Greetings,

I'm Ray Burgess, the designer who conceptualized and built this web site. I put up this site in 1998 with Jane English's permission as a homage to her and Gia Fu Feng's translation of the Tao Te Ching. The book had been very inspirational to me in my life and I learned the Tao by originally reading one reading per day from the 1972 edition of the book that I found in a garbage can. It struck me at the time that just reading one chapter per day is a good way to become imbued with the Taoist philosophy.

Recently, Jane came up with a 'gender neutered' rewrite of the book and I offered to update the site for free as well, to reflect the changes.

Let me be clear. I have never earned a penny from this site. Only one person has ever used the donate link and I have maintained the site for 14 years in an act of honoring Jane and her achievments. I have provided helpful links to her site, advocated on her behalf in copyright disputes, increased her volume of sales and promoted her products, her art and her philosophies.

Why have I taken the site down? Because of disrespect leveled at me by Ms. English when I asked for a small bit of assistance. The assistance that I asked for was for her to forward to me a formatted version of the document using a cross-platform supported format. What I got was blaming and shaming. In addition I received a short lecture on how to use a text editor, and a pile of unusable text.

If anyone cares,here is the dialog so you can judge for yourself. To quote my last e-mail;

"If over a decade of respect, service and dedication to you and your products and your art, not to mention a ton of free advocacy and advertisement does not earn me the right to some respect, I doubt there is anything I could say to compel it."

I was not looking for a reward for my work but I never imagined that I would be treated this way for asking for a bit of assistance from the owner. Oh well.

Sincerely,
Ray Burgess
Inventor of the daily-tao