‘Bigu’, or ‘grain avoidance’, is an ancient practice in Taoism that involves long-term abstinence from the ‘five grains’: various cultivars of rice, wheat, millet, hemp, soybeans and so on.
The I Ching has served for thousands of years as a philosophical taxonomy of the universe, a guide to an ethical life, a manual for rulers, and an oracle of one’s personal future and the future of the state. It was an organizing principle or authoritative proof for literary and arts criticism, cartography, medicine, and many of the sciences, and it generated endless Confucian,
Last year I got a call from Abbess Yin, an old friend who runs a Daoist nunnery near Nanjing. I’ve always known her as supernaturally placid and oblique, but this time she was nervous and direct: a group of Germans were coming to spend a week learning about Daoist life; could I travel down from Beijing to help? To translate, I asked? No, she said impatiently, to mediate to