Zhongyongdaoist

Here is some necessary background: The most common astrology is based on a cycle of Sixty "Stems and Branches": Another important one is based on the Nine Stars: The above two are used to give meaning to time periods that are part of long repeating time cycles, such as the Sixty year cycle mentioned in the first one. Finally the Twenty-eight Mansions of the Moon are also important: They are used in a type of astrology that is more like the Western "astrological chart". Familiarity with the above will help in understanding any further posts of mine in this thread. ZYD

In the decades of my interest in Chinese esotericism I built up a large library on these subjects, some of them may still be in print, others could be found used. I will pull them out and post titles of some of the more useful ones. A good practical resource is Delemme software, which has good programs for calculating astrological charts and doing numerology. I'm busy, but I will try to post more shortly. ZYD

Humor is always welcome, but it should be good humor, and I didn't think that this was: Was good humor. Leaving the question of why Laozi is out "walking in the rain without an umbrella or a raincoat", we find him meeting a student with an umbrella who asks Laozi, why he is out walking in the rain without an umbrella. Laozi responds that when it is raining "the Tao is to get wet", his trusting student having "immediately gained enlightenment" throws away the umbrella and leaves, "Smiling in the Rain", for which act Loazi calls him "a fool", indicating that what was gained was certainly not "enlightenment", but folly and then picks up the umbrella, apparently for his own use. As written this is not: But pseudo Daoist fraud, which is confirmed by Laozi calling the trusting student a "fool" for falling for the ruse that, when it is raining"the Tao is to get wet", in order to gain the trusting student's umbrella under false pretenses, and since it required Laozi to say "the Tao is to get wet", it is not: Wuwei. Wuwei either, since saying something is a form of action, and the DaoDe Jing considers Wuwei "Wordless Teaching". Rather this piece of "humor" portrays Laozi as someone, who for whatever reason, finds himself caught in the rain and thinks its a fine idea to fool a trusting student into abandoning his umbrella so that Laozi could use it himself. Apparently sharing was not an option for reasons not disclosed, and that's why I don't think this is good humor, but bad humor, which for the above reasons, I didn't find funny, which is part of why I liked Cobie's response above, the other being his emphasis on Compassion, as aspect of the Dao often neglected. ZYD

As for this: I did find the quote I was looking for, it is however, long and dealing with it will take sometime. It does support what dawei said though without looking at it more, I am still not sure that "flow" is the right word. Among other things it uses the word 志, zhì (aspiration / ambition / the will) instead of yi as I mentioned in my post. I'll have more to say soon. ZYD

When I said this: The above is fundamentally correct, though I will try to expand a little on it in a later post. Right now it is almost one am where I live and time for me to head to bed. I meant that I thought that dawei had mentioned the basics, but I was not completely happy with with how he had written about them. In particular "Mencius said, Qi flows from intent.", puzzled me. It has been twenty years since I did my principle study of Mencius and qi and I don't remember anything exactly like this, but dawei may have been hurried and working from memory. However dawei does mention intent, derived from the Chinese 意, yì (idea / meaning / thought / to think / wish / desire / intention / to expect / to anticipate), which is used as a technical term for an ability inherent in 心, xīn (heart / mind / intention / center / core) to use imagination to "form" qi and to imbue it with a specific intention or purpose. A typical example of this would be the creation of a "thought form" examples of which can be found in the books of Professor Jerry Alan Johnson. This ability is used in Daoist Healing, Martial Arts and Magic and becoming skill and adept in its use is an important part of Daoist training. As far as Mencius and qi goes his quote about the "floodlike qi" is well know and I quote it in the topic "Confucian Qigong": There is another quote which I will look for and post. as regards this I agree with that. The question then is: does that intent arise before Existence? I was only quoting dawei and as I noted above I am not in complete agreement with it, however what you seem to be asking is if there is something real that precedes existence which can in some sense have "intent" and possibly even be a creative power influencing existence. Is that a correct interpretation? ZYD

The notion of qi as life force is a common oversimplification of a word with a lot of possible meanings. In posts that I made in a Topic called "A Science of Wuwei?" a few years ago I examine the meanings of qi in a wider context than the merely biological which should provide a good context for discussion. the first post is here: and my last post is on Page four Posted November 30, 2018 Reading these post will give one a much better sense of the larger meanings of qi as well as some useful background in Chinese Cosmology. It is a real pleasure to see dawei posting here again, as he has a profound knowledge of Daoist belief and practice: The above is fundamentally correct, though I will try to expand a little on it in a later post. Right now it is almost one am where I live and time for me to head to bed. ZYD

