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Shaman is witch. It has many names in different cultures and doing more or less similar things all over the world. The name Shaman has been getting more popularly used since Carlos Castaneda's writings in 1960s, to describe witches in tribes. There is no universal term for these people in Africa, central America, Siberia, China, South East Asia, Europe and India. This term Shaman has even been spread to space, when Master Logray became the Shaman of Bright Tree Village, details can be found in Star Wars 6. For centuries, China doesn't really have witches (巫). So who serves the above functions? - Taoism. Taoism religion consists of QuanZhen temples, they are most conspicuous and fit into what is described as religion. But under this umbrella of Taoism, it is increasingly mixed with witchcraft. The 2nd main branch of Taoism is ZhengYi. They are considered as the magical arm, the ceremonies and ritual servers, run worship temples (most of them don't work in formal temples). It has witch or Shaman elements. ZhengYi is extremely diversified. So it is arguable some of them are really Taoist or not, as many are just being called "Sifu". If ZhengYi is less known and associated with the supernatural side, there is another main branch which is even more obscure. They are believed to be descendants of the White Lotus which is one of the earliest Taoist groups. They are the Sin Tin Toa (Primordial Toa). They worship Buddhist deities, well versed in Neidan, also have magic. They were banned in China in Qing Dynasty. In early communist China, they were regarded as reactionary, which was one of the worst possible accusation. Nowadays they are widely spread in Taiwan, and estimated in 25-40% of the temples in Hong Kong, also exist in Japan and Vietnam. Some scholars/researchers regard these more fringe factions as China's folk religions. While for normal people, they are loosely regarded as Taoists. It is not easy to draw the line between formal religion, folk religion, witchcraft, superstition, and, frauds.

玉房之中神門戶 玉 jade 房 room 之中 inside 神 Shen 門戶 doors and windows Shen's portal is in the jade room I think the jade room is Xiuan Guang.(= Huan Tin = yellow court)

是的，丹田類似脈輪 Yes, Dantian is similar to the chakra 上有黃庭下關元， 前有幽闕後命門。 up is Huang Tin Down is Guan Yuan Front is Yiuo Chue Back is Min door 關元命門屬於下丹田 幽闕屬於中丹田 黃庭屬於上丹田

See my post and the discussion here: There was a great deal of activity related to his teacher, Mak Tin Si, and Chi in Nature, when I started on Dao Bums nine years ago. So searching under Mak Tin Si, and Chi in Nature would be the way to research this. I also seem to remember that this fellow, who seems to be in charge of teaching magic now, posted in the past year or so on Dao Bums to invite people to learn Daoist magic with him. I don't think he got much of a response, as really not many here are interested in Daoist magic to begin with, though there are a small number of Dao Bums that are. As a forum, the Dao Bums has no opinion about this group, we only post the opinions and experiences of our members about it. Our members opinions have varied, but if you follow the link in the post of mine that I quoted, you can get an overview, and more of our members may weigh in here about them. I did some research on their site when I first joined here, and as far as I can tell they do not represent a lineal descent from a specific school, but that the founders do represent some authentic aspects of Chinese magical tradition, and that they believe they were authorized in visions by the highest level of the Daoist Pantheon to teach. I would suggest a lot of "due diligence" in regard to any association with them, but that is my personal opinion as a person with a good familiarity with Daoist Ritual and magic, and should not be confused with any official position of the Dao Bums, even though I am a moderator here. As I have said the Dao Bums does not have an official position on this school. I hope other members who remember past interactions with this group will join in with the discussion. ZYD

Anyone knows if this temple and it's people are legit? From a layman's perspective they seem to be...even if giving off a bit of "used car salesman" vibes in some videos... On one of their recent videos they "made it free" some scriptures and "books" but I don't know if their processes are legit or even if they should be ok to be attempted by beginners. You can find the link to their pages with the "freebies" in this video:

