Taoist Texts

There are smokers into their 90s... so False.

 

There are always outliers.   I study data for a living.  

 

Lies, damn lies, and Statistics... 

 

We can discuss without falling into some generalizations... I know some may be unavoidable. 

Good, i love data. As you know the only reason to study data is to predict. And prediction is impossible without generalization.

Yet, an ordinary  individual in a society is forbidden to make generalizations about other individuals. Unless the generalizations are government-approved. 'Smoking is bad', 'Vaccines are good', 

Why?

The answer is power. To make a generalization it is to gain power over the generalized. To the detriment of the incumbent powers that be. Since we live in a zero-sum game. To forbid generalization is one of the ways to stay in power.

I'm still practicing and haven't been sick since I started. I've had many positive feelings from practicing though, some of them quite incredible.

 

I'm skeptical, of course I am. The claims are insane, immortality. But the people from this school, their rational personalities, the teacher's astounding intuitive ability to appeal to the needs of each student, the steadiness and calm focus possessed by exactly all of them (I went to a seminar in St. Petersburg), the spontaneous movement practice, and again the other feelings; I can't help but stay with it to see where it all leads.

 

Thats the key word here.

diet, exercise, and Chinese medicine. Once I'm back to 100% health, which might take half a year, I'll be able to test some of the other things and see what the true cause was.

Half a year! This sounds like something very serious, wish u to get well soon. In my experience the only cure that is extremely safe and produces  wondrous results is fasting , give it a try if you will.

It is an interesting topic. When we can generalise and when we can not (or allowed not)? 'All smokers are damaging their health by smoking cigarettes'. True or false?

  I did notice with shengong that it seemed to have a pretty powerful and deep effect on the manifestations of the Water element in TCM, although I barely practiced it for a few days prior to experiencing a strange illness (which most likely originated from other things happening at the time), and so have quit since then.

 

My view on the school is that it's best for people who enjoy the training. For everyone else, there is a plethora of other schools which may be more fitting to the individual, and you shouldn't be made to feel like you're missing out on anything. I think it's only because the students and instructors of that school are so impressed with their results, that they want to help others find a good way. But there are other good schools.

Neidan pracices make people sick. Internet seminar peddlers are scammers. Nothing surprising about that. What does not cease to amaze me is how people try to rationalize away having been had, even after becoming literally sick.

 

  Who paid him thirty pieces of silver?  

hehehe;)

It's hard enough to find someone that teaches proper Neidan as it is today, if we end up having lot's of unserious teachers will finding a serious teacher become even harder?

The western neidan is a  cottage industry driven by two factors: availability of western 'teachers' and the greed of the seminar goers for health and longevity.

There are no big barriers to entry to become a neidan teacher, that is, a teacher of rejuvenation, health and immortality . The qualifications needed are less than those for a used car salesman. 

All you need to do is to memorize some verbiage and not be dead yet. Oh, yeah, also a website is a must.

Western Neidan= teachers+health/longevity. That's the formula.

But you see,  it turns out that for 200 years already Liu Huayang was saying that no teacher is necessary or even desirable, while  王常月 Wang Changyue  (?-1680)  

especially objected to refining the Material Essence and Vital Breath to get rid of one's illness and prolong bodily life,

So the true neidan has no need of a teacher, and does not provide neither health nor longevity.

Ooops!

Therefore,  i would say the wester neidan, which is a health fad, is not on the rise anymore. When these 2 truths come out, the fad will pass soon.

Kuang Changxiu’s short essay Xiantian qigong is a fun read. It’s been on my coffee table for the last couple months. It’s a great little neidan how-to manual, and one of the few counter examples to the notion that neidan can’t be learnt from books. 

Absolutely.

Liu Huayang, the founder of the neidan as we know it, says that neidan can and should be learned from his book.

this one is oldie but goodie

 Or you'd like to recall how you did translate qixue as "Qi Lair". 
 

"Lao Zi with a sword dispels cheaters and tricksters":

"An angry maniac with a shiv tries to stab Lao-zi"

Look at that poor old Lao-zi running for his life. Run, Lao-zi! Run like the wind!

Historically there was a direct line of succession in Longmen with the head of it for each generation as follows:

历任宗师

• 第一代 赵道坚
• 第二代 张德纯
• 第三代 陈通微
• 第四代 周玄朴
• 第五代分张静定和沈静圆两支传播
  • 张静定 沈静圆
  • 赵真嵩 卫真定
  • 王常月 沈常敬

To say that Longmen has no concept of the "head of the Dragon Gate Tradition" is quite untrue historically. Thats what 宗师 is.