The Character which is translated as "Compassion" is 慈, ci ( compassionate / gentle / merciful / kind / humane, MDGB Chinese Dictionary) and this comes out of this passage from Chapter 67 : 我有三寶，持而保之。一曰慈，二曰儉，三曰不敢為天下先 Translated as: But I have three precious things which I prize and hold fast. The first is gentleness; the second is economy; and the third is shrinking from taking precedence of others. The above reference is to The Chinese Text Project website and its translation to which you can go by clicking 67 above. Searching for 慈, ci, in the Daoist texts on the Chinese Text Project Website gives a total of 35 occurrences in several early Daoist Texts including Zhuangzi and Wenzi, which indicates the importance of the concept in Daoism before the arrival of Buddhist texts. I hope this information is helpful. ZYD

A good quality PDF and other formats, can be downloaded from Archive.org at this link: The Teachings of Taoist Master Chuang Happy Reading, ZYD

I'm sorry to be so long to get back to this. As it turns out I was busier than I thought I would be, but I did try to work in some time to think about this matter and then figure out how best to address it. You can help me give you better answers by telling me a little more about your background in this, like how long have your studied this, do you have other books of Professor Johnson or others and information like that. Without knowing that I can prepare some very general comments, but I would like to address your own needs in this regard, as well as general interest. ZYD

I am very busy now and will be all this week and won't be able to make any posts here for several days, probably the weekend at the earliest. ZYD

Thanks for answering. Book title: Daoist internal alchemy: neigong weigong training. Page no 453 You're welcome, I had thought that was the book to which you were referring, but I didn't feel like going through it to find the reference. As I had expected there is more to this than just three colors and that the important part, the Three Pure Ones as being left out. One of the most important parts getting the Three Pure One to descend into your body was left out. In Daoism the Three Pure Ones are the primordial powers of creation, as you can read about in the Wikipedia article on the Three Pure Ones. The actual meditation involves a lot more than just visualizing the three colors that have been mentioned here, but involve the starts of the Big Dipper, where the Three Pure Ones hang out and other things which I suspect need to be learned about and connected to before one can effectively perform the meditation and actually have the Three Pure Ones descend into your body and then working with them to recreate yourself. Simply breathing colored qi into the three Dans is a waste of time and if you are lucky will not do anything, if you aren't lucky you could create a bad condition of qi stagnation, which you don't want. This is the last meditation in a whole section of the book and based upon what I know from other sources the material that leads up to the section cited should be worked through first. That this is the case is somewhat confirmed by some sections at the very end of the book. The material there is much too complex to summarize here. I hope this is helpful. ZYD

Professor Johnson has written many books, almost all of which I have. What you are saying sounds like an over simplification of what he has written. If you could give the book title and page, I could comment on it in more detail. ZYD

I read Women In Buddhism by Diana Paul some thirty or so years ago and was appalled by what it said, here is the short summary from the University of California website, which originally published it back in 1985: As a man, who even as a teenager back in the late Sixties understood the deleterious effects of misogynist ideas and attitudes in society, I was, as I said above, pretty appalled by this book about a religious tradition for which I had previously had much respect. When I compare it to the Platonism, which basically advocated a relationship of equality between men and women, documented in Plato's Republic for almost 2500 years, I can only wonder what kind of enlightenment one gets from Buddhism. Daoism also has had issues, but Confucianism, about which I have read more than most Dao Bums, seems to have had a more complex attitude, which I don't have time to address here, but I don't think many aspects of misogyny in the far East can be fairly blamed on it, but rather on the preexisting patriarchal social structure, which regrettably seems to have been and still be, a worldwide problem in both East and West. I have Posted on Plato's attitude to women in my thread Plato and Platonism 101. Zhongyongdaoist

You're certainly welcome. I'm glad that you found it informative and hope that others will too. There is a reason why I chose that long quote, aside from it aptness as an example, to illustrate the Great Chain of Being and I will return to it later when I examine how reading Agrippa's First Book of Occult Philosophy was to open up a hole new way of looking at magic and how that was to affect how I thought about the Golden Dawn and ritual. ZYD