I said it does what it says on the tin...Damo mentions building the field for example...it does exactly that..and as you might also know...DTG involves filling the LDT...and it does that too. Have built, or are building? I cannot answer the former, the latter, however I can easily state...the majority who practice consistently. You need to remember the IAA is only open just over a year. Are you saying to me you expect people to have built and filled a LDT in that time? When you begin DTG work, start feeling your things moving around inside (im being purposely vague), and phenomena start arising...things get very real, very quickly. What follows is not in any way subtle or imaginary. There is no visualisations, no imagining, no mental forcing....it happens and it does what it is intended to do.... When you do the material as it is presented it works....and it works very, very well.....that is why I mentioned it is very potent. I'm not interested in slating other systems here... The whole "my neigong is better than yours" and so forth. I'd rather not go there personally, it is not required I can say with full confidence, some of the other things that happened to me are beyond what I would have imagined...and very much well outside the paradigm of what we could label "normal". I wont elaborate further as we already established it isn't necessary...but I reiterate the following point. I have absolutely nothing to gain by endorsing it.

Several reasons Respect for confidentiality of the school Some of it is esoteric, and because of that is best left unsaid Its not required....the methods work, that's pretty much the most important point...they do exactly what the claim to Methods that work produce results...methods that don't, well...they don't. All of the people I've spoken too have had similar results....so they do what they say on the tin

Verse 204 of the Dhammapada, in a translation by Daw Mya Tin. Thank you and most likely the quote is a misquote, not even Daoist nor from Laozi. It is amazing how much is out there that is always difficult to trust even in respectable forums. Thanks for sharing

Oddly similar to this one Verse 204 of the Dhammapada, in a translation by Daw Mya Tin.

Ah, the "Tin Yat Lineage" guy who charges $300 for a remote "ordination", I didn't realize that was his blog. That explains a lot.

Not sure if you are still around to see this reply, but here is what I know about Wilson Yong. I had some interaction with Wilson Yong through email a number of years ago. My impression was he was sincere about what he was teaching and offering, and his tradition, but his type of lineage may not be for everyone. It involves the use of talismans and incantations and ceremonies and that sort of thing. I don't know very much about his tradition beyond that, but some might refer to it as 'folk Taoism', which is still practiced in places like Malaysia and Taiwan. The second webpage looks very similar to the kind of attacks against Wilson Yong that were being made by a person who once posted here at Dao Bums (Herman Mak, if I remember correctly, AKA 'Mak Jo Si', 'Mak Tin Si', etc.), who went by different self proclaimed 'Taoist' titles and names over the years, and who is a very troubled person, to say it as nicely as I can. I think Mak was banned from Dao Bums after only a short stint of posting here, to give you an idea about him. Mak declared himself and his partner to be 'high level Taoist masters' decreed by the 'highest level Taoist gods' whom he claimed appeared before them and ordained them, and he started his own 'Taoist temple' and 'Taoist sect', etc., but I remember reading on his website a few years after that where he admitted that he made the whole divinely decreed Taoist master stuff up in conjunction with another person as a scam. His remorse didn't last long however. Several months later he took that webpage down and started a new website under a new name, and a new 'Taoist sect' with a new name, and changed his and his partner's titles and names a bit, but the same story again. He was supposedly ordained into a new 'Taoist sect' by 'highest level Taoist gods' again, and he carried on again as if nothing had happened previously. He used to go on and on about how his 'Taoist sect' was the only true and authentic form of Taoism out there. Ha ha. One of the things he did was use pellet guns on his 'Taoist alter' and similar instead of say ceremonial swords as his special 'Taoist tools' for doing 'exorcisms' and that sort of thing, for which he charged very large sums of money. I kid you not. For several years Mak posted all kinds of videos on Youtube where he was reviewing all kinds of pellet guns and demonstrating all kinds of martial arts forms where it was obvious he was just copying various forms from many different Chinese martial arts DVDs, or making up his own 'martial arts' sets. For some reason Mak went after Wilson Yong a number of years ago, and Mak was attacking Wilson Yong all over the net, and I believe Wilson Yong just kind of went low profile on the net at that point rather than trying to deal with a very troubled person. Wilson Yong's website also went dormant around the same time, I believe. It looks like he may have decided to stay low profile after what happened with Mak. Wilson Yong is a medical doctor, I believe, and he likely didn't have time to try to deal with Mak's antics on the net. I can't vouch for the authenticity of Wilson Yong's tradition, because I know little about it, but Mak is definitely a very troubled person from what I saw over a period of several years. I wouldn't normally say much of anything about things like this, but I felt I should give a warning about Mak for people who may not have heard of him before, and who don't know his history.