Well Leth i see we are back at square one. I failed but enjoyed our conversation immensely;) Thank you

 "Taoist Master Wang Liping, head of the Dragon Gate Tradition." Deeper in your page, we see the claim, "Wang Liping was chosen by three masters of the Dragon Gate Tradition to become the 18th heir and holder of the lineage."

 

Your biography says you are fluent in Chinese, so how do you not realize that there is no "head of the Dragon Gate Tradition"? There is no Dragon Gate "pope," most certainly not a layman-pope,  

Walker , would you care to explain what this list is and who are all these people? Thanks;)

• 第一代 赵道坚
• 第二代 张德纯
• 第三代 陈通微
• 第四代 周玄朴
• 第五代分张静定和沈静圆两支传播
  • 张静定 沈静圆
  • 赵真嵩 卫真定
  • 王常月 沈常敬

 

 

If people other than the insatiably argumentative Taoist Texts  

As much as I am not a big fan of Wang's, Walker's accusations are unfair:

 prompting the new availability of purported teachers and teachings, at the end of the day, I think the best advice I got early in my attraction to Daoism remains the best possible advice I could give any enthusiast today: learn classical Chinese. Even though the Dao, obviously, is not limited by national boundaries or human language,

But both below and above you just say that it is. The cultural context is defined by the national boundaries and language. And your neidan colleague says that classical chinese is of no help whatsoever. You guys might wanna compare notes.

it is damn hard to understand Daoism if one is divorced from its cultural context by not being able to live around Chinese lineage holders. The older generation's role is to explain the teachings; fill in blanks and resolve the confusion left by reading and talking to others; transmit methods; and lead by example. If you don't have access to such teachers, and you don't take the time to learn Chinese (you say you don't have time to learn a language, and yet you think you have time to seek Dao? Which do you think will take more time and effort? Will the smaller task not improve the chances of success at the greater?), how can you hope to tell if these English books and websites are genuine or downright fraudulent, or perhaps a mix of wheat and chaff? On what can you rely other than your "intuition" and luck?

No other instrument except intuition and common sense are  available for that. How do you know if those chinese linage holders of yours are not frauds? Lots of dupes lived around Rajneesh and his rolls-royces for a long time too, none the wiser, but speaking the same language.

To give an example of what I mean:

 

Mr. Brine, on the front page of your website, in big letters, we see, "Taoist Master Wang Liping, head of the Dragon Gate Tradition." Deeper in your page, we see the claim, "Wang Liping was chosen by three masters of the Dragon Gate Tradition to become the 18th heir and holder of the lineage."

 

Your biography says you are fluent in Chinese, so how do you not realize that there is no "head of the Dragon Gate Tradition"? There is no Dragon Gate "pope," most certainly not a layman-pope, and there are/were probably hundreds of monks and nuns in the 18th generation, some of whom are/were quite highly achieved.

And? If there is no pope then any one can say that he is the pope in terms of mystical knowledge. Its his word against your opinion. And frankly, Wang is a recognized chinese teacher, while you are not. His words trump yours.

Also the Dragon Gate is not an organization, and Wang never claimed to be its leader. Lineage holder means that he has knowledge, thats all.

There are also plenty of Dragon Gate monks and nuns who have not even heard of Wang, and others who only have a vague impression of having heard the name of this fellow! I am speaking on the basis of conversations I've had with monks and nuns at many monasteries--people who've devoted their entire lives to Daoism, some living in such penury that they don't know when they'll get their next chance to take a shower and sleep literally on bunk beds in closets with a piece of cloth for a door! If he's the "head" of the Dragon Gate sect, then for these devotees to not even know who Wang is like a Jesuit priest never even having heard of the pope or a Gelug lama never having heard of the Dalai Lama... patently ridiculous!

You deliberately fudge the issue. Wang never says that all DG monks report to him or obey him, as in your misplaced analogy monks and priests do towards their leader.

I have seen this false claim in the writings of so many students of Wang Liping on the internet that I can't help but wonder if it is Wang himself who propagates the illusion. Then again, maybe it is a mistake made and passed on by those who don't read Chinese and haven't spent time around Daoists, like with the game telephone. Why the notion splashes across the front page of a website associated with an practitioner-academic who is responsible for translating Daoist Canon texts baffles me. 

I think you and opendao are attacking Wang because you both sell seminars and he is your competition. Is it a fair assumption on my part?

This kind of problem is not just superficial. For example, if would-be internal alchemists buy a in a book in English that apparently was prepared by students of Wang's, Ling Bao Tong Zhi Neng Nei Gong Shu, they will be buying a book that suffers from omissions of important material in the translated text! If a book claiming to present practical instructions omits information, what becomes of the people who use it as an instruction manual?

Nothing bad will befall them;) The book in question is a hodge-podge collection of various, tersely described methods. Leaving out some, for whatever reason is not gonna affect students. Besides you guys always say that books are useless anyway. That is germane to you language study advice too. If books are useless what use is the language?

