50 Fun Facts About Taoism

What does the Chinese word 'Tao' (Dao) most literally mean?

Way or path: it is the everyday Chinese word for a road, and every ancient school preached a Way of its own; the Tao Te Ching was the first to use the word for the origin of everything that exists.

What does the name Laozi, the legendary author of the Tao Te Ching, literally mean?

Old Master is the usual reading, a title of respect rather than a personal name. Legend takes it literally: his mother is said to have carried him for decades, so that he was born already white-haired.

In legend, who persuaded Laozi to write down his teachings when he quit his court post and left China?

A border official, the keeper of the pass known in the legend as Yin Xi, begged the departing sage for a book; Laozi wrote one in two parts, then went on his way and was never heard of again.

What is the personal name traditional accounts give to Laozi?

Li Er: one legend explains the surname by having him born at the foot of a plum tree, li in Chinese, and centuries later a ruling house with the same family name claimed him as its ancestor.

Where, in the Tao Te Ching's original Chinese, does a journey of a thousand miles begin?

Beneath your feet: the familiar 'single step' is a free translation. The verse, which also has a tree too wide to embrace growing from a tiny shoot, is advice to put things in order before disorder begins.

The oldest known passages of the Tao Te Ching, buried around 300 BCE and unearthed in 1993, were written on what?

Bamboo strips: 71 of them, from a tomb at Guodian, carry sayings found in 31 of the book's chapters but arranged differently, which some scholars read as a sign that the text was still taking shape.

Which invention is thought to have come from Chinese alchemists' search for an elixir of immortality?

Gunpowder: a ninth-century Taoist text warns that heating sulphur and saltpetre with honey had burned experimenters' hands and faces, and even brought down the house they were working in.

In the Zhuangzi's most famous passage, Zhuang Zhou wakes unsure whether he had dreamed of being what?

A butterfly: on waking he cannot tell whether he is a man who dreamed he was an insect or an insect now dreaming it is a man, and the passage names that slide 'the transformation of things'.

Refusing high office, Zhuang Zhou said he would rather be which animal, alive and dragging its tail in the mud?

A tortoise: the king who wanted him kept a sacred one, dead for three thousand years, wrapped up in his temple, and Zhuang Zhou asked the envoys whether it would not sooner be alive in the mud.

What is the Taoist ethical concept of 'wu wei' usually translated as?

Effortless action or non-action is the Tao Te Ching's advice to rulers above all: the best of them do so little forcing that when the work is done, the people say they did it all themselves.

Which element do ancient Taoist texts use as their favourite image of wu wei?

Water: the Tao Te Ching says nothing in the world is softer or weaker, yet nothing is better at wearing down what is hard and strong, and it settles without a struggle in the low places everyone else shuns.

Which storybook bear did a popular 1982 book hold up as the model of the Taoist 'uncarved block'?

Winnie-the-Pooh: Benjamin Hoff's The Tao of Pooh notes that pu, the Chinese for the uncarved block, sounds much like the bear's name, and argues that he gets things right by not trying while Owl and Rabbit overcomplicate everything.

What are Taoism's 'Three Treasures' or 'Three Jewels' of virtue?

Compassion, moderation and humility come from chapter 67 of the Tao Te Ching, which turns each on its head: the gentle can afford to be brave, the frugal to be generous, and those who never push ahead end up leading.

What is 'De' (Te), the second word in the title Tao Te Ching, usually translated as?

Virtue or power here means the potency every being draws from the Tao rather than good behaviour, and the oldest complete manuscripts even put the half of the book that opens with this word first.

In yin-yang thought, which of these belongs to yin rather than to yang?

The moon: the two words first meant the shady and the sunny side of a hill, so dark, cool, moonlit things fell to yin and bright, hot, sunlit ones to yang.

Which country's national flag has a red-and-blue yin-yang symbol at its centre?

South Korea: Korea had no national flag at all until the 1880s, when treaty talks with other countries called for one, and its designers reached for an old symbol, known in Korean as the taegeuk.

Laozi and Zhuangzi never called themselves Taoists, so historians of which dynasty coined the label 'Taoist school'?

The Han: around 100 BCE a court historian sorted the old thinkers into six schools and invented the 'school of the Tao' for books whose authors had never seen themselves as a movement.

