The best books on Taoism

For someone who doesn’t know anything about it, what would you say Daoism is? Is it a religion, a philosophy?

The most simple, parsimonious definition is that it’s the native religious tradition of China. That’s the way they talk about it in Chinese, as China’s homegrown religious tradition. Then there are all kinds of ways that we can complexify and nuance that.

What’s important to understand is that it’s had a several centuries-long interaction with the West. That means our ways of understanding it have been profoundly shaped by the way that Western culture has engaged with China over the past 400 years. So a lot of the ways we think about it as a religion or as a philosophical system are shaded by the fact that the earliest people to talk about Daoism in the West were Christian intellectuals—first Catholic and then Protestant; Protestant missionaries who were looking at everything through a Protestant lens.

The term Daoism was coined in the French language in the 1830s, in the context of the French colonization of Indo-China, so present day Vietnam and southern China.

That being said, Daoism does refer to a generally understood phenomenon in Chinese culture, Daojia or Daojiao which is this philosophical and religious movement that began in the Axial Age. It’s often traced back in its own mytho-history to this figure, Laozi, who is believed to have lived around the same time as the Buddha—we’re talking sixth century BC or so.

One of the earlier strata of Daoism is this highly literate, philosophical tradition that flowers during China’s Warring States Period (475–221 BC). Two of the books I have today are medieval commentaries on the two texts that became the central philosophical pillars of the Daoist tradition—Laozi’s Daodejing and the Zhuangzi.

It gets much more complex after the Classical period. Around the time of the BC to AD transition, Daoism begins coalescing. It’s a very multivocal tradition. You have these philosophical texts, but you also have practitioners of different forms of medicine, magic, and alchemy. All of these things begin coalescing into a general philosophical, ascetic, and practical movement, or series of movements.

They have their final consolidation moment in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, when the first Daoist religious communities arise, what we would recognize as religions in the West—with leaders of the church and congregations and the development of systematic theologies and systems of practice and public engagement. This happens at a really pivotal moment in Chinese history. Then one initial community that began in Sichuan province in the west spreads out all over the country and seeds what becomes the Daoist tradition all over China in the 4th century.

How many Daoists are there in the world now, is it about five million or so in China?

This is one of those questions that’s really difficult to answer. I’ve seen numbers close to 500 million in China, but it’s because classifying someone with a specific religious affiliation doesn’t map well onto Chinese culture. There’s a fluidity to religious identification. In China, you can be a Daoist in the morning, a Confucian when you go to work, and a Buddhist in the evening.

The history of religions in China is like this. It’s highly syncretistic, and it’s very fluid and open. I’m trying to be nuanced here because we’re bringing a lot of these Christian categories with distinct denominations and trying to map them onto Chinese culture, and it doesn’t really work.

It’s also hard to judge the number of Daoists because of the chaos of the religious policies in 20th-century China. Nowadays, things are really on an upswing. In a significant break with his predecessors, the Communist government under Xi Jinping actively supports traditional Chinese culture in its own very specific and idiosyncratic way, extending to certain forms of Daoism. I would say the number of people who identify as Daoist has probably gone up in the past ten years, just because of changes in culture and what’s acceptable to say and express now.

Let’s turn to the books you’re recommending about Daoism. How did you choose them? What were your criteria for selecting these five?

My initial impetus was to give you five books that would be introductory for someone with no exposure to Daoism. So I made a list, but it seemed quite un-genuine to where I’m coming from. The logic behind why I chose these five books instead—which is quite a strange group of five books when it comes to Daoism—is as follows.

As I said earlier, interaction between Daoism and the West has been ongoing for 400 years, since the first Jesuit missions to China in the 16th century and to the court of the Qing emperor in the 17th century. But what persists to this day—in this weird, almost superposition—is that things from China in the West are seen as simultaneously super ancient, but only just now being revealed for the very first time. This is relevant to what I teach, Tai Chi and Qigong. It’s exactly how they’re always marketed in the West. Everybody knows what Tai Chi is—it’s been around for 50 years in the West—but people still pretend that only now is it being unveiled from the mystic fog of the Orient.

