SifuPhil

Rainbow - congratulations on the beginning of your journey! As you might guess from the wide range of answers here, there ARE no answers as such. Rather, it's an individual path that you follow in taoism, guided only occasionally by those who have tread the Way previously. You need to be clear on at least one point, in my opinion - are you following taoism as a religion or as a philosophy? The two, although sharing many elements, are also divergent enough to cause mega-headaches. Read, read and re-read the classics - adapt them to YOUR lifestyle - don't let anyone tell you what you should be aiming for, because only YOU know that. Listen to opinions, but see them as merely that - opinions. Seek knowledge but don't bow down to it. Question it. Fight it. See if it stands up to the crucible of real life. And perhaps something that has deeply affected my life - realize that everything is constantly changing... Good luck!

One of the advantages of being a philosophical Taoist, as opposed to a religious one, is that there are FAR less taboos.

Well, I was a student of Sifu Yang for a while, so I have a little bit of an "in", but if you can prove you're a school (usually, here in the states, a business license / tax ID #), you get the wholesale prices. I end up paying about $30 for both jacket and pants.

Great explanation - thank you!

Oh, ok, thank you. Sorry - I thought you were approaching it from a religious / philosophical point of view. Don't quite know WHY I thought that - must be the weekend. So you could then prescribe a diet heavier in fish to remove that dampness, correct?

LOL! Already, I feel myself becoming dirty and undesireable... Thank you, TaoBums!

Not when you pay wholesale it isn't. And if, like me, someone likes the raw brushed silk instead of the shiny stuff, there aren't too many other options except for a typical "kung-fu" outfit.

LOL! Sounds like a MySpace thing - "Pimp out your ChiSpace!" YMAA (Yang Martial Arts Association) has plain but beautiful raw silk uniforms that I always use. They're not flashy, but comfortable as all get-out. Your choice of a rainbow of colors...as long as it's either black or white. If you want a satin pimp outfit (hat not included), try AWMA - they have some flashy colored uniforms.

My title says "TAO MASTER", so it MUST be true!!! Yay! I'm great! I'm wonderful! Let the drums beat and the trumpets play! I'm omnipotent! I'm impotent! I'm unimportant! I'm incompetent! I'm...errr.... ...i'm.....ummm.....i,uh....... *sigh* ...never mind.

Dear Stratocumulus Hermit : As perhaps is the idea that any outside source can give you enlightenment... aka Wikipedia / "researcher" relationship... "I GOTTA' get this paper done tonight - I'll fail the course if I don't!"... Wikipedia expects to be a source of knowledge, but fails among those who realize what true sources are; the "seeker" of that knowledge is betrayed in that they read not the words of a learned body, but a consensus of jackals. Wikipedia thought to be great - they are less than that. "Seekers" thought to become knowledgeable - they gained falsehood. There - now that I've expelled my vitriol against the great god Wiki...LOL... The human creature is a tragically flawed piece of meat...their sub-animal instincts, bred into them and refined over thousands of years, have brought most of them to the point where, if you dangle a promise of power in front of their eyes; if you grant them a few thousand willing "slaves" to hang on their every word and gesture; If you say you will give them a title - they will run roughshod over their own mothers to grasp that brass ring, and damned be those who try to stand in their way! As I said above, I believe it is breeding and genetics. For me, it appears that it is the desire to buy into the cult life; the "need" to "receive knowledge" from a father/mother/god figure; the basically weak position of any supplicant; and the everlasting idea that enlightenment comes from without, not within. A favorite movie of mine - "Circle of Iron" - featured a man on a quest to gain all the world's enlightenment from a legendary Book of Knowledge. In the end, after multiple fights and horrific encounters, he discovered the book's pages were made of mirrors. As he looked upon them, first in astonishment and then in amusement, the Guardian of the Book intoned, "The Seekers fight to come here, year after year, at great cost to themselves and their loved ones...and when they finally fling the Book open in blazing expectation of finding the answers to all their questions... What do they find?....themselves. There IS no "Book"...no enlightenment, outside yourself" ... Of course! But unless you pick and choose your battles very carefully, you'll find yourself fatigued before your time. Not saying this isn't a worthy battle - I think it is. So, discovering WHAT it is that drives them to the false gurus seems a very logical place to start... A peculiar trait amongst the human species - they rarely learn their history, so are doomed to repeat it...

Robots.txt is good as far as it goes, but I understand some engines totally disregard them, and will only read a robot file that is placed in the root directory. Depending on the hosting arrangement, you might not always be able to place your file there, so you'd need to go solely with the robots.txt approach. It's still better than nothing, certainly. It just seems like the old cops-and-robbers game - we put up a new safeguard; they find a way around it.

Cloud, I think you win the kewpie doll! Morals are a man-made construct - not a natural occurrence. Therefore, most taoists wouldn't subscribe to the popular notion of them. "Selfishness" is great - without some degree of selfishness, we wouldn't care for ourselves physically or mentally. It's only when terms like "self", "selfish" and "selfless" become attached to radical swings of behaviour do they earn their bad reputation. The Chinese, like Russia of old, most feared the West because of their unpredictability. We were those crazy people whom you could never be sure just what we'd do in a given situation. That makes for discomfort, and discomfort leads to political / quasi-religious actions. And if "The Useless Tree" didn't mention THIS little fact - Taoist thought is clear on the point of governance - less is better; allow the people to believe it is THEIR actions that are governing them, not yours; move only with considered thought for the governed, not for the greater glory of government or self.

Sunshine, could you please explain this one?

Grrr...now I have to figure out what line of code I messed up that makes my entire site shift off the right-hand side of the page! I KNEW I should have just worn a sandwich-board...

Wow- didn't know the spammers had that much of a leg up on things - goes to show what a specialty field spam prevention is, I suppose. And yes, I like the intro idea - even though I'm usually an intro type, I know a lot of folks aren't, and maybe it would help bring them out of the virtual closet, so to speak. And if it helps stop spammers - all that much better.