Glossary of Taoist Terms
A reference guide to the key concepts, Chinese terms, and philosophical vocabulary you'll encounter in Taoist thought. Chinese characters and approximate pronunciations included.
D
Dao / Tao 道
The Way — the fundamental principle underlying all things. The Tao is not a god, not a law, and not a moral system; it is the natural order of the cosmos, the process by which all things arise, move, and return. Laozi opens the Tao Te Ching with the statement that it cannot be named, which is itself the most accurate thing one can say about it: as soon as it is fixed into words or concepts, something essential slips away. In practice, aligning with the Tao means moving with the grain of things rather than against it — not forcing, not striving, but acting in accord with the natural tendencies of each situation.
Daojia 道家
Philosophical Taoism — the intellectual and contemplative tradition rooted in the Tao Te Ching of Laozi and the writings of Zhuangzi, as distinct from the later organized religious movements. Daojia is concerned with understanding the nature of the Tao, living in alignment with it, and the cultivation of inner stillness and naturalness. It is not a religion in the Western sense — it has no doctrinal requirements, no priesthood, and no conception of a personal god — but a philosophical orientation toward life. Most of what is discussed on this site falls under Daojia rather than the religious traditions.
De / Te 德
Virtue, inner power, or integrity. The character combines elements suggesting movement and the heart-mind, pointing toward a quality that is expressed through action and presence rather than held as an abstract principle. De is not moral virtue in the Western sense — it is not rule-following or the suppression of impulses — but the natural expression of a being genuinely aligned with the Tao. A person of great De moves through life without straining; their actions arise spontaneously from their true nature rather than from effort or self-consciousness. The title of the Tao Te Ching is often translated as "The Book of the Way and Its Power," where "power" refers to De.
J
Jian 儉
Frugality, conservation, moderation. Jian is one of Laozi's Three Treasures, named in Chapter 67 of the Tao Te Ching alongside compassion and humility. The concept is not about poverty or deprivation but about knowing enough — not using more than is needed, not speaking more than is necessary, not straining when ease is available. The principle extends beyond material things to attention, effort, and action: a person practicing jian does not exhaust their resources through excess, and so always has something in reserve. In a culture oriented toward accumulation and productivity, jian is a quietly radical stance.
L
Laozi 老子
The Old Master, or sometimes the Old Child — the legendary author of the Tao Te Ching and the founding figure of philosophical Taoism. Whether Laozi was a historical individual is genuinely uncertain; the traditional biography, which describes him as a contemporary of Confucius who served as an archivist and later departed westward through a mountain pass, is disputed by modern scholars. What is clear is that the text attributed to him is one of the most influential works in human history, translated into more languages and editions than almost any other book. The name itself is sometimes read as a title — "the old master" — rather than a personal name.
Li 理
Pattern, principle, the natural grain of things. Li refers to the inherent structure or order that makes things what they are — the pattern in a piece of jade that makes it beautiful, the channel a river naturally finds through a landscape, the logic by which a situation tends to unfold. In Taoist thought, acting in accord with li means reading the natural structure of a situation and moving with it rather than imposing an external order. The concept is related to wu wei: the skilled person — whether a craftsman, a leader, or a cook — learns to perceive li and work along its grain rather than against it.
N
Neidan 內丹
Inner alchemy. A tradition of Taoist meditation and cultivation practice that uses the metaphors and vocabulary of alchemical transformation to describe internal processes. Where the outer alchemists (waidan) worked with furnaces and chemical substances to seek immortality or elixirs, the inner alchemists understood the body itself as the crucible: the refinement of jing (essence), qi (energy), and shen (spirit) through meditation and breath practice. Neidan became the dominant form of Taoist cultivation practice from the Tang dynasty onward and is the basis of many modern Taoist meditation traditions.
Neiguan 內觀
Inner observation or inner contemplation. A meditative practice of turning awareness inward — away from the external world of objects and events — to observe the body's energies, the flow of qi, and the movements of the mind. Neiguan is one of the foundational practices of Taoist internal cultivation; the aim is not to analyze or judge what one finds but simply to observe with clarity and stillness. Over time, sustained inner observation is said to reveal the natural patterns of the body and mind and to cultivate the kind of self-knowledge that makes effortless action possible.