So instead of falling back into that pattern of regarding these things as only being introduced now, I chose texts that are a bit more nuanced, to speak more genuinely to where I think we’re at as a culture in a next, more mature phase in the Western reception of Daoism.

So the fundamental text of Daoism is the Daodejing, which everybody knows. It’s been translated into hundreds of languages. I’ve never seen a footnote on it, but everyone claims it’s one of the most translated books on the planet, second only to the Bible. I don’t know if that’s true, but it has been translated and re-translated and interpreted. There are even lots of translations by people who don’t read Chinese. So instead of giving you my favorite one of those, I chose a Classical commentary on the Daodejing from the Tang Dynasty. I did the same thing with the second most famous Daoist philosophical text, the Zhuangzi. I chose a comprehensive commentary on the Zhuangzi that has shaped its reception history through the centuries.

So the logic behind which I chose these five books was that instead of being an introduction for someone who knows nothing, I’m flying at a higher altitude and giving someone a foot in the door of the robust intellectual and aesthetic traditions within Daoism.

Let’s go through the books individually. First up is The Taoist Experience: An Anthology by Livia Kohn, which is a collection of Daoist writings. Tell me about this book and why you chose it.

Anything by Livia Kohn is amazing. She’s a classically trained sinologist but she also speaks from the heart and writes really good prose. This book is really close to my heart because I got it when I was a teenager. I carried it around with me, and I’ve read it more times than I can remember.

It has a wonderful introduction by Livia. The book introduces the complex theological texts, the different spirit realms, the sacred geographies. It covers Daoist medicines and alchemical practices. You have chapters on Daoist gymnastics and physical exercises, Daoist sexual practices, sleep, and dream practices. There is high-flying philosophy, as well as visualizing the stars and engaging with celestial journeys through your meditation. Most importantly for our purposes, it gives a sense of the breadth of the Daoist tradition.

A friend of mine said that Daoism isn’t really a religion, it’s a DIY religion toolkit. There is this massive amount of stuff and all these fluid traditions that are constantly re-traditioning themselves and reinventing themselves every few generations. It’s a mess as a historian but as a practitioner, someone engaging with this stuff on their own terms, it’s this beautiful, variegated panoply of different practices and views and philosophies that you can absorb, that can enrich your life.

Could you give me an example of something you took from the book and did?

The gymnastics chapter was stuff that I actively did as a kid. I was probably 15 years old when I got this book, and I took it very seriously and did some of the practices. For example, she has practices of sitting in stillness and doing deep abdominal breathing. There are also stretches—stuff not too dissimilar to modern postural Yoga.

The first thing that I really practiced out of here was the gymnastics of Pengzu, a variation of the Eight Brocades. It’s a classical qigong system in Daoism and in China, where you sit and do a series of very simple gymnastic movements.

Also, for those needing an introduction to Daoism, at the beginning of the book the author charts the history of Daoism from when it started right through to now and what’s going on in Taiwan.

That’s the thing about a number of these books. There’s Livia’s introduction. Also, when we get to the art book, Kristofer Schipper does a great synoptic introduction to the entire Daoist tradition in 20 pages or so. For people who want just a very basic introduction to Daoism, you can get that from these books, just in the introductory material.

So when you started using this book age 15, had you already read the Daodejing and gotten involved in Daoism?

Yes. We had some family friends, these two consummate aesthetes. One was a former trumpet player; one was a conductor. They were very close to me when I was a kid. They were musical mentors and close family friends.

When I graduated from fifth grade, they gave me two copies of the Daodejing. One was the Victor Mair translation. He’s one of the most highly regarded sinologists, very erudite, and knows Chinese like the back of his hand. The other was by Ursula K Le Guin, who’s a sci-fi author who doesn’t know any Chinese. Hers is a very idiosyncratic interpretation, just based on her own worldview. So they gave me these two copies side by side, which was a very interesting thing to give to a fifth grader. It introduced me to this hermeneutically nuanced way of engaging with the Daodejing, being aware that there are multiple angles to talk about it.