Now, does Wang possess and pass on true transmission? Does he have great accomplishments? I have no idea and don't care to speculate. For all I know he is a profoundly achieved adept and is busy transmitting invaluable teachings to students around the globe. Be that as it may, there is still a very real and easily identifiable problem with misinformation that follows this man.

How about all the other neidan peddlers out there? Why pick on Wang? Because he is the most successful of them?

The questions I propose to people spending their money on Amazon:

 

If Wang's teachings suffer from this deeply troubling problem, what about the books and websites of others?

Oh theirs are plain horrible so again, why pick on on Wang? Judged against  the whole neidan market  he is the golden standard.

If Westerners never learn how to refer to the classics that have stood the test of centuries and milennia, how many will actually benefit from these new books and websites?

no, no, no;) The classics are useless without a teacher, remember your motto?

 Caveat cultivator. (Forgive my Latin, dear Jesuits, I know it sucks   )

Your logic has some room for improvement too.

No, molecules can not be said to be tangiable becase they are tangiable in large quantities  

 I myself was in these shoes and I practiced methods from books and I trained with suspicious teachers, and only now I understand how i was wrong with that approach

This basically says ' i was wrong every time before therefore i am right now'.

That does not at all explain why the future exists as a construct yet is not part of reality.

Because constructs are not real?

Leth we started here

How are we things?

 

And how is Dao not a thing if we are things?

Then we found out that we do not know what things are. Perhaps by now you do and agree that humans are things?

Ontology is not something put between reality and our minds, it is the study of existance and reality. I do not insert it, it is merely a description of what it is we are doing when we study or discuss the subject of existance and reality.

 

It is a field of study which have arisen because we have inquires about existance and reality, and thus must figure out what it means to exist, or what it means to be real. And as it turns out this is a very complex subject, because our language uses the word exist in many different ways and it can become unclear what is meant with existance unless we specify which form of existance we are talking about.

so why dont we specify and do away with it?

Ontological objects are such things that exists as independent objects in reality, and not such things that we have made up mental constructs of to be objects in our mind.

yes. it is crystal clear. what seems to be the problem?

And the cup is a common object often used to demonstrate that our conceptions of objects does not translate to ontological objects even if they can be said to be real, that is that the demarcation of the cup as a distinct object is not ontologicall but just a mental construct because we define the object by it's function to us and not by any sort of ontological demarcation. Thus we differentiate between physical objects and ontological objects.

 

This is a convinent distiction if we are to talk about destinctions between reality as it is and how our minds percieve reality.

See there is your problem. You constantly bring back mind objects into the reality. Why? The cup is real  and its attributes do not exist independently of it. thats all there is to know for our purposes.

Or are you to say that reality is only made up of what we percive it to be. Is reality then not subjective?

Absolutely. It is.

The problem with this is that if we define this to be reality then it really loses it's function. It makes little sense to talk about reality as something external and we might just talk about it as reality. We might instead just use words such as I think, or for me it is. But this ofcourse is problematic becase we do communicate with other beings, and if we are to asume they are in fact not only figments of our own mind then there must exists something external, something we might call real, and it must be have some form of fundamental objective aspect.

No, no problem becouse the rest of the humanity shares our subjective reality.

How can it be a construct without also being a reality?

Simple. The human mind has a miraculous power to think up new  constructs out of external stimuli. Its called consciousness.

It is my opinion that studying Daoist works without an understanding of polysemy is bound to lead to misconceptions.

I donno about that;)

Others, as many times before, are doomed to follow charlatans and spread false teachings, destroying not only own future, but the future of their children 

Whatever Wang's flaws, at least he has not gone insane with greed  to threaten the children of the competition.

just a great quote for a time being;)

Schopenhauer expressed his dislike for the philosophy of his contemporary Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel many times in his published works. The following quotations are typical:

• If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow Hegel is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.
• Further, if I were to say that this summus philosophus [...] scribbled nonsense quite unlike any mortal before him, so that whoever could read his most eulogized work, the so-called Phenomenology of the Mind, without feeling as if he were in a madhouse, would qualify as an inmate for Bedlam, I should be no less right.^[115]
• At first Fichte and Schelling shine as the heroes of this epoch; to be followed by the man who is quite unworthy even of them, and greatly their inferior in point of talent --- I mean the stupid and clumsy charlatan Hegel.^[116]

In his Foreword to the first edition of his work Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, Schopenhauer suggested that he had shown Hegel to have fallen prey to the Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Schopenhauer suggested that Hegel's works were filled with "castles of abstraction," and that Hegel used deliberately impressive but ultimately vacuous verbiage.^[117]

"All those who want to live a long life, but do not obtain the Divine Elixirs (shendan) and the Golden Liquor (jinye), merely bring suffering upon themselves.

