The Taoist Experience: An Anthology

"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. 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. 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. 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."