I loved it. I read the whole thing in one go. I just thought it was so cool, this weird, aphoristic, mystical logic. I was very into martial arts and Orientalism writ large in 1990s media culture, so it dovetailed with this whole worldview that I talk about in the book that I wrote, The Subtle Body. I call it “Japanofuturistic e-Asia”, that 90’s cartoon/video game world that I really grew up in.

The next book on your list is a commentary on the Daodejing by a medieval monk. Talk me through this choice.

This is hard-hitting philosophy, as hardcore as Chinese philosophy gets. It’s The Daode jing Commentary of Cheng Xuanying, who wrote it at the height of Tang dynasty Daoism in the 7th century.

Cheng Xuanying was right at the center of the imperial court in Chang’an (present day Xi’an). He was working side by side with Xuanzang, the great Buddhist translator who made his Journey to the West, spent 15 years there, brought 600 scrolls back to China, and started the greatest translation project in Chinese history up to that point.

This was a really amazing time in Daoism because it was one of the few periods in Chinese history where the imperial bureaucracy really embraced Daoism. At this time, the Daodejing actually made its way onto the reading list of the Imperial Examination System in China.

Cheng Xuanying and Xuanzang together translated the Daodejing into Sanskrit in this period. Unfortunately, the Sanskrit translation is no longer extant, but it was a period of intense Buddho-Daoist fusion. So what Cheng Xuanying does is he really combines the most sophisticated forms of Buddhist logic with Daoist philosophy. And he creates this very, very interesting and highly erudite and systematic commentary on the Daodejing.

What I find so interesting is what happens with this highly ambiguous, poetic philosophical text, because the Daodejing is a series of 81 aphoristic poems. They’re highly interpretable and plastic. Different commentaries arise through the Daoist tradition. Some of them take this series of 81 aphoristic poems and turn them into systematic philosophical systems—and no one does that better than Cheng Xuanying.

I really enjoy this coincidence of opposites, having a series of philosophical poems that are very non-specific in their implications, and then a highly systematic interpretation and rendition of them in almost a structured theology.

The reason I have this on my list is that everybody knows about the Daodejing at this point—the ‘dao’ of this and the ‘dao’ of that—but this gives you a taste of how seriously and systematically these ideas were taken in the Chinese tradition.

Do you want to an example of an aphorism from the Daodejing and how he interprets it and gives it meaning?

There’s nowhere better to start than the opening line of the first chapter. So this is Friederike Assandri’s translation of Cheng Xuanying’s commentary: “道可道, 非常道”.“The dao that can be spoken of as dao is not the constant dao.” And then several pages of commentary. Then “名可名非常名”:
“The name that can be named is not the constant name.” “无名天地之始” “Without name, it is the beginning of heaven and earth. “有名万物之母” “Having a name is the mother of the 10,000 things.”

What Cheng Xuanying does in those first few lines of the poem is he goes and renders, character by character, what’s really an ontological dialectic. He talks about these categories of ‘being’ (“having a name”) and ‘non-being’ (“without a name”) and their mutual interactions by bringing in the sophisticated Buddhist logic of the Madhyamaka School of Nāgārjuna. He brings the dialectical engagement with these categories of being and non-being to bear on these first four lines of the Daodejing.

Cheng Xuanying is regarded as the founder of the Chongxuan school or ‘school of the double mystery,’ a highly sophisticated school of Daoist philosophy.  It actually goes back to the last line of the first chapter of the Daodejing, where it says, 玄之又玄，众妙之门 “Mysterious and mysterious again, it is the door to all marvels.”

‘Mysterious’ is an extremely common term in Chinese aesthetics and philosophy. What Cheng Xuanying argues is that Laozi says the first mysterious in order “to eliminate our clingings to phenomena.” When we say something is mysterious, we know that we can’t grasp it.

