Buddhism. …

As religious practices became more diversified with the introduction of Buddhism, it became an accepted idea that the way (Tao), which is one by nature, can be arrived at via different paths. This view became a fundamental proposition for Tao-sheng’s contemporaries, repeated in their writings as it had been formulated earlier in the I Ching: “[In the world] there are many different roads but the destination is the same.”