Taoist lineages

Taoist lineages can be classified by the following criteria:

1) By the geographical origin or area of influence of that school, for example, the Mo Shan school is so-named because it originates  from a mountain called Mo Shan ( located in the Jiangsu Province).The Complete Reality school belongs to  the North School because its influence was mainly limited to the area north of the Yangtze River during the Song-Yuan Dynasties.

2) By the names of its founders , for examples, Wu-Liu School is named after its two masters :

Wu Chong-Xu and Liu Hua-Yang .

3) By the method it adopts, for example , the Pre-Celestial School is so-called because it teaches people to situate their mind in  a meta-physical dimension of nowhere so as to attain the Pre-celestial qi … if you start by paying attention to your dantian in order to initialize some qi , then of course, hardly can your method be called Pre-Celestial because you are using an environmentally conditioned reasoning long after your birth to initialize some post-celestial qi in your body…

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Taoist Chinese material on the internet

More and more people are  becoming capable of reading  Taoist material  in Chinese, so on the internet  , how to search and identify the right content, needs some guidelines:

 1) Nearly most of Taoist books and material can be found free or free to download online, some websites are especially abundant in  such contents :  baidu.com ; sina.com; 360.com..etc provided that you can input the right words;

2) Many contents of Neidan ( internal  Taoist alchemy ) are in fact hidden in TCM writings, so in order to find them , sometimes you better search for TCM contents,  not Taoist alchemist , especially you are oriented to find some cure for  certain disease or you are in fact interested in medical qigong;

3) Taoist alchemical material written in or before the Yuan Dynasty, owing to full of strange jargons :  tiger, dragon, lead, mercury ,baby..etc, are in fact, unreadable to most Chinese, not to speak of foreigners, so better choose those written after that period  , ie, material written in Ming or Ching Dynasty. Besides, the language used is a  little close to the modern Chinese, so they are likely easier to understand .

4)Material  written after 1949 , year of  the Communist takeover, although full of scientific terms, most of them are unlikely to be useful .. I mean if you are searching  for the essence of  Taoism ; if you are searching for material  related to medical qigong, then it is another story.

 

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