But it’s not just one mysterious. The line continues, “mysterious and mysterious again.” And this is key to Cheng Xuanying’s philosophy. “The first mysterious eliminates our clingings, but then he is afraid the adept may be attached to this conception of the mysterious. Therefore he now says mysterious again to eliminate also the latter sickness.”

So it’s not just mysterious in a way we can’t grasp it, because then you can grasp onto that mysteriousness itself and be lost in that. So it’s the mystery of mystery, or the mystery beyond mystery. This is classic Buddhist Madhyamaka dialectics that he’s applying to the text. You’re trying to eliminate your grasping at concepts, but you can actually get lost in the nihilism of the ungraspable. So you have to eliminate your grasping to the ungraspable as well.

This is the central feature of the double mystery school of philosophy and this is the stuff that absolutely suffuses his engagement with the Daodejing.

These lines of thinking are present in the Western philosophical tradition as well, among the skeptics, from Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus. Hume was a modern incarnation of that thinking, as is early Descartes. These are philosophical dialectical tricks that show up repeatedly throughout global philosophy but they’re done in a very high falutin fashion here at the height of the Tang Dynasty, in Cheng Xuanying’s commentary on the Daodejing.

Let’s go on to the next book, Zhuangzi: A New Translation of the Sayings of Master Zhuang as Interpreted by Guo Xiang, which dates from an even earlier period than your last book.

I absolutely love this commentary. The Daodejing is cool, but Zhuangzi was always my favorite. It’s a series of parables, often involving animals that have a non-sequitur quality to them. So it’ll be a story about a bird or a fish that leaves you hanging at the end. You never really know what he’s talking about.

The classic Zhuangzi story is the tale of the butterfly. One day Zhuangzi is sleeping, and he dreams that he’s a butterfly flitting about. Then he wakes up and he doesn’t know whether he’s the butterfly dreaming it’s Zhuangzi or he’s Zhuangzi dreaming he’s a butterfly. He says, “There must be some difference between these two. I call this the transformation of things.” That’s all he gives you. What do you do with that?

Again, much ink has been spilled throughout the Daoist tradition of commentaries on the Zhuangzi. My favorite one, the classic, quintessential commentary is that by Guo Xiang, who wrote it in the third century CE. Not only did he write the commentary, but the version of Zhuangzi we have is the Guo Xiang redaction. Prior to him, the Zhuangzi was almost twice as long. He pared it down to 33 essential chapters and wrote commentaries on all of those.

A similar thing happened with Plato in the same time period. Plato’s writing was pared down by Thrasyllus, giving us the Platonic corpus that we have today. Zhuangzi and Plato were almost contemporaries. They both wrote in dialogue format in very ambiguous ways. There are lots of remarkable similarities between how they were produced and how the texts were transmitted. It almost seems like someone made up this history because it’s so close. It’s kind of wild.

So these two texts, the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, are very different in their approach. One is these paradoxical, gnomic statements. The other is stories that you do understand but then you’re not sure what he’s getting at. Is that right?

Yes. Formally, they’re very different. The Daodejing has this poetic, aphoristic quality, whereas the Zhuangzi is parables and stories. It’s almost like Aesop’s Fables.

I understand your point earlier that Daoism has the scope to be many things to many people, but what would you say are some of the important tenets of Daoism or the parts of it that have really appealed to you?

The most prominent facet of Daoism in its Western reception has been this idea of ‘go with the flow.’ And while this is absolutely resonant with a very central feature of the Daoist historical tradition, there has been a tendency in its western reception toward reducing Daoism to this simple cliché, while it is just one theme among so many.

I found this kind of countercultural Daoism, ‘go with the flow’ vibe very cool when I was a teenager in high school, which I viewed as being in prison. I wanted a philosophy to be able to cope with having to sit in one place bored to tears for eight hours a day. My trivial teenage understanding of Daoism I found really useful in that context.

