Is Daoism Chinese?

Underlying many of the fierce arguments about whether Westerners are appropriating Daoism  is a basic question: is Daoism Chinese? If not, it’s hard to see [&hellip

The Tao of Queen Mary

The Netflix series “The Crown” offers a very interesting bit of applied Daoism, spread across three episodes in Season 1. It’s always tempting to twist [&hellip

You Forget Yourself

In the Broadway smash hit “Hamilton,” our hero meets his future wife Eliza Schuyler by first hitting on her sister Angelica with a very bold [&hellip

Bomb-Making Refugees

I’m not a big meme guy, in part because it’s hard for them to get into any reasonable level of nuance. Now that I made [&hellip

Scientific Blinders

A post last year looked at the ways in which even the best scientists — Albert Einstein, for example — are prone to disregarding empirical [&hellip

Bruce Lee and the Power of Water

I just ran across a classic post at Maria Popova’s always worthwhile BrainPickings that illuminates the connection between martial arts and Daoism. She’s telling the [&hellip

Spooky Action at a Distance

Einstein was wrong. As insightful as he was about the nature of the universe, the most famous Western genius since Aristotle could not wrap his [&hellip

Aleister Crowley’s Black Magickal “Tao Teh King”

There are a lot of good English editions of the Daodejing, from scholarly translations by Victor Mair and Robert Henricks to the more poetic version [&hellip