Everyday Tao: Living with Balance and Harmony by Deng Ming-Dao


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Everyday Tao: Living with Balance and Harmony by Deng Ming-Dao is a companion volume to the bestselling 365 Tao: Daily Meditations.

Everyday Tao: Living with Balance and Harmony provides clear, specific directions on bringing the Taoist spirit into our work, our relationships, and other aspects of our everyday lives.

Each ideogram provides the starting point for a Taoist lesson. The narrative that follows shows how we can achieve an intimate relationship with nature, others, and our natural selves.

Buy Everyday Tao by Deng Ming-Dao

The Taoist spirit comes to life, made vibrant and contemporary through the Chinese ideograms whose images and stories speak of living in harmony with the Tao. Everyday Tao revives an ancient approach to meditation and reflection by using these stories as sources of insight for spiritual growth.

I really found the this idea to be so enlightening:

Tao is a person running along a path.

I use this book as part of my study of Taoism.

Deng Ming-Dao writes this about Everyday Tao: Living with Balance and Harmony:

This book takes the structure of Chinese words as its framework. Many words (though not all) are pictures, and oftentimes, understanding the picture helps illuminate the meaning.

Studying Taoism in the United States is undeniably shaped by translation. Oddly, studying Taoism in China is, in some ways, also influenced by translation: classical Chinese is hard to decipher even for current scholars, and the books are interpreted into contemporary Chinese. But by looking at the word-pictures and understanding what the ancients were trying to convey, we can have wonderful keys to the deeper meanings of Taoism.

With the help of Edward Thi, a professor and calligrapher, I explored the origins of each word. The pictures led me back to the beginnings of the Chinese language, and thus the beginnings of what it meant to follow the Tao.

Everyday Tao: Living with Balance and Harmony by Deng Ming-Dao is available from Amazon.com in Kindle and other formats.

I enjoyed reading the following reviews:

In this companion volume to 365 Tao, Deng Ming-Dao explores the central features of Taoism and their application to everyday life. Divided into sections with names like “Nature,” “Silence,” “Devotion” and “Self,” Deng’s individual meditations focus on virtues like charity, kindness, patience and diligence. Each meditation is preceded by a drawing of an ancient Chinese ideogram of which Deng offers a translation and an extended reflection on the drawing’s meaning, or instruction, for following the Tao. For example, in his reflection on travel, he illustrates the various ways in which the act of traveling is synonymous with following the Tao. In his words, “to travel means to trust the Tao.” Deng’s poetic conversations on the harmony and balance of living the Tao in everyday life should have broad appeal.
—Publishers Weekly

In his introduction, Ming-Dao explains that Tao is “literally the movement of all life … the total ongoing of the universe,” and that to live according to Taoist principles is to go along with this movement, this flow. Ming-Dao notes eight “special qualities” of people who internalize Taoism: simplicity, sensitivity, flexibility, independence and being focused, cultivated, disciplined, and joyous. The body of the book consists of texts based on Chinese characters emblematic of certain aspects of the Taoist way, including specific aspects of nature, silence, conduct, moderation, devotion, teaching, self, and union. In his clear and concise definitions of each concept, Ming-Dao provides a running history of Tao, a summary of Tao practice, and suggestions for how the study of Taoism can enrich everyday life in the Western world.
—Donna Seaman, Booklist

Everyday Tao: Living with Balance and Harmony by Deng Ming-Dao is available from Amazon.com.

Books by Ming Dao

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Copyright © 1980 to 2025 by Richard Edward Ward. All rights reserved.