Who reportedly saw a vision of Laozi in 142 CE and founded the first organised Taoist religion?

Zhang Daoling took the title Celestial Master and handed it down to his son and grandson. His priests treated sickness as the price of wrongdoing, to be cured by sending the spirits a written confession.

The early Celestial Masters movement was popularly named after which levy it charged its members?

Five pecks of rice from its members helped support a self-governing religious state in western China, where the priests were the government.

Which late-Han uprising was raised in 184 CE by a Taoist faith healer and his Great Peace sect?

The Yellow Turban Rebellion, named for its fighters' headscarves, was broken within a year or so, but the generals who crushed it kept their armies and carved the empire into the Three Kingdoms.

Which warlord officially recognised the Celestial Masters school in 215 CE?

Cao Cao took the sect's surrender, gave its leader a title and married one of his own sons to the leader's daughter; resettling the followers across the north then carried their religion all over China.

Which red mineral was the prized ingredient of Taoist alchemists' elixirs?

Cinnabar turns into liquid mercury when heated and can be turned back into red powder, a change the alchemists prized; elixirs made with it are blamed for the deaths of several Chinese emperors.

The emperors of which dynasty claimed Laozi as their ancestor and gave Taoism official favour?

The Tang founder declared the old sage his own forefather, and his heirs wrote the claim into the state: for a time men sitting the civil service examinations could be tested on Taoist scriptures.

What is the Daozang?

The Taoist canon of scriptures was printed in 1445 and then grew so rare that by the 1920s only a handful of sets survived; photographing the copy kept in a Beijing monastery in 1926 saved it.

Who founded the Complete Perfection school of Taoism in 12th-century Shandong?

Wang Chongyang is said to have dug himself a grave, named it the Tomb of the Living Dead and meditated in it for three years; the order he then founded housed its clergy in monasteries on the Buddhist model.

Which conqueror summoned the elderly Taoist master Qiu Chuji across Asia in the 1220s to ask about living for ever?

Genghis Khan got a blunt answer after the old man's long journey: there are ways of protecting life, but no elixir that will prolong it. He thanked the monk for his candour and freed his sect from taxes.

What are the two main sects of later Taoism, one focused on spells and ritual, the other on inner alchemy?

Zhengyi and Quanzhen divide the clergy between them, and only Quanzhen fits the picture of the Taoist monk, celibate and cloistered: Zhengyi priests marry, live at home and go out to perform rituals.

Who are the Three Pure Ones?

The highest gods of the Taoist pantheon rule one heaven each, and the third is known as the Supreme Lord Lao: believers hold that the author of the Tao Te Ching was one of his appearances on earth.

Li Tieguai, Zhongli Quan and Lan Caihe belong to which famous band of Taoist legend?

The Eight Immortals are a mixed company, among them a woman, a beggar with an iron crutch, a flute player and an emperor's kinsman, who never met in life and were brought together only by later artists and storytellers.

What is a 'xian' in Taoism?

An immortal being of this kind is made, not born: a xian starts as an ordinary mortal who earns the state through breathing exercises and strict diets, and only appears to die.

Which range in Hubei is the Taoist counterpart to the Buddhist Shaolin Monastery and famed for tai chi?

Wudang owes its palaces to the Ming emperor Yongle, who claimed the mountain's warrior god as his protector and covered its slopes with temples in one vast building campaign in the early 1400s.

Which legendary Taoist hermit did early tai chi masters credit with inventing the art?

Zhang Sanfeng, the legend says, devised it after watching a snake outlast an attacking bird by yielding and then striking; historians find no evidence for the tale, and some doubt he ever lived.

What are the 'Three Treasures' of the body in Taoist inner alchemy?

Jing, qi and shen, or essence, breath and spirit, are worked on in that order: the adept sets out to refine essence into breath, breath into spirit, and spirit back into the Tao.

What is the traditional title, meaning 'master of the Tao', reserved for ordained Taoist clergy?

Daoshi usually learn the craft at home rather than in a cloister: the office of the priest who leads a community's rituals is typically handed down within families, from one generation to the next.

Since the fifth century, Taoist scriptures have been sorted into three great divisions known as what?

