Accounts of Taoism often separate a philosophical Taoism, daojia, from a religious Taoism, daojiao: the first meaning the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi, contemplative and literary; the second the priesthood, the canon, the gods, the rituals and the pursuit of longevity. The distinction is convenient, and it is also contested.
The terms themselves are old. Daojia, the school of the Way, was a bibliographic classification used by Han historians for a set of texts; daojiao, the teaching of the Way, came into use for the organised movements. But the sharp modern division, a pure philosophy later corrupted into superstition, is largely a construction of Western and Japanese scholarship of the last two centuries, and specialists have argued for decades that it distorts the material. The organised tradition treats the Tao Te Ching as scripture and Laozi as a deity; its alchemical and meditative practices are pursued as means to the same union with the Tao that the early texts describe; the personnel and the vocabulary overlap throughout.
The counter-argument is that a difference in kind is real however the boundary is drawn. A Warring States text sceptical of ritual and an ordained priest performing a rite for the dead are doing different things, and readers who come to Taoism through the Tao Te Ching alone are frequently surprised by what the living tradition consists of.
The defensible summary is that there is one tradition with a long philosophical literature and a long ritual practice, that the two have influenced each other continuously, that neither is reducible to the other, and that the two-Taoisms framing is best handled as a scholarly convenience rather than as a fact about the religion.