“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...

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...

Over the years I’ve found myself drawn to stories about immortals. I think this attraction was due to having read Ge Hong’s (葛 洪) fourth-century work Master Who Embraces Simplicity (抱 朴 子, Bao Pu Zi ). In his book, Ge Hong makes credible arguments for the belief and existence of immortals, as well a...

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...