Customer Reviews

Vitality, Energy, Spirit: A Taoist Sourcebook (Shambhala Dragon Editions)

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Cleary has done an excellent job of putting a number of essential Taoist texts into one volume. The book begins with some Tao Te Ching and leads straight into some translations of Ancester Lu - not everything, just the essentials.

There are numerous other texts here and, quite framkly, the book stands quite well as a new start in the tradition of the old classics. That is, there appears to be a lot of 'method' to Cleary's 'madness' of taking only sections of the texts in conjunction with the general development of the material.

This book contains enough of the classics that it is essential to anyone seriously practicing Qigong. If you have this and a couple of Eva Wong's excellent translations you probably don't need much else for your library.

This is a must have for anyone interested in Taoism. Has an excelent selection from numerous important authors from Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu sequentialy through the writing of 20th century Taoists. Superb for the beginner and indespensable to the serious collector.

For reading on Taoism, I say read the Tao Te Ching, then read this book. When I found Vitality, Energy, Spirit at the library, it blew me away. The book presents an excellent blend of Taoist thought and philosophy, meditation theory, folk tales, and commentary, ranging from some of the earliest known Taoist texts to writings of the twentieth century. What I love most about the book is it actually flows very well for a reference-type book, and Cleary is a master at picking out the most potent pieces from a variety of important Taoist writings. He never spends too much time on one author or text, but manages to tie each selection together so that it doesn't read as some collection of random excerpts.

In my somewhat limited experience, studying Taoism can be rather confusing as it has evolved so much over the centuries, many schools of thought seeming to directly contradict each other, and the inner alchemy stuff can get especially abstract. I would never dream of taking on reading some of the texts Cleary draws from (and I probably couldn't find some of them even if I wanted to), so it's great that so much vital Taoist information has been consolidated into one gem of a book. I read the whole thing front-to-back when I first checked it out from the library, and had to recheck it out 3 times before I finally tracked it down and ordered it through Amazon. If you're interested in Taoism at all, I highly recommend this one.

A great anthology, and typical of Shambhala publications: concise, factual, and comprehensive! An excellent introduction to understanding Taoism.

The most Comprehensive, complete book on the subtle aspects of Taoism ever read. Brought many peices together.

If you study the great way then this book will help you much. If you study qi gong and like to mess with energy then there is also much that this book can offer you. In a nutshell it is the most complete book of philosophy and spiritualistic studies I have ever encountered save for Balfour's "Taoist Texts" unfortunately this text is hard to come by as it's last reprint was in 1975 and it's original translation and first printing was done in 1880. One can find it from used or rare book dealers however, I actually purchased mine from the amazon auction store, it was the only one they had however.