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Hey! I started this thread and went away to not fight anyone this TKSGK and when I came back it had gotten too funny to ignore. Folks, nirvana is the transmutation of the yang spirit away from the yin. Otherwise known as death, I think. Could be wrong as usual but IMO the point of Taoist immortality is to avoid death AND to embrace life. You can't IMO embrace life if you're spending too much time in survival mode, which is what the lizard brain's job is and the lizard people's job to insist upon. No tin-foil hats required, a BS meter will do for starters. If you check, over the last however many centuries, there has been a culturally consistent telling of human history that includes: - duality - ascension - future promises for present sacrifice - the inherent worthlessness/weakness of humans (can't save themselves out of a paper bag) Which of course is BS.

No bows from me, for I live in fear of my tin foil hat falling off.

first of all, youre the one who started it, and then didnt answer her question at all. second of all, tin foil hats DO help, thats why people wear them. how do i ignore this guy? i've never done that, can someone tell me how?

Your big mouth doesnt equate to big power, even if that was the point. You are all bark, with no bite. You still live in fear of the reptilian overlords in their motherships, orbiting the earth and controlling people's minds with microradiowaves. So go ahead and put on your tin foil hat. See if that helps.

I browsed their website a bit. The only word I can come up with that somewhat describes it nicely ... WACKY! http://www.chiinnature.com/tao_gunning.html http://www.chiinnature.com/badpaths.html I'm not saying their stuff doesn't work, but apparently they have some serious potential for causing more harm than healing. And their utter lack of even the tiniest bit of shame for total marketing exploitation is not my personal taste. Sure, everybody has to make a living, but I'm just saying that I had to laugh in astonishment regarding their ... severe opportunism. On a more serious note, I think emphasizing all the gun and protection stuff on an altar might fortify the perception of a threat. You try to keep demons at bay, and at the same time the real battlefield - within - is dominated by them because your focus is on the outside. In some of their slander texts, you can even see the psychological roots for this whole approach. And they themselves are so much as they perceive others that it's a big joke. I haven't read everything there, but did anybody check their lineage/background? Addendum: OK, found this thread: http://www.thetaobums.com/index.php?/topic/10095-questionable-mak-tin-si-sect/

Little1 is in China now (I don't know which city) but he said he cannot access Taobums and facebook from there. Do you know any way how to access the banned sites? I talked with him through yahoo messenger news about Yoda (I was wondering too what happened to him): http://makchingyuen.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/tin-yat-students-altar-kyle/ http://makchingyuen.wordpress.com/2011/07/27/tin-yang-kyle-tin-yat-lineage-taoist-faat-si-video-of-doing-scripture/

Hey Cam, good to see you! I'm sure you and China will enjoy each other's company! I was in China last summer, but spent 6 weeks of my stay in Xi'an and only a few days in Beijing. Xi'an is a provincial city of 7 million and I learned its ways only to find that in Beijing much of what I'd learned does not apply, it's so different. Beijing reminded me of Moscow -- hectic, busy, flashy, polluted as hell, modern to the max on the outside, but inside -- ???... Well, looks like you'll have a good chance to find out what it's really like. Do keep us posted if the spirit so moves you. As for Yoda, the last thing I heard about him was that he became an apprentice of Mak Tin Si after the latter helped him dispel some negative energies which Yoda attributed to kunlun. (How's your kunlun, by the way, still going or in cold storage?) Mak Tin Si has a site, you may try tracing Yoda's current whereabouts if you visit, but I don't have a bookmark for that, google it up.

I may or may not agree with that statement, and with the rest of your post (though I do posit that Mak Tin Si has awesome hair). But I'm not asking here for knowledge of the true Way of the Tao, I'm asking for information that will help me bring authenticity to a work of fiction set in premodern China. I'm asking for help in understanding the theoretical underpinnings of belief that a premodern Chinese Taoist may have held, and I'm looking for details that will help me write rich descriptions of rituals. What do you mean by "ku's"? The poison magic?

