In 2013, I served as a lecturer of Daoism at the University of California Berkeley. Daoism [also spelled “Taoism”] is the only organized religion ever to have arisen in China. It is commonly known as the “religion of immortality” because followers hoped to merge their bodies with the Dao, the basic life-force of the universe. In the first part of this course, students examined a variety of Chinese “texts” (e.g., scriptures, paintings, rituals) to build a more profound understanding of religious Daoism in ancient, medieval, and modern China. In the second part of the course, we paid close attention to how Daoist rituals and ideas permeated peoples throughout SE Asia and the United States.