Taoism nowadays are mainly into 2 sects/types. Chuen Jan Faction and Jing Yat Faction. Chuen Jan is more on inner alchemy, and/or being a religion like Buddhism, Christianity or Hinduism. Jing Yat is Taoists in ceremonies, burial rituals, magicks, purging ghosts, bringing fortunes, mending relationships, Feng Shui, fortune telling, divination and so on. They also train their Chi too. Since Taoism is extremely diversified, each sect or each temple is different from the others.

I see. I've heard things about Mantak but then again, I've heard things about everyone. I get lumped in the Taoist crackpot category along with Mak Jo Si of Tin Yat. The wider Occult community has the same issues, scammers and con artists. As of right now, my interests are mostly weather magick and natural spirituality. Maybe one day we could Skype, I'd be up for that.

Hey you're not in league with Mr Tin Yat of Cananda? Most genuine Daoists and shamans wear jeans and a t shirt; The forces or heaven and earth don't give a monkeys what you wear, it's about the power one possesses. The more powerful the Daoist the less likely he or she will need silly hats, robes and paraphernalia.

You can't disappoint me, I'm always disappointed in you conformists. Mak Tin Si hasn't got a Jaguar, a fur coat or a throne, sorry honey I've won again. P.S. My Jaguar has massaging seats. We haven't even touched on the Lexus yet!

Sorry to disappoint you, honey shnuggums, but Mak Tin Si already popped everybody's flamboyant home-baked fake Daoism weirdness cherry 10 years ago here. It was a bloody mess but we healed. At this point I'm afraid you're just another bozo in a long and endless line of TDB bozos. I'm sure you raise eyebrows at the local Tesco, but we're kinda jaded here.

I think of it this way - we’re always doing something wrong... but hopefully a little less wrong with each passing hour of practice. Doing it ‘right’ is when you’ve finally reached mastery and become a wise, enlightened sage yourself. Which, for me, is quite a way off You're right though - if you have a good teacher they’ll be able to help correct you. There isn’t one correct position - not really... the body goes through changes - what was correct for you yesterday may be incorrect today. That’s why it’s impossible to communicate these intricacies in a book. Standing practices are really quite complex. Internally you’re always dancing on the edge between release and inner connection, between stillness and movement... You’re always hunting for a certain equilibrium that takes you deeper and deeper. It is not standing in a certain structure and grinning and bearing it until your timer rings (although that’s usually how it starts). If you finish your standing and you have to sort pry yourself out of the posture like pulling off the stuck lid of an old paint tin then something isn’t right. If you feel numb or stiff and need to move around to get the circulation going again then something isn’t quite right. If you walk away feeling sore, clothes soaked in sweat but feeling vital and calm and the body feels big, expanded and bouncy like a spring - then you’ve done well.

Tin Yat is someone whose "system" I will go out on a limb to say that it is more dangerous to study with him than it is to make up your own nonsense from the misinformation out there that people get from YouTube videos and books or DVDs by popular teachers whose names I will not mention here. I should also mention that one of his own pathetic attempts to describe demons in Buddhism was laughable. For starters, he believes Buddhism is demonic and especially attacks Tibetan Buddhism, but also fails to understand that there are many sects of Buddhism, not even realizing Pure Land, Vajrayana, and Theravada are all different. Guess whose picture he posted as a demonic entity? Akuma/Gouki, a character from Street Fighter. It's like he's not even trying...

Tin Yat is a false comparison to people who actually have skill, wisdom, tradition, and something worth teaching. I believe a master can charge whatever they want because it's not just the prestige of that knowledge and skill that will transform your lives, it's the fact they need to babysit people who just want power. And people who want power or skill for free are kidding themselves.