The Three Caverns each gathered the scriptures of one early school; the scheme is traditionally credited to the master Lu Xiujing, and it later set the ladder of ranks for ordaining priests as well.

Tai chi takes its name from taiji, a term of Chinese cosmology usually translated as what?

The supreme ultimate is the undivided whole from which yin and yang separate, so the slow exercise in the park is, in full, 'supreme ultimate boxing': a fighting art named after a principle of the universe.

What happened to many Taoist priests during China's Cultural Revolution of 1966-76?

They were sent to work camps while their temples were shut, burned or turned into barracks; the clergy's association was only revived in 1980, and ordinations have resumed since.

Taoism is one of five religions China officially recognises, with Buddhism, Islam, Protestantism and which other?

Catholicism: Beijing counts the two Christian churches separately, each under its own state-run association, while folk religion, the most widespread practice in the country, is not on the list at all.

Tao and Dao are one Chinese word, so which spelling system, adopted in China in the 1950s, writes it with a D?

Pinyin: the older Wade-Giles spelling used a plain t for a sound that sits between English t and d, so generations of English speakers learned to say Tao with a hard t the Chinese word never had.

Which school is paired with Taoism as China's other great home-grown tradition of thought?

Confucianism: the two were rivals from the start, and the Zhuangzi invents scenes in which Confucius and his favourite pupil are told that trying to set a crooked world to rights is a mistake.

During which turbulent era, between about 450 and 300 BCE, did the core of Taoist thought take shape?

The Warring States: as the old royal house lost its grip and rival kingdoms fought for supremacy, thinkers competed to say how order could return, a ferment China remembers as the hundred schools.

A fever remedy recorded by the fourth-century Taoist alchemist Ge Hong led a modern scientist to which Nobel-winning malaria drug?

Artemisinin: Ge Hong said to soak sweet wormwood in cold water and wring out the juice rather than boil it, the detail that told Tu Youyou heat was ruining her extract; she shared the Nobel Prize in 2015.

Which Taoist meditation text became famous in the West through a 1929 translation with Carl Jung's commentary?

The Secret of the Golden Flower began in the 1680s as messages taken down at spirit-writing sessions; the missionary Richard Wilhelm put it into German, and his friend Jung's commentary won it readers among psychologists.

Which deity is popularly pictured as the ruler of heaven, presiding over a celestial bureaucracy modelled on China's empire?

The Jade Emperor runs heaven as a mirror of the old imperial court, ministries and all; yet he began as the chief god of popular religion, and Taoist priests adopted him only about a thousand years ago, when emperors endorsed his worship.

About how many Chinese characters long is the whole Tao Te Ching?

About 5,000 characters, which is why Chinese readers call it the five-thousand-character text; for so short a book it has drawn an astonishing weight of commentary, some seven hundred works by one count.

Which Han tomb site, the resting place of Lady Dai, yielded silk copies of the Tao Te Ching in 1973?

Mawangdui: its tombs were packed so tightly in clay and charcoal that Lady Dai's body could still be given an autopsy two thousand years on, and a relative's library of silk books, buried in 168 BCE, could still be read.

Who gives the first biographical account of Laozi, combining three different stories?

Sima Qian could not settle who the sage was: his biography offers an archivist consulted by Confucius, an author called Lao Laizi and a court astrologer named Dan, and wonders whether one man simply lived for two hundred years.

What name is given to the seven chapters of the Zhuangzi traditionally credited to Zhuang Zhou himself?

The Inner Chapters open the book. Around 300 CE the editor Guo Xiang cut the text he inherited by about a third and sorted the rest into outer and miscellaneous chapters, now thought to be by later hands.

In a famous Zhuangzi passage, what is Zhuang Zhou found doing after his wife's death?

Drumming on a basin and singing, he tells a shocked friend that he wept at first, then saw her death as one more change, like the turning of the four seasons, and that wailing on would only show he had not understood.

Strolling over a river bridge, Zhuang Zhou tells his friend Huizi that he can see which creatures are enjoying themselves?

The fish: 'You are not a fish, so how do you know they are happy?' objects Huizi the logician, and Zhuang Zhou turns it round: you are not me, so how do you know that I do not know?