Couple founded the Genesee Valley Daoist Hermitage

By Mary Stamp

Thirty years ago, Charlotte Sun and her husband, Sun Da-Jin founded the Genesee Valley Daoist Hermitage on a six-acre farm, located 16 miles outside Moscow, Idaho.

Charlotte and Da-Jin live a simple life close to nature at the hermitage, a secluded residential center that draws a few people at a time from around the world to study.

There they practice and teach Daoist health preservation and healing skills, do daily qigong movement, breathing and meditation, and apply Daoist principles in their daily living.

Both also teach and still travel to China.

Daoism started about 2000 B.C. when the philosopher Laozi wrote down the basic precepts of Daoism.

Charlotte describes Daoism as more a philosophy to live life according to nature than a religion.

"Most people practice on their own, but we come together periodically to learn and share," she said.

Helped only by students who stay at the hermitage, they do the work on their sustainable organic farm, providing food for their chang ming diet, which they share with the local community.

Charlotte and Da-Jin grow 80 percent of their own food and also grow food and herbs for the Moscow Food Co-op. For 20 years, they sold at the Moscow Farmers Market and to local restaurants. Da-Jin is a cook and prepares meals for up to 20 on many Sundays.

Their produce includes organic potatoes, beans, carrots, beets, lettuce, kale, chard, cucumber, zucchini, eggplant, green and red amaranth, daikon radish, eggplant, Chinese chives and green bamboo—known as Chinese lettuce.

"We use sustainable practices, such as adding ash from controlled burns to our soil," she said.

The farm was settled by the Borgen family in the late 1800s. Because they used pesticides to grow wheat, barley and garbanzo beans, Charlotte and Da-Jin had to wait three years before their produce was considered organic.

Signs along the roadside say, "No spraying."

"We are too small a farm to go through the expense and paperwork to be licensed as organic, but we have permission by a state program to call our produce organic," she said. "We comply with organic growing practices and have trust from the community."

"Chickens eat the food we eat in the summer and eat squash that we grow in the winter," Charlotte said. "We sell their eggs."

The Genesee Valley Daoist Hermitage provides a residential setting to study and practice Daoism. Daily life follows a schedule with time for practice, study, reading, resting and walking.

As far as Charlotte knows, it is the only residential center for Daoism in the U.S. since one in Colorado closed.

Charlotte, 84, said that she grew up feeling like an outsider in Totowa, N.J., a small town near New York City. Her parents were teachers there.

After high school, she decided to become a registered nurse and completed three years of study in New York City at St. Luke's Hospital School of Nursing, affiliated with Columbia University. She continued studies there and graduated in 1966 with a degree in western psychology and nursing administration.

Charlotte moved to San Francisco, where she became a certified public health nurse and worked in geriatric care when Medicare just started.

Working in a long-term care facility and writing policies for elder care, she was concerned that "old people were warehoused—put in beds with catheters to stagnate."

Charlotte "helped revolutionize long-term care" by getting people out of beds and dressed so they walked, exercised, did activities and ate well."

She worked at a convalescent hospital, in home health and for long-term care facilities from 1970 to 1986. During those years, she earned a master's degree in education at Holy Names College in Oakland and completed doctoral studies in philosophy and religion, particularly Daoism, at the Institute of Asian Studies—now the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

For her doctoral degree, she created her own program, studying Chinese language, history, herbs, taijiquan (tai chi) and qigong at Hangzhou University in China.

Charlotte's doctoral dissertation was on "Daoist Healing Practices in the Long-Term Care Setting."

She shared what she was learning in China, both in teaching classes at several San Francisco Bay Area colleges and as administrator of five long-term care facilities in Vallejo, Calif.

"In those facilities, we called people residents, not patients. We encouraged them to meditate and do qigong, and we cooked meals with whole foods," she said.

After completing the doctoral degree in 1985, Charlotte continued to do studies on Chinese health care, meditation and qigong at the Hangzhou Qigong Science Research Institute.

From 1988 to 1993, she directed a program she started on integral health studies at the Institute of Integral Studies. From 1989 to 1998, she also directed the Daoist Longevity Center in San Francisco.

"I found meaning that fit me outside western thought," she said.

While studying and teaching in Hangzhou, she met Da-Jin at the Qigong Institute.

Da-Jin was born in Hangzhou in 1948 during the Communist Revolution. In his high school years, the Cultural Revolution began. He was sent to the countryside to do agricultural work. He injured his back and was told he might never walk. Da-Jin's father brought a qigong master to work with him, and eventually he was able to walk again.

Da-Jin continued studies of gongfu (Kung Fu) physical and mental discipline and qigong under several masters. Then he taught it and became director at the Hangzhou Qigong Science Research Institute. He also taught as an adjunct faculty member at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Before moving to Idaho, Charlotte and Da-Jin lived and worked in San Francisco and Hangzhou. Their daughter, Sun-Hong, was born in China and raised by Da-Jin's mother. She is now a registered nurse at the University of Washington Medical Center.

In March 1989, when visiting her sister in Moscow, Idaho, Charlotte and Da-Jin married. Because they met in China, they speak Chinese with each other, and she is his interpreter.

Charlotte, a Daoist nun in the 24th generation of the Dragon Gate School, was a disciple of Bao Zong-de in Dongyang, China. Since his death in 1992, she has continued the lineage.

In 1993, Charlotte and Da-Jin decided to move to Idaho and looked for a farm. In 1994, they opened the Genesee Valley Daoist Hermitage.

Charlotte's mother moved to Moscow, where her sister and her husband worked and taught at the University of Idaho (UI). Charlotte has been a guest teacher at the UI, Washington State University and Lewis and Clark State College, and taught fundamentals of traditional Chinese medicine at the Moscow School of Massage.

"We grow traditional Chinese herbs for therapeutic use to treat people," she said. "We also teach people to grow the Chinese herbs."

Charlotte listed some of the herbs and their purposes.

• Skull cap is an herbal antibiotic.

• Indigo leaves and roots treat colds, flu and COVID.

• Dandelion green poultice and dandelion tea treat cancer.

• Canadian thistle tea is used for cancer.

• Safflower oil on the skin relieves sprains and aches. Safflower tea improves circulation to relieve PMS and headaches.

"Garlic and onions that we grow are staples in our diet, along with vinegar and ginger—which we buy—to tone up our immune system and as antibiotics," said Charlotte, explaining that most Indigenous cultures know medicinal use of herbs, but Chinese recorded the uses in writing.

"Western societies often consider these remedies as unscientific," she said.

For the hermitage's 30th anniversary, they held an educational event at the 1912 Center in Moscow. Of more than 50 who came, 15 former students traveled from the Bay area and Oregon.

Charlotte said she and Da-Jin have invited local younger people and students to serve on a hermitage succession committee to keep the center going.

For information, call 208-285-0123 or visit gvdaoisthermitage.org.