More importantly, Daoism has a very specific aesthetic—of lightness, of immortals flying on clouds, of wild spirit realms. It’s this aesthetic that came into the American counterculture and transformed into the comics and cartoons I was watching and reading in the 1980s and 90s that really resonated with me. That’s why one of the books I chose today is a book on Daoist art. It has this vibrant, aesthetic tradition and I don’t think you’re really engaging with Daoism unless you’re aware of that or tapped into it.

There’s also the praxeological tradition, which is to say Daoism as a form of practice.  And though this is very far from being representative of traditional Daoism in Chinese society, in the western reception of Daoism, its actual practice has become inextricably linked with the martial arts, most notably Tai Chi. This elevation of martial arts discourse in terms of Daoist philosophy and aesthetics appears to have really taken off about 400 years ago in China, and Tai Chi has been a huge part of the western reception of Daoism since the counterculture.

So it wasn’t so much Daoist theology or philosophy that appealed to me as its aesthetic and practical traditions I thought were very cool, and that’s what drew me to China in 2008 when I entered a Daoist temple. It was living there that I became conversant in all these multifarious and very different ways of talking about Daoism.

The philosophy of the school I encountered in China was almost the exact opposite of ‘go with the flow.’ It was alchemical Daoism that was like a form of Daoist existentialism. I recently wrote an article on this. You’re actually extricating yourself from the flow and cultivating the elixir of immortality. You’re by yourself in a cave, you’re pushing away society, the temples, everything, and just being a hermit.

So the things within Daoism that have appealed to me have changed over time. But the basic Western engagement with Daoism, which was really a proxy for aesthetic anti-formalism in the 1950s and 60s—a.k.a. go with the flow—was definitely what turned me on at first. And that is a legitimate pillar within the Daoist tradition.

Wow. It’s quite something that Daoism can be both ‘go with the flow’ and the opposite. Can you go anywhere you want with Daoism?

It is a vast tradition. At the end of the day, it doesn’t have a founder, it doesn’t have a central scripture. There are all these different streams and different lineages. They often use aquatic metaphors. So the Dao itself is seen as this ocean. Then it has major rivers that come off of it, which are the major lineages, like the “Complete Perfection” and the “Orthodox Unity.” Those then have smaller channels that go off of them, like the “Dragon Gate” lineage. And then those have tiny canals going off of them, like my own, the “San Feng” lineage. Every lineage is a sub-lineage of a sub-lineage of a sub-lineage, and they all lead back to the ocean of the Dao.

Their manifestations have changed through the ages, but they usually have some reference to these classical texts. But, again, this obsession with texts is something we’re pasting from Protestantism. There is no Daoist Bible.

The Daodejing is not the Bible, but it’s somewhat viewed as the Bible, isn’t it?

In Western Daoism, people view it as the Bible, and I think that’s perfectly fine. But if you get specific and engage with the historical tradition, there is no Bible, and most Daoists throughout history have probably never read the Daodejing.

How different is Daoism from Buddhism? You mentioned at the beginning that many Chinese people are both. Is it possible to compare and contrast the two?

That’s a super interesting historical project in itself. Daoism existed in China before Buddhism made its way to China. For a few hundred years there were these classical texts of the Zhuangzi and the Laozi, communities of alchemists and magical practitioners, people practicing what became the Daoist gymnastic traditions, as well as the dream, sleep, and sexological practices. But they don’t really coalesce until the arrival of Buddhism.

When Buddhism arrived, the Buddhists had a really good ground game. It was the first missionary religion, really. They came to China and started establishing temples, getting tax-free status, etc. That galvanized the Daoist communities into a more solid self-identification. There’s this interesting way in which Daoism doesn’t really solidify itself until it has that external irritant of Buddhism arriving in Chinese society.

Then Daoism and Buddhism exist in this space of both constantly stealing from each other for the rest of Chinese history. There’s competition, there’s back and forth. They don’t just fuse into one thing, which is what happened in the Western reception of Daoism and counterculture: Dao and Zen, it’s all the same. Alan Watts gives a beautiful voice to this way of receiving them as two sides of the same coin.

