Blog
My Taoism teacher, Stuart Olson, recently passed away. The Sanctuary of Tao wrote a tribute to him. I wanted to write one as well.
I first encountered Stuart during the 2019 Qigong Global Summit, an online event that no longer exists. Stuart gave a talk about Taoism. In it, he described it as an
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Dear friends,
Since Stuart’s passing, many of you have been wondering: What will happen to the Sanctuary of Tao?
The good news is that this is exactly why the Sanctuary of Tao was created: to preserve the teachings Stuart sought to transmit so they could live on beyond him. None of us expected tha...
I met Stuart in 1992—more than thirty years ago. Like a lot of people, I wanted to learn Tai Chi. I had started studying with Jim Lodal, a student of Master Liang’s and Stuart’s in Duluth, MN.
Jim told me that Stuart, newly married to Lian Hua and with his son Lee, on the way, had just moved back t...
When someone like Stuart, who devoted his life to the Taoist arts of vitality, passes in his 75th year, it can raise questions. How could a teacher of health and longevity die “relatively young”?
Stuart himself would have wanted us to look at this openly, without denial. For him, life as it is was ...
天 文 錄
Tian Wen Lu
Translation Copyright © 2014 by Stuart Alve Olson. From the Chinese book Non Action Tranquil Sitting Methods (無為靜坐法, Wu Wei Jing Zuo Fa) compiled by Master Xu Zhenru (徐真如. Xu Zhenru). Derived from the work compiled by Hunyizi (混一子). Published and printed by Zhen Shan Mei Book Com...
Translation © 2023 by Stuart Alve Olson
These translations of the Scripture on Tao and Virtue by Lao Zi (道 德 經 著 老 子) include the rare commentary by Taoist Immortal Bai Yuchan (白 玉 蟾, 1194–1229 CE), more popularly called the Jade Toad Immortal. Bai Yuchan was the fifth patriarch of the Southern Sch...
During my last talk in the membership, I spoke a little on Wei Wu Wei, the Taoist idea of “active non-action,” or possibly better said, “active non-calculation.” However one wishes to translate this term, the concept of “doing nothing” always comes to mind, or as we might want to state it, “actively...
Originating sometime during the Tang dynasty in Shanxi province, this story is about an elderly man who sold herbal medicines in the marketplace of his village. Since no one in the village knew his name, they just called him the Old Herb Seller.
Wang Yu, a rich man in the village, was reserved, kin...
For a long time now I’ve been wanting to tell this Taoist story about a young girl who wanted to learn Taoist magic and become an immortaless. It really has good advice about self-cultivation of Taoism and goes like this:
In the province of Sichuan there was a very rich man, who had a young daughte...
In Taoism, life and death, or mortality and immortality, are one and the same. Mortality is immortality and immortality is mortality, just as life is death and death is life.
Taiji Symbol
In the Taiji (Yin-Yang) symbol it can be seen that death (the small dark circle) exists within life (the large...
Sitting in meditation as done in Zuo Wang (Sitting and Forgetting) there’s really little to depend upon. I think this is why most people acquire real doubts about practicing meditation. We can go to many types of workshops and seminars to learn various things that seem to have some aspect of a tangi...
