Introduction

[Ailun]

Hello,

 

I'm a grad student (studying linguistics). I bought a copy of the Tao Te Ching a year ago, for no special reason. I really liked the philosophy and the style of it, and read it in one day.

 

Perhaps a few weeks later, I was brooding about some problem or other, sitting at my desk, and for some reason I picked up the book again. I read it very quickly, and I was surprised that by the end I felt much, much better. My mind was clear and I was calm, whatever had been bothering me no longer seemed overwhelming, or even especially important (and indeed, in hindsight, it wasn't).

 

At the time I lived in the SF Bay Area. I think I had already been learning tai chi for a while from a former student of Wong Jack Man (I didn't know this at the time, I only found out later when another teacher asked about previous training). I looked around for Taoist organizations, but found that apart from temples which clearly catered to an ethnic Chinese demographic, expensive and questionable new-agey stuff, and various sorts of tai chi, there was not much around.

 

So, I bought the Chuang Tzu and loved that as well. I kept rereading Tao Te Ching from time to time. I bought a few other books by Liu I Ming and so on, and occasionally picked them up. But I didn't really know what else to do.

 

Now I am in Tucson, and I still don't know what to do. I want to do more than read about it all, but if I couldn't find anything useful in SF with its huge chinese-american population, I don't hold out much hope for Arizona. I guess I'll just keep reading and I'll figure out what I'm looking for some day.

[Mal]

[Stigweard]