I understand the wariness about teachers charging for spiritual teachings. This relates to something the Christian church calls "simony"- charging money for ordinations, sacraments, teachings. Some things to keep in mind, though- in the "old world", ie China or connected areas, a monastery or temple usually has a certain amount of social infrastructure, that is, a recognized place in the surrounding society, devotees, history, allowing it to rely on donations from many sources or sometimes even government subsidies. In those contexts it is relatively easy for teaching to be given free of charge or on a sliding scale. A Taoist teacher in the West is generally not going to have this kind of infrastructure. Absent some generous donors or a solidly supportive Chinese diaspora community it might be hard to pay the bills while offering free training for long amounts of time. I am not saying this to justify charging exorbitant fees for lessons, books, etc- there is plenty of room for criticism there. But I also don't think we should be too harsh. That said there is no way I'm scrounging up $400 to get remotely ordained by that Tin Yat guy.

I love you Tin Hat Cat.

I keep reading the title of this thread as 'Tin Hat Daoist Sect'. Luckily I was already wearing my tin hat when I read it.

One of the biggest frustrations I have about this forum and the anonymous nature of the Internet is that it also takes something very difficult to fundamentally measure fairly rather than objectively or equally, which is the esoteric path. I will actually be referencing a few groups here including our favorite WMP friends and am trying to speak as respectfully as possible with the full disclosure that I am making zero attacks on anyone mentioned here. To put it simply, none of us for the most part know each other's complexities as human beings, even divorced of our practices and our participation here. What we especially don't know about is the veracity or legitimacy of someone's practice, which can vary with topics outright decrying Mantak Chia and Michael Winn as frauds and weak or unhealthy practices versus people who are very happy with the results. What is more important is the sincerity of each practitioner, and even then, it's hard to verify, because besides generational, national cultural, political, and linguistic barriers such as many who don't speak English as their first language here, we also have the further limiting factor that is people's ability to communicate in writing their depth of understanding, let alone the difficulties even I as a writer and professional struggle with in conveying my points. By the logical positivist school of thinking, we are all failures in our ability to communicate effectively. By my own humanity, that failure is what makes us closer to one another. The administration here describes this as a café-like atmosphere where decorum and etiquette are determined by them, but when you mix spiritual and esoteric practices, it becomes more of a pub in that regard since these practices affect our perceptions and relationship with the veils of the myriad of realities we pass through, but more apparently, it stirs egos, both our own and others. And while in an actual physical establishment where people will gravitate towards others who share similar interests and can ignore the others who clash with them, the problem with the nature of an Internet forum is that these conversations, unless edited, hidden, or deleted, stay here forever and people are judged by those posts, which are also impacted by the above complexities I've mentioned with language, age, culture, and such. I'm not ashamed of my posts, but I am also not proud of a few of them over the years, and I went from being an idealistic and curious individual in 2015 to someone more settled into my path, suffice to say I am more of a journeyman and an adept in 2019 rather than a recently-elevated senior apprentice then. And as a human being, I of course have my moments and struggles. What I have found helpful was talking to people in private and even offline, especially when I gave free or voluntary donation-based Akashic readings here and got to know many individuals on video conference or phone calls, and even meeting up in person with some. It helps to hear the tone, to know someone as a person, an individual, and a human, and find out how they sound and look and their little tics and quirks are far different from their ability to express themselves in writing, and likewise, people don't see us, they assemble us through the filter of their own projections as we do to them. In short: we have both hands and feet tied to the chair, our mouths gagged, eyes blindfolded, ears plugged, and are judged by our ability to understand Shakespeare, Sartre, and Solzhenitsyn in Sanskrit and communicate it in a translation into Esperanto while using only morse code to others, and the consequences of this stay with us for a long time because they only know what we've said and do not how we look or feel, nor do they know anything about us. The metrics by which people measure their own practice and others is not a constant in this forum. Flowing Hands is someone that could be a fraud or a holy man and nobody knows without knowing him or being part of the same school. By the metrics of my own lineages, I give him my respect because I can sense it in him and in GSMaster, while those same metrics are the ones that make me grateful for Flowing Hands informing us of new developments from Tin Yat Dao and advising caution. By those same metrics I personally