Đạo Tạng 道藏

Đạo Tạng (道藏) — in Chinese Daozang — is the name given to the collected scriptures of Daoism, gathered, classified and edited over many dynasties. Several canons were compiled in Chinese history, but the only one to survive intact is the Ming woodblock edition: the 《正統道藏》 Zhengtong Daozang (1445) together with its continuation, the 《萬曆續道藏》 Wanli Xu Daozang (1607).

So when people say "the Daozang" they usually mean the combined printing of these two: 5,485 juan (卷) in 512 cases (函), containing close to 1,500 separate texts. The set is numbered using the 《千字文》 Thousand Character Classic — each case carries one character from that ancient poem, an ingenious way of "encoding a library".

The edition in circulation today descends from the early twentieth century: after the Ming printing blocks were destroyed in the Boxer upheaval, Shanghai's Hanfen Lou (上海涵芬樓) photographed and reprinted the copy preserved at the White Cloud Abbey (白雲觀) in Beijing — which is how the canon reached us at all.

The whole canon is organised by the system 三洞四輔十二類 — Three Caverns, Four Supplements, Twelve Categories. This is not merely shelving: it is a theological map, in which each tier corresponds to a grade of teaching and a distinct line of transmission.

The word dong (洞) means "to penetrate" or "to be thoroughly conversant with" — it denotes the practitioner's penetration of truth, not a physical cave.

A note for taijiquan practitioners: the scriptures we care about most — the inner-alchemy and health-cultivation texts such as the Huangting Jing 黃庭經, the Cantong Qi 參同契 and the Wuzhen Pian 悟真篇 — sit chiefly in the Taiqing and Dongshen sections.

The Daozang was not written once. It is the result of more than a thousand years of accumulation — and each compilation was tied to a dynasty, an emperor, and the shifting political contest between Daoism and Buddhism.

The whole Daozang is in the public domain and can be read and downloaded free of charge. These are the most complete and reliable sources.

Read online

• 道经云 — daojing.yun: https://daojing.yun/ — online reading and download of the 《正統道藏》 and 《中華道藏》, roughly 73 million characters, with full-text search, vernacular glosses and AI-assisted reading.
• Wikisource: 正統道藏 · 萬曆續道藏 — public-domain text.

Download (Internet Archive)

Each set below includes PDF + EPUB + an OCR text layer already generated — no need to run your own OCR:

An important fact to state plainly: there is still no complete translation of the Daozang into either English or Vietnamese. Readers have translations of individual scriptures — and that is exactly what this library is building.

What this library already holds

Vietnamese-language reference material

• daogiao.io.vn — a series on the Daozang: compilation history, the "Tam Động Tứ Phụ Thập Nhị Loại" system, cultural value.
• daogiao.org.vn — "Đạo Tạng — Kho tàng tri thức Đạo giáo".
• lichsuvietnam.org — analysis of origin, structure and significance.
• daogiao.vn — "Cấu trúc Đạo Tạng".

Note: these are secondary sources, several AI-assisted. Verify against the Chinese primary texts where accuracy matters.

The Daozang is the documentary source of nearly the whole theoretical apparatus that taijiquan inherits: the concepts of qi 氣, the dantian 丹田, the microcosmic orbit 周天, yin and yang 陰陽, wu wei 無為, and the union of Heaven and humanity 天人合一 — all argued out in the scriptures of the Taiqing and Dongshen sections.

When a taijiquan teacher says "use intent, not force" (用意不用力), or "let the qi sink to the dantian" (氣沉丹田), those are fragments of a larger intellectual system — and the Daozang is where that system is recorded most completely.