ABSTRACT
As the third millennium opens, it remains very difficult to give an accurate, thorough, and nuanced explanation of the social dynamics of Taoism over the ages. Part of the problem is that an indeterminable amount of pertinent data remains unstudied. Another is that some of our questions may be questions for which the available data may, by their very nature, be largely if not wholly inadequate. For instance, if we were to ask how the understanding and practice of Taoist women differed from that of Taoist men in the fifth century, or in the fifteenth, it is quite possible that we simply do not have, and may never have, a sufficient range of pertinent data to formulate even a sound answer to such questions, much less a definitive one.
