Taoist canon
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
The Taoist Canon (Chinese 道藏, pinyin Dào Zàng), is a voluminous collection of Taoist writings, containing well over a thousand texts. Its most well known members would be the Dao de jing and the Zhuang zi, but most are concerned with Taoist alchemy, divination, history or other, non-"philoshophical" types of Taoism.
There is not one Taoist Canon per se. Rather, there are a number of different canons, some of which have now been lost. Some were associated with a particular school, such as Lingbao or Shangqing; some were published under Imperial edict. Even those belonging to a particular school often include the texts of other schools also, and sometimes even popular texts from other Chinese religious traditions (Confucianism or Buddhism.)
External Links
- Daozang (Taoist Canon) (http://www.stanford.edu/~pregadio/daozang.html) - maintained by Fabrizio Pregadio at Stanford University
- The Daoist Canon (http://www.eng.taoism.org.hk/daoist-scriptures/daoist-canon/default.asp) - maintained by Taoist Culture and Information Centre in Hong Kong.
- The Taoist Canon (http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/hbcanondaw-u.html) - maintained by David K. Jordan at UCSD. See also his overview of the canons of all three major Chinese religions, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism, here (http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/chin/hbcanons-u.html).