I have given a lot of thought to these books and how they might help you and came to the conclusion that what you want to do is research is an idea called The Great Chain of Being. The Wikipedia article deals with it in the later Judeo/Christian form, but the ideas go back to Plato and Aristotle and the efforts by the Middle Platonists to unify the thought of both Plato and Aristotle into a unified cosmology, thus the references in my post below to "ideas" derived from Plato and "forms" derived from Aristotle are placed in a cosmological structure the maps out a descent from the highest levels of the Cosmos to the earth where the ideas become forms which are made manifest in our world. The following post is the first post from: Agrippa's Doctrine of Occult Virtues, a core concept examined and explained First I would like to quote from Thomas Kuhn, the man whose book, The Structure of Scienfific Revolutions, introduced the concept of the paradigms and their shifts: After finishing his discussion of the elements with a discussion of the Virtues dependent upon the elements in Chapter 9, Agrippa introduces the Occult Virtues in the following way: to attract Iron: the attraction of iron to a lodestone was one of the primary illustrations of occult virtues, while we now explain this in a certain way, there is no rational reason why considering it also a manifestation of the "virtues" or "powers" inherent in lodestone and iron is not valid and an example of looking at things in the context of a different paradigm. these vertues are a sequell of the species, and form of this or that thing: Though I was not completely familiar with Aristotle's Four Causes at this time, I was reading texts in alchemy in which Aristotelian terminology was used and in which the medicinal "virtue" of an herb could be viewed as the result of extracting its "form" through "spirit of wine", i.e. alcohol. I will examine the most important of these texts as I go along and this idea will make more sense after the second post in this series. these vertues having much form, and litle matter, can do very much: It is a matter of learning to extract the virtue or power or to enhance the activity of the virtue through appropriate action. Again more in the next post. they are called occult qualities, because their Causes lie hid, and mans intellect cannot in any way reach, and find them out. Wherefore Philosophers have attained to the greatest part of them by long experience, rather then by the search of reason: They are "occult" because hidden and unlike elemental virtues, which can be deduced from the qualities of the elements and the proportion of their compound, the occult or "hidden" virtues must be found out by experience. Those who were following my discussion of Aristotle's Four causes may now realize why in a humorous response to Descartes criticism of Formal Causes I said: Agrippa outlines the cosmological setting for this in Chapter 11: Platonists say that all inferiour bodies are exemplified by the superiour Ideas: At the top is "God" or "The One", depending on ones ontological commitments, the ideas as conceived of by Plato, are rooted in this one and then they exert an influence all the way down, through the forms as envisioned by Aristotle and into our world, where they manifest as the occult virtues or "hidden powers" of natural things. Ideas in this sense are active and creative powers, not mere abstractions present in our consciousness. they define an Idea to be a form, above bodies, souls, minds, and to be one, simple, pure, immutable, indivisible, incorporeal, and eternall: On the highest level they are simple, but as they descend they mix with each other and become more complex. they place Idea's in the first place in very goodness it self (i.e.) God: While Agrippa my mean God in a circa 1500 Roman Catholic sense, this is not to be confused with god as thought of by your local neighborhood fundamentalist yahoo and it can also be separated from any taint of Abrahamic revelation by being conceived of as Plotinus' One, or even the Dao. In the second place, they place them in the very intelligible it self (i.e.) in the Soul of the world: Here they are on a lower level and are a part of the animating power of the Universe. It must be remembered that a Platonic world is a living soul, filled with souls, not a mechanical universe consisting of dead matter. They place them in nature, as certain small seed of forms infused by the Idea's: Here we start to get closer to our own world and this idea of a seed of forms was to prove “fruitful” as I began to look at them as “seeds of power” which the Platonic Magician learned to cultivate, both in him or herself, but also in the external world. For Idea's are not only essential causes of every species, but are also the causes of every vertue: This simply reaffirms what I said before, the causal efficacy of the “ideas” is manifest all the way down to our world, where they manifest as “power” that can be harvested and harnessed. This cosmological structure going from ideas in the “Mind of God” to their manifestations as physical objects here on earth, is called “the Great Chain of Being" and was the fundamental idea of how the Cosmos functioned from the Hellenistic period to about 1800. Its History and development have been admirably chronicled by A. O. Lovejoy in his book of the same name, The Great Chain of Being. For the moment skipping over chapter 12, we will quote from Chapter 13, where the Great Chain of Being is further examined: Therefore Plato, and his Schollers [scholars] attribute these vertues to Idea's, the formers of things.: Again affirming the causal power of the ideas. The Form therefore, and Vertue of things comes first from the Idea's: The form in the Aristotelian sense is the idea manifesting as a "formal" cause. There is therefore no other cause of the necessity of effects, then the connexion [connection] of all things with the first Cause, and their correspondency with those Divine patterns, and eternall Idea's, whence every thing hath its determinate, and particular place in the exemplary world: Again the Great Chain of Being. At the top is the One, which differentiates on down the Hierarchy to manifest in our world. And every vertue of Hearbs [herbs], Stones, Metals, Animals, Words, and Speeches: It is noteworthy that Agrippa includes words and speeches as a potential manifestation of “hidden powers”. He ends his First Book on the subject of "Words, and Speeches" and then expands on it in later books. These two sections are Agrippa's basic exposition of a cosmological structure that occurs in other places in the Three Books and is an important part of his “theory of the practice”, the base cosmic circuit board, you might say, of Platonic Engineering. All cited references to Agrippa's Occult Philosophy are from Joseph Peterson's Twilight Grotto, a very useful site. So to get back to your question the basic ideas go back to Plato and Aristotle, they were worked into a cosmological model "the Great Chain of Being" and this cosmological model became a standard one during the Hellenistic period which would have been used by anyone wanting to rationalize and explain all sorts of things including magic and alchemy. One primary example would be the integration of the Chaldean Oracles with late Platonism with the development of Theurgy in Iamblichus and Proclus As long as the above is, it just scratches the surface of the subject, but I hope that it will prove to be a helpful and fruitful starting point for you. ZYD