P
Pu 樸
The uncarved block. The character depicts an unworked piece of wood or stone — raw material before any tool has shaped it into something particular. In Taoism, pu represents original, undifferentiated potential: the state of a thing, or a person, before concepts and categories have fixed it into a particular form. Once the block is carved, it can only be what it has been carved into; in its raw state, it could become anything. Laozi uses pu as an image of the ideal state of human consciousness — open, unformed, responsive — before education, socialization, and habit narrow it into rigid patterns. It is related to the concept of ziran, naturalness.
Q
Qi 氣
Vital energy, life force, breath — the fundamental animating substance of Chinese cosmology. Qi is something like a middle category between matter and energy: it is what makes living things alive, what moves through the body in patterns of health and disease, what fills the atmosphere and gives it its particular quality on a given day. In Taoist thought, qi is not merely a medical concept but a cosmological one: the ten thousand things arise through the differentiation and interaction of qi, and return to the undifferentiated ground from which they came. In the body, qi flows through pathways called meridians; health is understood as the balanced and unobstructed movement of qi.
Qigong 氣功
Energy cultivation practices — a broad category of Taoist and Chinese health practices that combine slow, deliberate movement with breath work and meditative attention to cultivate and balance qi in the body. Qigong ranges from gentle standing and moving forms accessible to all ages and physical conditions to more demanding practices requiring years of dedicated training. The underlying principle across all forms is the same: by bringing deliberate, relaxed awareness to movement and breath, the practitioner learns to perceive and guide the movement of qi. Many people come to qigong through health and stress-reduction interests; those who continue often find it becomes a contemplative practice with broader effects on how they live.
S
Shen 神
Spirit, consciousness, the higher aspects of human awareness. In Taoist medicine and cultivation practice, shen is one of the Three Treasures of the body — alongside jing (essence or vital substance) and qi (energy). If jing is the material substrate of life and qi is the animating energy, shen is the animating intelligence: the clarity and presence that makes a person fully alive rather than merely functional. When shen is bright, the eyes are clear and the person is fully present; when shen is disturbed or depleted, the eyes go dull and the mind loses its natural coherence. Taoist cultivation practices aim at refining and brightening shen.
San Jiao 三教
The Three Teachings — Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. In Chinese intellectual history, these three traditions have generally been understood as complementary paths rather than competing religions, each addressing a different dimension of human life: Confucianism for social ethics and governance, Buddhism for questions of suffering and liberation, Taoism for the understanding of nature and the cultivation of the self. The three traditions influenced each other profoundly over centuries and many Chinese people have drawn on all three simultaneously without experiencing any contradiction. The San Jiao framework reflects a characteristically Chinese approach to religious and philosophical difference.
T
Tao Te Ching 道德經
The Book of the Way and Its Power (or Virtue). The foundational text of philosophical Taoism, attributed to Laozi and traditionally dated to the 6th century BCE, though modern scholarship suggests it may have been compiled over a longer period. It consists of 81 short chapters — some as brief as a few lines — covering the nature of the Tao, the principles of good governance, the practice of wu wei, and the paradoxes of knowledge and power. The Tao Te Ching has been translated into English more times than almost any other book in history; each translation reveals different aspects of a text that resists definitive interpretation. No single translation captures it entirely.
W
Wu 無
Nothingness, absence, emptiness. Not nihilistic nothingness but productive emptiness — the kind of absence that makes things useful and possible. Chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching makes the point through three examples: it is the empty hub of a wheel that allows the axle to turn; it is the empty space within a room that makes the room habitable; it is the hollow of a vessel that makes it able to hold water. Wu is not a deficiency but a condition of function. In broader Taoist thought, wu names the undifferentiated ground before the ten thousand things arise — the primordial openness from which the Tao gives birth to all things.
Wu Wei 無為
Non-action, or effortless action. The term is often misread as passivity or doing nothing, but this misses its essential meaning. Wu wei is not inaction but action that is fully aligned with the natural flow of a situation — without forcing, without straining against the grain of things, without imposing the ego's agenda on a process that has its own natural movement. The skilled practitioner of wu wei accomplishes what needs to be done with the minimum necessary effort, like water finding its level or a craftsman working along the natural grain of wood. It is the central practical teaching of the Tao Te Ching and one of the most misunderstood concepts in popular treatments of Taoism.