have, I may not agree with the deviations from traditional transmission of the WMP group, but I can empathize with them even if I can't agree with them since their metric is not mine and my metric is not theirs, and still be friendly with them so long as we understand that we aren't converting each other the same way a Jew and a Buddhist talking about their different views doesn't have to be about burning synagogues and temples but about understanding why they believe what they believe and don't necessarily agree with your views. (Briefly, I offer apologies to any of you members of that group reading this because I only say WMP since that's the common recognized title for you as they separate you from actual and current students of JC's lineage). As a result of the lack of consistent metrics to measure and verify practices or recognize authority in others and their practices, we can't really help but be agnostic about everything, even if the actual masters people revere were to post in this forum. It already happens as I know even Sifu Terry Dunn of the Flying Phoenix thread is so busy that I've been asked to help manage that thread as his student. The problem with the above as a representative of Terry Dunn is that when an incident occurs that his own students understand what is wrong (trolling our thread, insulting Sifu Terry, and defending a scammer), those on the outside and not in the know have indeed construed their own version of events and I have endured their insults, including the most amusing one when someone said "My flow is better than yours". It's an opinion and not the most endearing thing to hear (to say the least), but it's also an uninformed opinion because it has more to do with that individual looking through the lens of their practice, their values, and their ignorance of the internal situation in our own corner of the café (which will not be available to see as most of the offending posts have been edited out), as well as the emphasis on the overall forum's view of fairness, which again is not consistent even amongst mods as it is to their own discretion with again their own human fallibilities. This thread has gone from being a public service announcement to stern warning on civility and now the questioning of legitimacy and authority or qualifications of individuals like Flowing Hands and another exhausting chapter of the battle between the mods and the individuals over what is proper, and unfortunately, even if I agree with Flowing Hands, we're in their territory and it's a lost cause since their priority is to give everyone an equal opportunity to speak and have themselves protected within reason. It is one thing to be non-judging, but the problem here is people are also being non-discerning in an effort to appear non-judging. A political example here (and again, apologies to those who fall into the partisan divide, particularly Americans): in the vein of John Locke, I don't agree with someone's opinion, but I will fight for their right to speak it, so when someone in Berkeley says something in the vein of white nationalism and calling dark-skinned individuals like me part of the problem of the eroding identity of America, I consider why he says that even if I am biting my tongue already and know that he may not view me fairly because of his bias, but I win because I have heard and considered him and done my own investigation through both dialogue with him and research about his views. I lose if I am the Progressive idiot who punches him in the face because even if his views are alarmingly bigoted, I feed the bigotry by resorting to violence. (Disclaimer: I am a Progressive-leaning political Moderate, but find both parties disappointing). So in order to protect people's speaking privilege here, mods step in before they see someone potentially being punched in the face or what they see as a perceived threat of a punch, and I leave it to your imagination to figure out how that translates to online communication. Whether you are actually going to proceed to punch them in the face and if that is actually your intent are two entirely different things, again subject to debate and what they see. I apologize to everyone for this long-winded post and hope my view has offered some insights. I am uninterested in participating any further on this thread because Flowing Hands has already made his point, the mods have made theirs, the new direction of this thread is a repeat of something else I have already experienced, and I have spoken my piece on this as an individual member. In the words of Rodney King: "Can we just get along?"

I´ve no idea about the Tin Yat Dao Sect but I know Yoda from his postings way back when and was very fond of him. He came off as a genuine good guy. Yoda was (is?) that rare spiritual seeker type with a bold -- dare I say fun -- experimental streak. I enjoyed following his spiritual adventures.

It could've just been a kind of chaos magic, law of attraction, or placebo effect type thing, when Yoda's problems stopped after applying what appeared to be a solution to the problems. Or maybe the talismans etc were legit. I mean, that's truly a possibility too. The source of them is silly, but sometimes silly people can have learned magic, too. Either way, it was unfortunate that he felt like it was bad enough that he had to leave the forum and break contact with his fellow cultivators. Such a thing, in my mind, really looks like the beginnings of joining a dangerous cult. As such, I hope he's not associated with Mak Tin Si anymore, and is carefree and enjoying life.