When you zoom in, you see that the Buddhists and Daoists were viciously butting heads for a lot of Chinese history. There were about 600 years of Buddho-Daoist debates, from the 7th century until the 13th century, when the Mongols came in and were like ‘Enough is enough.’ They burned all the records of the Buddho-Daoist debates and declared them over.

Of course that didn’t stop the Buddhists and Daoists from continuing to butt heads. My own teacher in China just loves to talk smack about Buddhists and Buddhism and vice versa from Buddhist teachers. For the most part, it’s been good-humored. There have been occasional periods of suppression where monks were beheaded. There was the Huichang Suppression of the 9th century, for example.

Can you tell us a bit more about your time at a temple in China? How long were you there and what were you learning?

I moved to China in 2008 and lived there until 2014 in a Daoist temple called YuXu Gong at the base of Wudang Mountain. It was informally granted to my teacher back in 2004. He ran a school out of there until about 2012 when the Bureau of Tourism completely renovated the temple, pumped millions of dollars into it, rebuilt everything, and turned it into a public tourist site. We couldn’t really train there anymore, so we stayed in an annex of the ancient temple which had been turned into a hospital and then became our dormitory.

It was martial arts that drew me there. I was 21 and I just wanted a kung fu vacation. But I found this master who was the former head priest at Purple Cloud Palace, which is the main temple in Wudang Mountain. He did all the liturgical stuff, the ritual dance, the chanting, and offering incense to the deities. He was offering a Daoist studies program for foreigners for five years, from 2009 to 2014. So I stayed for that. It focused on three traditions: martial arts, what we call qigong, and the inner alchemical meditation tradition.

But he also took us through a lot of Daoist philosophy, character by character, including the main philosophical texts. We had to memorize the entire Daodejing in classical Chinese. He loved Zhuangzi. We also went through “The Morning and Evening Prayers”, which my kungfu brother, Jake—who’s still living in China, he never left—and I are doing a translation and commentary on right now. It’s this massive compendium of Daoist lore and cosmology and theology and magical practice. It’s very cool.

You’ve mentioned the word alchemy or alchemical a couple of times now. Is that the same as what Isaac Newton was doing, trying to make gold?

Newton was doing hardcore apparatus alchemy. He had an alchemical fire in his library for most of his life. That was happening in China in an earlier period. There’s a great scholar, Fabrizio Pregadio, who’s a historian of this early phase of Chinese alchemy, where people had crucibles and were mixing different kinds of substances and creating elixirs, different kinds of immortality medicines.

What we were doing was not like that. Around the time of Cheng Xuanying, our Daodejing commentator, in the 7th and 8th centuries in the Tang Dynasty, there was a turn from apparatus alchemy to what’s called internal alchemy. There was actually a string of Tang Dynasty emperors who died from mercury poisoning, supposedly from taking these sketchy immortality medicines from not super-responsible Daoists.

The Daoists view this history a bit differently.  From their view, acting as a sort of shadow government, their bestowal of poisonous brews was a way of expediting the demise of particularly incompetent or demented emperors. I always loved this view. Rome could have really used a few Daoists advisors around whenever a Commodus or Caligula popped up.

In any case, this precipitated this change in the tradition where you’re no longer taking external mercury and cinnabar. Instead, you’re engaging with mercury and cinnabar as symbolic renditions of substances or sensations within your own body. That’s the alchemy we were doing. It was about engaging with feelings in your body in dedicated meditative practice.

And you’re not trying to become immortal, or are you?

There are multiple schools of thought on this. Another part of the transition between external and internal alchemy was a shift away from making your physical, real body immortal. With internal alchemy, you’re crafting an immortal self within your body out of psychosomatic energy and making that immortal. It can leave your body the way a cicada leaves its shell, to use a common metaphor in these Daoist texts.

Our tradition didn’t really talk much about that. If you were to attempt to articulate the goal, it would be something like the creation of a little immortal being of light within, that can excarnate and travel to the next life, in a way that you can control it and not just be at the whim of the grand wheel of samsara.

Let’s go on to book number four. This is the art book you alluded to earlier, Taoism and the Arts of China. Or should I be pronouncing that ‘Taoism’?

