From www.science.org.au: “No one likes the thought of growing old. Despite our many human endeavors to escape or delay the process of aging, it seems to be an inevitable part of life.

But … why? Why do living things gradually fall apart when they grow older?

There is a word for it: senescence is t...

天 文 錄
Tian Wen Lu

Translation Copyright © 2014 by Stuart Alve Olson. From the Chinese book Non Action Tranquil Sitting Methods (無為靜坐法, Wu Wei Jing Zuo Fa) compiled by Master Xu Zhenru (徐真如. Xu Zhenru). Derived from the work compiled by Hunyizi (混一子).  Published and printed by Zhen Shan Mei Book Com...

This overview provides some explanation and history on the Yellow Court Scripture so that students will have some idea of the goal for learning it. The reason for practicing these teachings is to become an immortal, so it is important to understand what immortality means to a Daoist.

In the term “I...

This may sound like a contrary statement at first, but devoting yourself to single-mindedness about meditation can be unwholesome. Such a mindset doesn’t take into account the world as a whole. Normally, we are in a state of thinking, “I want this but I don’t want that.” All day long we make decisio...

Sitting in meditation as done in Zuo Wang (Sitting and Forgetting) there’s really little to depend upon. I think this is why most people acquire real doubts about practicing meditation. We can go to many types of workshops and seminars to learn various things that seem to have some aspect of a tangi...

In Taoism, life and death, or mortality and immortality, are one and the same. Mortality is immortality and immortality is mortality, just as life is death and death is life.

Taiji Symbol

In the Taiji (Yin-Yang) symbol it can be seen that death (the small dark circle) exists within life (the large...

For a long time now I’ve been wanting to tell this Taoist story about a young girl who wanted to learn Taoist magic and become an immortaless. It really has good advice about self-cultivation of Taoism and goes like this:

In the province of Sichuan there was a very rich man, who had a young daughte...

Originating sometime during the Tang dynasty in Shanxi province, this story is about an elderly man who sold herbal medicines in the marketplace of his village. Since no one in the village knew his name, they just called him the Old Herb Seller.

Wang Yu, a rich man in the village, was reserved, kin...

During my last talk in the membership, I spoke a little on Wei Wu Wei, the Taoist idea of “active non-action,” or possibly better said, “active non-calculation.” However one wishes to translate this term, the concept of “doing nothing” always comes to mind, or as we might want to state it, “actively...

“Hold on to being and keep to non-being” is an important verse in the Tao De Jing. The meaning is quite complex and can apply to various situations. But to help illustrate one of the meanings I will tell you an old story about a monk and a female benefactor.

There was once an old woman who took car...