Mystery Gate Daily Morning and Evening Scripture Altar Recitation
玄门日诵早晚坛功课经
New Cohort begins October 1st, 2026!
Every Sunday at 10:30am Pacific Time
We meet for 1 - 1.5 hours depending on the progression of the cohort.
Welcome to our Five Immortals Temple Chanting Group（五仙庙经唱班）! Here we aspire to teach recitation of Daoist scripture and to empower each individual with the skill of performing it. Together we create a collective frequency and seek to elevate our vibration, not only through the musical healing of this practice, but also by showing each other compassion and kindness.
First semester (6 months): We will cover Morning and Evening acapella including all chanting, all bao gaos, fish and bell percussion and most major songs.
Second semester (6 months): Continued refinement, assignment of solo parts for performance, learn all percussion melodies (dang, cha, 7 star rhythm, shaban, guoban, drum) and begin to pair it with your recitations.
Third semester (6 months): Learn advanced songs such as Xiao Zan, Zhong Tang Zan, Chan Hui.
Fourth semester (6 months): Learn special New and Full Moon songs and chanting sections such as Mi Luo Gao, Dou Mu Gao, and Zhu Sheng Wen.
What makes our scripture group unique is the participatory nature and uplifting atmosphere. We do not teach “at” you, but we empower each other to sing and share our essence, qi, and spirit through the ceremonial offering of the human voice. Our goal is to elevate together as a collective. Even if you have no background in music, have never sung in front of others before, we create a space for you to feel comfortable at your own pace.
Each month we spend 2 weeks on Morning Scripture and 2 weeks on Evening Scripture to maintain balance and coordinated progress with these 2 large works.
Our class time together includes
A full or partial “performance” run through of morning or evening scripture wherein those who are able (or already in the upper levels) will be assigned solo parts. We sequentially come on/ off mic on the zoom call one by one to execute scripture together. Those who do not have parts can follow along each week.
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Vocal warm ups
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English Readings
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Give and receive feedback
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Learn and workshop new parts each week
Resources We Offer
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Full sheet music and easy to follow line breaks in our Red Songbook ($36 for students, this is a required textbook for the course, not included in your tuition)
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Access to Zi Xiao Gong standard version video with follow along sections
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Individual Er hu instrumental tracks for musically perfect song examples
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Recordings of each class available for 2 weeks
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Weekly live examples with explanations and corrections
Your Instructors
Wei Cheng Ling (Lindsey Wei)
I remember in 2005, during the early years with shifu at the temple, I would look up each word of scripture in a paperback dictionary and hand write out my own translations. At that time, the scripture held the purest of mysteries to me. I still have precious recordings of Li Shifu singing each section for me so that I could follow along and learn them (these old recordings are sometimes shared in our classes!). Chanting on my own for many years, I always felt the scriptures as if washing my being with golden light. Afterwards I would feel cleaner and more vibrant. But it wasn’t until coming together with Alex and a small group of priests from Parting Clouds in 2023, that I felt I really began to find my voice and thrive in this arena of scripture recitation. The energy we created together was very healing, as we can be hard on ourselves in our lack of perfection in the difficulty of scripture recitation. We all accepted each other where we were at, and truly allowed ourselves to elevate by seeing the best in one another. We carry that seed forward with the groups we teach now.
Many of you already know me, but in summary, I am the eldest foreign disciple of Li Shifu and created the very first class of foreign students accepted at the temple in 2008, an invite only course (Johan attended.) I studied with Shifu since 2005, served as senior student and translator from 2008-2010, designing the exchange program that still exists today. I then had my daughter and could only visit occasionally, taking her with me in 2014 and 2016, meanwhile running my school in America and promoting the Chun Yang teachings of Shifu. In 2024, I started having the chance to return again consistently and have been taking students with me for the past 2 years. I became ordained as a Dragon Gate Priestess in 2024 when we performed scripture publicly for the first time in America. I am trained in the Kaiguang ritual and enjoy offering this for anyone who wants their altar statue to be empowered. It is my dream to one day learn the Gao Gong Fa Shi and the Ta Gang Bu Dou.
Li Cheng Cai (Johan Hausen)
My first exposure to the Daoist liturgies was in 2008, thanks to Lindsey Wei, when Li Shifu opened the gates to foreigners for the first time. Having thought through the experiences of my father’s humiliation in music classes at school, I believed that singing was not in my blood or something I should take up and I was less than enthusiastic at the time. Other subjects like healing and martial arts were much closer to my passions at the time. Years later I took over the ‘hot’ seat as translator, and as destiny had it in store the first course to translate was a scripture course to a single participant. This was very challenging on many fronts, since teaching the scripture resorts to many terms that are rarely if at all used in everyday lingo. Fast forward one year, I sat in front of a computer in the bitter cold on White Horse Mountain, typing up the first pinyin version of the Morning and Evening Daoist Liturgy. From time to time my fingers despite wearing gloves were frozen to a degree that I had to temporarily abandon my mission to warm them by the fire for the feeling to return. I asked Li Shifu if learning the scriptures was a good use of my time, to which he answered, ‘what do you think? Of course, it is, tutting in disapproval of my obvious question. Since then I was driven by learning the entire Morning and Evening Scriptures, which I tackled over the following winter by playing and replaying the Purple Cloud Palace (Zixiao Gong) recording over and over until the melody was engrained into my brain to perfection. Decades fast forward this original pinyin version was picked up by the three of us and culminated in a full music sheet version of the scriptures, incorporating pinyin (the romanization of Chinese characters), the melodies as well as the percussion accompaniment. As Li Shifu would call it, an immeasurable merit to future generations.
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Cheng Lai
(Alex Bechtold)
I first started to study Doaist Scriptures and their recitation in early 2017, attended Five Immortals Temple 2019 Morning & Evening Scripture Recitation course, joined Parting Clouds Daoist Education in Summer of 2020, and was present since the first PC Scripture Group began collective recitation, on my birthday, in June 2023. In a joint effort with Lindsey and Johan, we first trained a group of 4 performers who recited collectively, along with ourselves, in-person for 5 days in October 2024. In March 2025, we published a fully revised Morning & Evening Scripture songbook that includes basic percussion, jianpu sheet music, and unique formatting to match the incantations’ musical requirements. We gathered in-person again in October 2025, now with 10 performers ascending the altar together. We currently teach scripture recitation to a group of 20 priests and soon-to-be ordinees on a weekly basis.
registration
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Scripture Cohort
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