I can't bring myself to blame the cultural imperialists. The ones like Johnson have found something they believe in, something that changed their lives. Perhaps it came in a blazing moment, and they dedicated their lives to this, this way, this Tao. But as they study and come across elements that just sound absurd to them -- "wait, this scripture says at the age of fifty, a fox will grow a second tail and begin to change shape into a human female and suck men's yang out of them?" -- they're forced either to reject the silly-sounding elements or find a way to interpret them as metaphors. For me, though, writing about Taoist priests in premodern China, the culturally imperialistic, it's-just-a-metaphor crowd fail to give me the insight I need into my characters and their world. My big issue with Strickmann isn't that he's a scholar, keeping the spirituality at a studious distance; it's that he's a synthesist. He argues that Tantric Buddhism had more of an influence on magical Taoism than had been previously thought, so he uses their texts interchangeably; he also uses Japanese Taoist texts interchangeably with Chinese Taoists, and so on. Other anthropologists have been much more respectful to their sources, like John McCreery, but my liddle poet-brain can only read so much of "Taoist exorcistic manuals from the 13th century comprise both those that do or do not ascribe powers to divinity, except of course for the Tiae-Zhong, which does both and neither, according to Margaret Sussissus' excellent paper, 'The Both of Neither: Discourse, Discrepancy, and Discord amongst the Tiae-Zhongian Subsects of 13th-Century China,' but as we all know, Pierre Derriere refutes her methodologies (without disputing her conclusions) in his 1984 book...." and so on, ad vomititum. Thank you. I've been doing this. I'm still seeking many of the pieces that make it all fit. Actually, one of them is "power" -- this is a word Eva Wong uses several times in her Shambhala guide, saying that the efficacy of a talisman is proportionate to the "power" of the talisman's maker. She says that more than once, but she doesn't define "power" or give the Chinese word she might mean by "power." She says something, I forget what, but she says something that made me think her notion of a Taoist's "power" was connected with lineage and ordination. Any thoughts? Mak Ching Yuen, aka Mak Tin Si, seems to think that a talisman's effectiveness derives from its creator's lineage. (His lineage, predictably, is the best. Judging from his blog, his lineage also has the best guns and hairstyles.) Taoist Master Chuang, according to Michael Saso's book (perhaps the only one so far that was a joy to read), seems to think that the effectiveness of spells in general derives from the "perfection" of the spellcasting performance. So, in other words, how I felt upon reading that superb paragraph.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Taomeow! I'm actually not looking to acquire talismans or to make them. I'm writing a story, and I wanted to be able to give accurate details of the talisman-making process, the theory behind talismans, the different kinds of talismans, their supposed effects, and so on. If there was someone who'd had a particularly striking experience with talismanic magic, it might help shape my thinking on the subject. I've tried to join Mak Tin Si's site -- it's broken, the captcha doesn't work, no way to join it. Perhaps the yaogwei are interfering. I've read Eva Wong's book, in which everything is described in very general terms, and I bought one of Jerry Alan Johnson's (extremely expensive) books. Johnson gave a lot of details, but the theoretical understanding seems sketchy to me; he explains everything in terms of human psychology, psychic vibrations and such, whereas anthropological texts like Michael Strickmann's (extremely expensive) Chinese Magical Medicine make it look like traditional magical Taoists actually believed these things emanated from gods, demons, lost spirits, and animal spirits like huli jing. I think Johnson doesn't believe in the gods, demons, and animal spirits, so he translated it all into modern pop psychology, which makes his book a frustrating resource for my purposes. I've been considering Wilson Yong's (extremely expensive) Secret of Taoist Talismans, but I don't know if it contains anything worthwhile. I'd like to find informative websites, or knowledgeable people, or solid book recommendations, or hear about personal experience. Thank you!

Oh, OK, I just didn't want to start from the very basics, these being available elsewhere, but since you're familiar with the subject... Well, what are you interested in -- obtaining talismans for certain purposes, or learning how to write them yourself? If the former, I don't know who to recommend, there was one participant on the forum who sells them, Mak Tin Si, but I have my reservations, although there's other people here who spoke highly of his "energy." He has a forum somewhere out there, you can look him up. "Talismanic water" you asked about is obtained by burning an active talisman, mixing the ashes with water, and either sprinkling, spraying, adding to bath water, drinking, or otherwise using it externally or internally. No one is ready to write a talisman who hasn't practiced calligraphy for a rather long period of time. It has to be practiced the taoist way, as a deep meditation, not as a mechanical endeavor. But the sheer technique is also something to work on for a long time before your qi can saturate your brush... Needless to say your qi has to be developed as you go too. It's a long haul. The magical part, the applications, consecrations, fasts, prayers, intent manipulation, etc., is something you will discover either beforehand, in the process, or after you've mastered the techniques -- if it was meant to be. To be ready to write a talisman is far more difficult than to be ready to write a bestseller. Do you have pretty good handwriting, steady and strong and graceful? A sure, unshaking hand? If you ever shot a gun, were you really really great at hitting the mark? These are some indirect indicators that you might succeed someday if you take up the practice.