At first, Buddhism allied itself closely with Taoism to gain a foothold in China and borrowed from it. But in later centuries it was the Taoists who borrowed from Buddhism! Taoism was never a religion, it was a set of beliefs and doctrines left behind by a master and “preserved in a corpus of literature”. They got the idea of a ‘religion’ from Buddhists and also borrowed the idea of making statues and images from the latter.

via How Tao-before-Mao copied Buddhism- Hindustan Times.