Taoism Trivia
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50 free Taoism trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Taoism trivia for students of world religions and Chinese philosophy, tai chi practitioners, and anyone who has ever quoted 'the journey of a thousand miles'. The quiz starts with the basics - what the Tao means, Laozi and the archivist who supposedly wrote a book for a gatekeeper on his way west, the two-part Tao Te Ching, Zhuangzi and his butterfly dream, wu wei, ziran, the uncarved block, yin and yang - and moves through the history of the organised religion. That means Zhang Daoling's vision of Laozi in 142 CE and the Five Pecks of Rice, the Yellow Turbans, the Celestial Masters' deal with Cao Cao, elixir alchemists poisoning themselves with cinnabar and mercury, the Tang emperors who claimed Laozi as an ancestor, Wang Chongyang and the Quanzhen school, the Daozang canon, the Three Pure Ones and the Eight Immortals, the Wudang mountains, and Taoism's survival through the Cultural Revolution to official recognition today. Roughly a third of the questions are easy and the rest climb steadily. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does the Chinese word 'Tao' (Dao) most literally mean?
Way or path
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.
Q 02What does the name Laozi, the legendary author of the Tao Te Ching, literally mean?
Old Master
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.
Q 03In legend, who persuaded Laozi to write down his teachings when he quit his court post and left China?
A border official
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.
Q 04What is the personal name traditional accounts give to Laozi?
Li Er
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.
Q 05Where, in the Tao Te Ching's original Chinese, does a journey of a thousand miles begin?
Beneath your feet
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.
Q 06The oldest known passages of the Tao Te Ching, buried around 300 BCE and unearthed in 1993, were written on what?
Bamboo strips
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.
Q 07Which invention is thought to have come from Chinese alchemists' search for an elixir of immortality?
Gunpowder
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.
Q 08In the Zhuangzi's most famous passage, Zhuang Zhou wakes unsure whether he had dreamed of being what?
A butterfly
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'.
Q 09Refusing high office, Zhuang Zhou said he would rather be which animal, alive and dragging its tail in the mud?
A tortoise
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.
Q 10What is the Taoist ethical concept of 'wu wei' usually translated as?
Effortless action or non-action
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.
Q 11Which element do ancient Taoist texts use as their favourite image of wu wei?
Water
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.
Q 12Which storybook bear did a popular 1982 book hold up as the model of the Taoist 'uncarved block'?
Winnie-the-Pooh
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.
Q 13What are Taoism's 'Three Treasures' or 'Three Jewels' of virtue?
Q 21Which warlord officially recognised the Celestial Masters school in 215 CE?
Cao Cao
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.
Q 22Which red mineral was the prized ingredient of Taoist alchemists' elixirs?
Cinnabar
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.
Q 23The emperors of which dynasty claimed Laozi as their ancestor and gave Taoism official favour?
The Tang
Compassion, moderation and humility
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.
Q 14What is 'De' (Te), the second word in the title Tao Te Ching, usually translated as?
Virtue or power
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.
Q 15In yin-yang thought, which of these belongs to yin rather than to yang?
The moon
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.
Q 16Which country's national flag has a red-and-blue yin-yang symbol at its centre?
South Korea
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.
Q 17Laozi and Zhuangzi never called themselves Taoists, so historians of which dynasty coined the label 'Taoist school'?
The Han
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.
Q 18Who reportedly saw a vision of Laozi in 142 CE and founded the first organised Taoist religion?
Zhang Daoling
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.
Q 19The early Celestial Masters movement was popularly named after which levy it charged its members?
Five pecks of rice
Five pecks of rice from its members helped support a self-governing religious state in western China, where the priests were the government.
Q 20Which late-Han uprising was raised in 184 CE by a Taoist faith healer and his Great Peace sect?
The Yellow Turban Rebellion
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.
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.
Q 24What is the Daozang?
The Taoist canon of scriptures
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.
Q 25Who founded the Complete Perfection school of Taoism in 12th-century Shandong?
Wang Chongyang
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.
Q 26Which conqueror summoned the elderly Taoist master Qiu Chuji across Asia in the 1220s to ask about living for ever?
Genghis Khan
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.
Q 27What are the two main sects of later Taoism, one focused on spells and ritual, the other on inner alchemy?
Zhengyi and Quanzhen
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.
Q 28Who are the Three Pure Ones?
The highest gods of the Taoist pantheon
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.
Q 29Li Tieguai, Zhongli Quan and Lan Caihe belong to which famous band of Taoist legend?
The Eight Immortals
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.
Q 30What is a 'xian' in Taoism?
An immortal being
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.