The Daoist Scriptures Are Huge

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While the Bible or the Quran can fit into a single volume, the Daoist canon of scriptures contains around 1,500 texts. It is huge. So what is the Daoist canon all about? How did it form?

00:00 Basic overview
3:58 History of the Daozang
9:05 Daozang's role in Daoism
14:20 Register for our Daoism class!

[HeyGrouch]

Laozi: "The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao."
Daoists: *WRITE THAT DOWN WRITE THAT DOWN*

[interferis]

The saddest part is that historic Daoism is rarely studied in the West, but instead, we have massive amounts of new agey self-help butchered interpretations of the Tao Te Ching flooding the market

[vadimuha]

Now I see how Chinese government exam was so hard

[aldrinmilespartosa]

Finally, a book that rival the tumbler Mylittlepony fan fiction wall texts.

[apocryphanow]

It's interesting to hear that individual study of the Daoist texts will vary depending on the needs or interests of the reader, so that two different Daoist readers may end up reading entirely different portions of the texts. Whether admitted to or not, this is commonly done with those who study the Bible.

[Painocus]

The Christian equivalent of this wouldn't really be the bible, but more like if at some point the Catholics gathered up not only the stuff they considered authorative, the writings of the Church Father, the words and biographies of various saints, texts on the stardard way to performe certain rituals and prayers and so on, but also Orthodox writing, the Talmud, writings of those heretics the church fathers were responding to and so on. Then when the Protestants came along instead of removing anything that conflicted with their view, just added the writings of Martin Luther, John Calvin and even Thomas Müntzer.

[EladLerner]

"The way that can be spoken of is not the true way" ≈ "All models are wrong, but some are useful"

[Ssyphoned]

crowdsourcing your holy book is insane

[jackl.]

With Buddhism it’s similar, with upwards of 5, 000 texts depending the canon

[NoOne-gcot]

This is all very interesting but when he said he was in middle school in the early 2000s I promptly turned to dust and disintegrated.

[doriangray]

"The Way that can be spoken of is not the True Way"

[SaurianStudios]

I find eastern religions and philosophies to be incredibly fascinating to learn more, it makes me wish I could read the scared texts of Taoism, Buddhism, confucianism, and Hinduism.

[nebulan]

So, your religion can be flexible and personalizable without the religion falling apart?

[OntologicalShock]

Finally I can relate to this because in Xianxia genre, where most of the protagonist are Daoist and the Chapter have reach from 4, 000 to 10, 000 chapters and the protagonist have live from hundred millennium years to myriad millennium years.
In a novel “A Record of a Mortal's Journey to immortality” have reach 2400 in the mortal world and 1400+ chapters in the Immortal World Arc.
and there's Martial God Asura, and of course my favorite 'Reverend Insanity' by Gu Zhen Ren.

[paulkoza]

Daoism is a religious practice that still mystifies me. Thanks for bringing some light into my darkness.

[keenanarthur]

In college, my favorite professor was a Daoist philosophy professor, but my path of study led me more towards Hindu Tantra and Yoga and Vedānta, which have similarly massive canons. So does Tibetan Buddhism, as I witnessed during an extensive scroll procession on the Buddha's birthday at a Nyingma monastery in 2012. Some Hindu and Buddhist scriptures are considered to have been revealed by deities or disembodied bodhisattvas, and others were written by people viewed as enlightened masters who often specialized in a particular area of traditional study (e.g. medicine, astrology, meditation, alchemy, philosophy, aesthetics). Abhinavagupta was one of the first Śaivas to put his own name on tantric scriptures, rather than attributing his work to Śiva.

Given the profound phenomenological transformations of consciousness related to Tantric or Daoist practices that work with chi or prāṇa and kuṇḍalinī that I and many other people have experienced, I am confident in the veracity of these mystical systems.

[MatheusCosta-toeo]

Excellent academic approach on Daoist Canon.

[ikazuchioni]

Early bird award! And finally, notification worked this time. I usually see your vids a couple of days after uploading.

[Xaiff]

As an avid reader of Xianxia novels, this is an amazing video. Put so many things into better context in my head. :D

[isaach]

That library of wooden blocks is so cool. It's a shame not more survived, but it's a genius way to cheaply print important texts.