Libary Of Daoism

First of all, let me apologize to everybody who showed interest in my posts. After I created this website in 2021, I did not expect any interests from the internet. So the website was ignored since then. In the past few days, I came back for something else and found out that there are quite a few comments to my posts. I apologize to everybody who has been ignored for such a long time.

Since there are some interests, I will post more about Daoism and XiuXian. Nowadays, there are quite a few impressive XiuXian online novels. One of the most well-known novels, is titled “Legend of Average Joe’s XiuXian”. In Chinese, it is “凡人修仙传”。If there is sufficient amount of interest, say more than 100 audiences, I may translate this into English. The original novel has about 2,500 chapters, which took the author 5 years to write 1 or 2 chapters a day. If translating into English, it will be much more time consuming, since many jargons in Chinese do not have the counterparts in English. That alone requires a lot of research.

Honestly, there are so many things to write about Daoism. Today, we will talk about the existing “Library of Daoism”, which is considered as one of the handful Chinese core culture and values. In Chinese, the name of that library, is “道藏”。

The Library of Daoism is like the Library of Congress, which collects almost every valuable publication in USA. If you write a thesis or dissertation as a graduate student, your thesis or dissertation will be collected by Library of Congress of the USA. The Library of Daoism has been edited in similar ways. As one of the great achievements, each empire in Chinese history would consider editing all kinds of Libraries. The Library of Daoism has been one of them.

Since the Qin Dynasty 2000 years ago, XiuXian became one of the major advocates of the empires. Some were XiuXianers (i.e., XiuXian Practitioners) themselves. The first Chinese empire, QinShiHuang, was very enthusiastic in XiuXian. He sent one of the XiuXianers at that time, called “徐福”， to travel into the Pacific Ocean and search for the three fantasy islands of Chinese culture, namely the “PengLai” island, the “FangZhang” island and the “YingZhou” island, where immortals live. It turned out that “徐福” landed in Japan and brought Chinese culture to Japanese natives at that time. Later, QinShiHuang died in his 50s. However, his death is very mysterious. He died during a trip to the East China along the Pacific Ocean, where he was persuaded early by XiuXainers that there are the three fantasy islands in the ocean, and where there are medicine that can let human live forever. When he and his team returned home, he was announced death all of a sudden. The mysterious part is that nobody actually saw his corpse. Yes, some believed that he became a XiuXianer.

The earlier edition of the Library may trace back to 1552 years ago, when it was in the era of Chinese South-North Kingdoms, where there were several independent kingdoms, which was before the Tang Dynasty and 500 years after QinShiHuang. At that time, there were 1224 volumes in the library. Nowadays, there are 5600 volumes.

The library is classified according to the following topics:

• Three Insights (三洞）：
  1. Insight to ultimate truth (洞真), for late Super Category XiuXianers and immortals;
  2. insight to law of nature （洞玄）, for late Goden Dan and early Super Category Xiuxianers;
  3. insight of souls （洞神）, for late Break-Ground XiuXianers and Goden Dan XiuXianers
• Four Disciplines (四辅)：
  1. Ultimate law of nature (太玄部), a supplement to the second insight, i.e., “Insight to law of nature”;
  2. The law and values of XiuXianation（太平部）；
  3. Collection of Golden Dan Training Theories（太清部）, a supplement to the third insight, i.e., Insight of Souls；
  4. Following nature (正一部), a branch of Daoism that practices respects to the popular values in Chinese societies,
     for Qi and early Break-Ground category practitioners.
• 12 Subjects for each discipline
  1. Monographs
  2. The accompanying majic drawing that demo how to use the energy to do tricks, equivalent to modern electric circuit board
  3. The annotations
  4. Graphical and/or visual explanations of concepts, methods and skills
  5. The Gods and their manuscripts
  6. Rules and values
  7. Social Norms
  8. Training methods
  9. Applications of using the energy to do tricks
  10. Biographies of XiuXianers, Churches, etc.
  11. The book of Psalms
  12. The spells to communicate with Chinese Heaven and some of the lower level officers in Heaven

  Here is the link, if you would like to take a look, 正统道藏（Library of Daoism）. You can find another link, 道人家道藏（Library of Daoism ）