From the Tao Canon to the Dragon Gate

Two and a half thousand years of unbroken transmission — from Laozi's wordless Way, through the alchemists and the Complete Perfection masters, to the Dragon Gate hermits who taught GrandMaster Mantak Chia the practices AIYogi carries today.

Behind every branch of Taoism stands a single, disarming claim: that reality has a source which precedes all words, all forms, and all gods — the Tao , the Way. In the sixth to third centuries BCE this insight crystallized in the Daodejing , the "Classic of the Way and Virtue," traditionally ascribed to Laozi, a keeper of the archives at the court of Zhou whom even Confucius is said to have consulted.

Scholars now read the Daodejing as a compilation that reached final form around the third century BCE — terse, poetic, endlessly interpretable. Its companion, the Zhuangzi , is its opposite in tone: sprawling, funny, elusive, full of butterflies and fishing sages and fantastic dialogues. Together they set the two moods of the whole tradition — the still center and the free wanderer — that every later school would try to hold at once.