Wu Xing 五行
The Five Phases, often translated as the Five Elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. Unlike the Western four-element system, the Wu Xing is not primarily a classification of matter but a model of cyclical transformation — a way of understanding how qi moves through phases of growth, flourishing, harvest, storage, and renewal. The five phases map onto seasons, organs of the body, directions, tastes, emotions, and other phenomena in a system used extensively in Chinese medicine, cosmology, and strategy. Understanding the Wu Xing as a dynamic cycle of relationships rather than a static taxonomy is key to grasping its use in Taoist and Chinese thought.
X
Xin 心
Heart-mind. The Chinese character depicts the physical heart, but the concept does not separate the emotional and cognitive functions that Western thought tends to assign to different faculties. The xin is the seat of awareness, feeling, and intelligence together — the center of human experience in its entirety. This integrated understanding matters for Taoist practice: the goal is not to discipline the emotions with the intellect, or to think more clearly by suppressing feeling, but to cultivate a quality of heart-mind that is naturally clear, settled, and responsive. When Zhuangzi speaks of the "fasting of the heart-mind," he means a quality of the whole xin — not just the thinking mind.
Xinzhai 心齋
Fasting of the heart-mind. Zhuangzi's term for a meditative practice of emptying the conceptual mind — releasing preferences, judgments, fixed ideas, and the habitual agendas of the ego so that pure awareness and natural response can emerge. The term is deliberately paradoxical: fasting normally means going without food, but here what is given up is not material substance but mental grasping. When Confucius (in Zhuangzi's fictional dialogue) explains xinzhai, he describes it as listening not with the ears or the mind but with the qi — allowing the empty space within to receive what arises without immediately categorizing or reacting to it. It is one of Zhuangzi's most direct descriptions of meditative practice.
Y
Yi 易
Change, transformation, flux. The character is said to depict a chameleon, and the meaning captures the fundamental Taoist insight that all things are in continuous transformation — nothing is fixed, nothing is permanent, and the attempt to hold things in a fixed state works against the natural order. The Book of Changes (I Ching or Yijing) is built entirely on this observation: each of its 64 hexagrams represents a moment in a dynamic process, and wisdom lies in reading where in that process one stands and how to move with it. Yi as a concept connects Taoism with a much older layer of Chinese cosmological thinking.
Yin-Yang 陰陽
The two complementary, interdependent aspects of all phenomena. Yin encompasses what is receptive, yielding, dark, cool, and associated with rest and consolidation; yang encompasses what is active, assertive, light, warm, and associated with movement and expansion. The crucial Taoist understanding is that neither quality is superior to the other and neither can exist without the other — yin and yang define each other and constantly transform into each other, as night becomes day and action eventually gives way to rest. The familiar symbol, showing each half containing a seed of the other, expresses this dynamic interdependence. Misreadings of yin-yang as a simple binary opposition miss the point entirely.
Z
Zhuangzi 莊子
Both the philosopher and the text named after him. The historical Zhuangzi was a Taoist thinker of the 4th century BCE, a contemporary of Mencius, who lived in what is now Henan province. Where Laozi is spare and aphoristic, Zhuangzi is playful, paradoxical, and often darkly funny — he uses extended fables, imaginary dialogues, and sudden reversals to undermine fixed certainties and open the reader to a more fluid way of experiencing the world. He is famous for the butterfly dream, the parable of Cook Ding, the usefulness of uselessness, and his response to his wife's death. The text that bears his name is one of the great works of world literature, regardless of one's interest in Taoism.
Ziran 自然
Naturalness, spontaneity, self-so-ness. The character combines "self" and "thus" or "so," yielding something like "being as one naturally is" or "things being what they are of their own accord." Ziran points to the quality of action or being that arises without contrivance, performance, or the intervention of a self-conscious will — not the absence of skill, but skill so deeply integrated that it no longer feels like effort. A tree growing toward the light is exhibiting ziran; so is a master calligrapher whose hand moves without calculation. The concept is closely related to wu wei and pu, and represents the goal of Taoist self-cultivation: not the achievement of some ideal state but the return to one's own undistorted nature.
Zuowang 坐忘
Sitting and forgetting. Zhuangzi's term for a deep meditative state in which one releases fixed identity, the body's boundaries, the habitual ego, and accumulated conceptual structures to join with the open, undivided field of awareness. The term appears in a dialogue in the Zhuangzi where Confucius's student Yan Hui describes his practice: he has "forgotten benevolence and righteousness," then "forgotten rites and music," and finally achieved zuowang — dropping the body and intellect, releasing consciousness of particular things, and merging with the Great Pervader. It describes not trance or blankness but a radical openness that is the meditative counterpart of wu wei in action.