 

Huangdi jiuding shendan jingjue

"It is clear that if the present-day coarse and rustic practitioners do not obtain the great methods of the Golden Elixir, they will not obtain a long life.  ." (Baopu zi, chapter 14. Translated by Fabrizio Pregadio)

These 2 texts are waidan, external alchemy texts. These 2 excerpts show that the authors of these 2 texts regarded all other practices , such as neidan as false and/or  inferior. There is an irony somewhere in there.

This does not make them any less a mental construct.

 

All concepts we have are mental constructs, ontologically speaking ther eis no such thing as a cup, sure the cup is tangiable, and sure ontologically that which the cup is made of does exist, but ontologically speaking it is not a cup it is simply a part of reality. The cup exists only as a mental construct yet it is tangiable. And so it is with many things, they are tangiable, but they are not in any way ontological objects. In fact with our current understanding, ontological objects are but an abstraction and are in no way tangiable.

I understand but disagree. For some reason you insert something you call ontology between the reality and our minds.

And i dont think it is this

 

ontology either.

Who are we to say who is mad and who has a sound reasoning?

What is it about certain kinds of reasoning which makes it superior to other kinds of reasoning?

Only if we can agree that some sort of reasoning is unreasonable can we really come to terms with what is to be called mad and not.

Absolutely;)

Whether something can be defined with words does not in any way say anything about it's ontological status.

We can form words for anything, i could make up the word gobbledygook and claim it is an actuall ontological object but that doesn't make it so.

Of course. Because there is no something tangible for it. Remember its a 3 point check list;)

Likewise we must first conceptualise soemthing to be able to form words for it, and considering how many things we have historically been unable to conceptualise that are now accepted as part of reality it is unfeaseble to say that we must be able to conceptualise seomthing or form a word for it if it is real. Before copper as a material was conceptualised was there no such thing as copper in reality?

No, there was no copper before that. There was something called 'that funny reddish stone'.

Whether something is tangiable or not is not a very good indication of whether it is real either. Molecules are not tangiable yet we take them as real, nor is light tangiable yet it is real to us.

Molecules and other particles are tangible in large quantities. Light is tangible to our eyes.

On the other hand Softness is tangiable, but is but an attribute and not in any way a real thing.

Softness is not tangible. A soft object is.

As to usefullnes it is far from a good indicator, of course we can make up uses for anything if we so wish, but most would agree that a cloud is not very usable, yet we consider it real.

Umm, rain, shade, agriculture?

And on the other hand many abstract concepts are very usable yet they are not real, math is very usable but it is not real it exists only as abstracta, similarly words thoughts are but mental constructs.

Yes. Pls remember, all 3 points.

And is not infeasable to say that there are discoveries to be made about reality that are not yet conceptualised and thus has no words for them, nor would they be tangiable or usable yet they would be real. A molecule or a quark for instance are modern discoveries which before their discoveries fitted this category.

of course. The reality is changeable. But what not yet happened is a construct not a reality.

Not really, it's more about understanding context, words with more than one meaning is more or less abundant in most languages. 

I disagree that the words have more than one meaning. What you talking about is  called 

But what was born out of Dao is not Dao anymore.

東郭子問於莊子曰：「所謂道，惡乎在？」莊子曰：「無所不在。」東郭子曰：「期而後可。」莊子曰：「在螻蟻。」曰：「何其下邪？」曰：「在稊稗。」曰：「何其愈下邪？」曰：「在瓦甓。」曰：「何其愈甚邪？」曰：「在屎溺。」東郭子不應。

Knowledge Rambling in the...:

Dong-guo Zi asked Zhuangzi, saying, 'Where is what you call the Dao to be found?' Zhuangzi replied, 'Everywhere.'

The other said, 'Specify an instance of it. That will be more satisfactory.' '

It is here in this ant.'

'Give a lower instance.'

'It is in this panic grass.'

'Give me a still lower instance.'

'It is in this earthenware tile.' 

(shrug) these people are ignorant.

It is a mental construct, yes, but so are all words we use.

Not really, most words correspond to tangible things.

we do have the facility to analyse our own concepts and the language we use to compare complex structures of interrelations between concepts.

Again not quite. Some of us do have it, while the rest of us are considered deluded, mentally ill, or having a mystical experience.

As such i think it is fair that I am seeing that which is written about laozi as far as I can understand. I do not see Dao, yet I see Dao.

There is a 3 point check list to see if we see and/or understand something for real. 1. can it be defined in words? 2. is it tangible? 3. is it usable?

things, because seeing is not the same thing as seeing.

This 'same word is not the same word' thing could be a problem when trying to create a reasonable worldview.