The T is from an older system of romanization, the Wade-Giles. It’s always pronounced Daoism, even when it’s rendered with a T in the Wade-Giles system.

This is a super cool book about art and Daoist aesthetics. Even though this is a book-centered interview, I wanted to articulate dimensions of the Daoist tradition that aren’t just literary. It’s one of these fallacies that’s been baked into the Western reception of Daoism, that it’s somehow about books. The earliest sinologists engaging with these Daoist texts were Protestant missionaries who brought all of their Protestant baggage, the sola scriptura, with them: ‘Where is the Bible of Daoism? Once we have its Bible, then we can understand it.’ But, as I said, that fundamentally does not map onto the reality of the chaos of Daoist history.

Also, in terms of what appealed to me about Daoism, aesthetics was way at the top. Daoist aesthetics really did make their way into Western culture during the counterculture, through Chinese art, even in a silly way through Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan films.

There are a couple of books on Daoist art, but I chose this one partly because it has this wonderful introduction by Kristofer Schipper, who was probably the greatest sinologist of the 20th century. He was a Dutch guy and very funny. He did incredible, groundbreaking studies on the Daoist canon. He gives this synoptic introduction to the Daoist tradition you can read, and then the book also—even if you don’t read anything and just page through it—will give you a sense of the expansive and vast aesthetic tradition.

The other thing I really love about this book is it has a whole chapter on the god Zhenwu, who is the patron saint of Wudang Mountain, where I lived. Zhenwu is the quintessential exorcist in Daoist religion. He is often depicted in bare feet, with his hair down, and holding a sword. He has a wrathful gaze and often has a spirit army behind him—hundreds and hundreds of demons. He goes around China, defeats a demon, binds it, and then turns it into one of his helpers.

Zhenwu was the symbol of the north in Chinese history. The Mongols had conquered China and when the Ming dynasty then kicked out the Mongols, the Ming emperors viewed this warrior god from the north as the one who helped them. In the stories of the Ming defeating the Mongols, it was a bit like Constantine at the Battle of Milvian Bridge. There were apparitions of Zhenwu on the battlefield, helping them defeat the Mongols.

That’s how Zhenwu became the head of the Ming Dynasty Daoist pantheon. They created all the temples of Wudang, where I lived, as a talisman cast into the earth to support this god. So there’s a rich iconographic tradition with this particular figure. He’s a heavy metal dude.

Where are most of these paintings, if that’s what they are?

Yes, paintings and sculptures. With the chaos of the 20th century, a lot of the great Chinese art survived in diaspora communities. So they’re at the Grand Palace Museum in Taipei, the amazing museum in Seoul, Korea, in Tokyo and at the Guimet in Paris.

Some things did survive in Wudang. A number of monks from my lineage buried hundreds of bronze statues when everything was being melted down in the 1950s to meet the metal production quotas in the Great Leap Forward. China wanted to outdo Britain as the world’s number one steel producer and they did do it, but at a great cost. The monks saved a bunch of statues from being melted down in that period.

Wudang had a weird relationship with the Cultural Revolution, partly because one of the early Communist cadres learned martial arts there in the 1930s. He had an affinity for it and protected a lot of the temples through that most chaotic of periods.

Are those statues on display again now?

Yes, there’s a museum in Wudang that has a lot of these bronzes on display. A lot of them were just put back in the temples where they were supposed to be and had been since the Ming Dynasty, when they were cast 600 years ago.

So my reason behind picking this book is just to give people a view into the Daoist aesthetic tradition, which is rich.

Do you have a favorite picture in the book?

Yes, in the Zhenwu chapter. There’s a series that was commissioned by the third Ming emperor, the Yongle Emperor, who built Wudang.

When the temples were being built in the early 15th century—1412 to 1413 were the promulgation dates for the major temples—there were well over 100 sightings of lights in the sky, spinning wheels shooting out electricity. They were interpreted as apparitions of this god, Zhenwu, who was showing his favor and support for the construction of the Wudang temple complex. I actually gave a talk at the Esalen Institute about what were straight-up UFO tales from the early 1400s in Wudang.

