Stories
the narratives it tells itself
Laozi at the pass.
Disgusted with the state of things, he rode west on an ox to leave China altogether. The keeper of the frontier pass recognised him and refused to raise the gate until he wrote his teaching down. He produced five thousand characters, handed them over, and went through. Nobody knows what happened after that.
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Zhuangzi dreams the butterfly.
Asleep, he was a butterfly wholly; awake, a man. Which dreams which? The story refuses to settle — that refusal is the teaching.
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The useless tree.
A carpenter passes an enormous ancient tree and does not even look at it: the wood rots, the branches twist, it would make a bad boat and a worse coffin. That night the tree appears to him in a dream and points out that every useful tree in the district was cut down young, and asks what exactly he means by useless.
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Cook Ding's knife.
He carves an ox and the whole thing falls apart in time to music. His blade is nineteen years old and still like new, because a good cook changes his knife once a year from cutting and a poor one once a month from hacking, and he stopped using his eyes years ago and lets the blade find the spaces that were already there.
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The old man's horse.
His horse ran away — bad luck, said the neighbours; who knows, said the old man. It came back with a wild horse — good luck; who knows. His son broke his leg riding it — bad luck; who knows. Then the army came for every able-bodied young man in the district, and did not take him.
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Drumming on the pot.
Huizi arrives to pay respects and finds Zhuangzi sitting with his legs out, banging on a tub and singing, his wife dead beside him. Asked how he can do this, he says he wailed like anyone else at first — and then thought about where she had been before she was born, and could not go on treating it as a disaster.
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The covenant at Heming Mountain.
In 142 Lord Lao descended and appointed Zhang Daoling to govern the spirits under a written covenant, and his first act was to abolish the blood sacrifices the old local cults had been extracting from villages. Institutional Taoism dates from that year — five centuries after Laozi, and about a covenant rather than a book.
held by most
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The Yellow Turbans.
The tradition's uncomfortable beginning. The Way of Great Peace and the Five Pecks of Rice were mass movements with clergy, tithes and free hostels for travellers, which treated illness by having the sick write out their faults and confess them — and which raised armies. The Han dynasty came apart fighting them in 184.
⚖ contested within
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The peaches of the Queen Mother.
Xiwangmu keeps an orchard in the Kunlun mountains where the peaches ripen once every three thousand years and confer immortality. Every story about them is a story about someone getting in and taking one — and being caught, and punished, and remaining immortal, because the peach does not care about the paperwork.
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The Zhuangzi.
Thirty-three chapters of stories, jokes and invented dialogues, including several in which Confucius is made to argue the Taoist side. It is funnier and stranger than the Daodejing and has done at least as much work: Chinese landscape painting, most of its poetry and a good deal of Chan Buddhism come out of this book.
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The Tao Te Ching.
Five thousand characters left at the western gate — the Way in eighty-one small chapters.
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The Daozang.
The canon — the 1445 Ming edition alone runs to 1,476 titles across more than five thousand volumes, containing liturgy, alchemy, pharmacology, geography, biography, meditation manuals and blank administrative forms for addressing heaven. Very little of it is read outside the priesthood, and whole sections have never been translated into any Western language.
held by most
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The Classic of Purity and Stillness.
Around four hundred characters on stilling the mind: the Dao has no form and no name, the mind that is quiet lets the spirit clear, and desire is what stirs up the mud. It is recited every morning by Quanzhen clergy and known by heart by a great many laypeople, and it is short enough to say while walking.
held by most
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The Yellow Court Classic.
The body as an inhabited country — each organ with a resident spirit who has a name, a colour, a costume and an address, to be visualised and held in place. It is the foundation of Taoist visualisation practice, and Wang Xizhi's transcription of it is one of the monuments of Chinese calligraphy.
⚖ contested within
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The Seal of the Unity of the Three.
Alchemy written in the vocabulary of the Yijing so that the same verses read as furnace chemistry, as cosmology, and as instructions for a process inside the practitioner's own body. The ambiguity is deliberate, every commentator disagrees, and that is precisely why the tradition required living masters.
⚖ contested within
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The Treatise on Action and Response.
It opens by saying that calamity and blessing have no gate of their own — a person calls them in. Then it lists, concretely, what earns what. Printed and given away free for eight centuries in enormous quantities, read by Confucians and Buddhists as readily as by Taoists, and probably the most widely distributed Chinese religious text after the Daodejing.
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