When the initial reports made it to Beijing, it was highly ambiguous. The emperor sent inspectors to Wudang to investigate. They went around collecting all of these stories. They collated them, took the 17 most compelling ones, and wrote them up in an official document about apparitions of the god Zhenwu in Wudang mountain.

Initially, the document was secret. Then, about 30 years later, they made it public and said, ‘All of this is in support of the Ming dynasty.’ Once they figure out a story to tell, it turns into a piece of imperial propaganda. They made woodblock print images of how people described these apparitions at the openings of the different temples. It included the materialization of a bell and a massive column. It’s very, very strange stuff.

Then, 100 years later, a whole novel is produced for mass consumption, telling these stories of great apparitions in support of the Ming Emperor.

Where are the pictures?

There are beautiful color copy versions of these apparitions in the book, but the only original is in Beijing. It’s a scroll of 30 or so scenes, and it is still held at the White Cloud Temple or Baiyunguan, in Beijing. The White Cloud Temple was commissioned by Chinggis (Genghis) Khan when the head of Daoism, Qiu Chuji, met with him out in Uzbekistan in the 12th century.

We’d better move to your last choice, which is out of left field. Tell me about Feline Philosophy by the British philosopher John Gray.

I love John Gray. He is an acerbic and acidic critic of the modern world and is deeply influenced by Daoism. He doesn’t read Chinese, and he doesn’t have a Daoist lineage, but he often cites the Zhuangzi, in particular the A.C. Graham translation and commentary. Graham was a British sinologist who was schooled in all the proper British ways, was analytically inclined, and brought all of that erudition to bear to really articulate Zhuangzi’s critiques in a very clear-headed way.

I chose a John Gray book as my last one because just as ‘go with the flow’ is maybe a trivialization of what Daoism is but does actually accord with a very prominent stream within the Daoist tradition, John Gray, as a critic of society, standing from the outside looking in and often using parables of animals, also gives a voice to a very prominent and, for me, one of my favorite dimensions of the Daoist tradition, which is a form of broad-minded cultural critique of the present historical moment.

This really goes back to Zhuangzi himself, who was writing from southern China in the Warring States period. There’s some speculation that Zhuangzi was in touch with hunter-gatherer tribes on the southern periphery of the Zhou world of Late Bronze/early Iron Age China. He was giving voice to critiques of state power as well as basic things like agriculture or having a crank to lift your bucket out of a well. Zhuangzi has this critique of technology that influenced Heidegger via Okakura Kakuzō.

Gray uses animals as a counterpoint to all of the absurdities and silliness of present-day human ideologies. His main critique is of the concept of progress: that’s a theme that runs throughout all his work. He doesn’t think we’re making any “progress” and even if we were, it wouldn’t be a good thing.

Feline Philosophy is a very short and very readable book and he cites Zhuangzi in it. His main book is called Straw Dogs, which is a line out of the Daodejing. So he cites Daoism quite often. When I’m trying to get my friends to read John Gray, I say he’s a guy who went so far down the rabbit hole of British philosophy that he came out on the other side as a Daoist mystic.

The last chapter is on “Cats and the Meaning of Life.” There’s one paragraph where he sums up what he thinks: “If cats could understand the human search for meaning, they would purr with delight at its absurdity. Life as the cat they happen to be is meaning enough for them. Humans, on the other hand, cannot help looking for meaning beyond their lives.” This is a very Zhuangzian critique.

For John Gray, philosophy is not the solution to a problem, it’s a symptom of our biggest problem, which is self-consciousness. So cats, not having self-consciousness don’t need to have philosophy. They don’t have the symptoms of self-consciousness or awareness of death and so they just live life as they are. So “Life as the cat they happen to be is meaning enough for them” is something for Gray that we should aspire toward. This is also a theme in the Daoist tradition—living our life deeply and lucidly, and being satisfied with the enoughness of our own existence.