sillybearhappyhoneyeater

The whole style uses Ming Gong, but the practice is Xing Ming Shuangxiu. We can say that the active aspect of the practice is essentially the same as Nan Zong, but the attention to consciousness is from Bei Zong, and then the unique aspect of allowing the energy to move naturally is a unique idea developed by Li Daochun. They don't use either the words Zuowang or Jingzuo. Zuowang is an old, pre neidan term for meditation, which Wang Chongyang brought into Quanzhen practice in order to illustrate a certain point he wanted to make about the relationship between seated meditation and other physical postures of meditation such as walking, standing, and lying down. Jing zuo is a Neo Confucian term which really didn't make its way into Daoism in a big way until the 20th century when reformers such as Jiang Weiqiao started using it as a way to emphasize their belief that meditation should be done while seated. Wang Chongyang used that word a little bit, but he also used words like Chan, and he clearly wasn't teaching Chan Buddhism. Back to the time of the early Nei Dan schools, there was no Chinese word to describe the process of internal alchemy specifically as a seated process, and I think people would be very hard pressed to find any evidence that any of the early Nei Dan people specifically suggested people should sit in meditation rather than simply affecting the meditative state at all times.

Ormus, the middle school starts with seated meditation. LaoZiDao, the middle school doesn't use the word meditation, that was my word for simplification of the subject.

This post is about building a foundation in Nei Dan, I just want to talk about theory, and if others have something to add, then please do. People who practice any art must first build a foundation and meditation is not any different. The difference with meditation is that the foundation can be hard to understand, since many of the goals of meditation are not tangible at first. Neidan provides some problems which complicate the issue further. Most schools of meditation are mainly focused on developing consciousness first, and some never even touch upon the physical health aspect of practice in their meditation. This often leads meditation schools to having various types of exercise that compliment their meditation. Yoga is a great example of a modern school which successfully combines meditation with physical exercise (although I personally think yoga people overemphasize the exercise part a bit). Daoism gets around this by focusing on developing Qi as well as developing a clear, empty mind. Developing Qi and then being careful about your lifestyle is a very good way to maintain good health, and usually this means that you can meditate a lot without getting tired. The problem is that at the beginning, people are unclear about what qi is, how it is developed, and how it relates to the mind. This, plus the many complex writings passed down in Daoism lead to considerable potential for distortion of facts. This is one of the reasons why so many ancient masters maintained the importance of receiving oral transmission and not just textual notes. Having said all that, Nei Dan has a set of basic attributes which must be put in place for the rest of the practice to succeed later. If you don't achieve these basics, then any later work will be a waste. It is like the old proverb that you shouldn't build a house from soggy wood. In Neidan, the core basis of the practice is predicated upon achieving internal quiet, minimizing mental phenomena, and allowing the required phenomena you can't ignore to merge together. So the basic practice of Nei dan will usually somehow relate to the mind, breath, and body merging together as one. That is how post heaven jing (phyiscal substance), Qi (breath), and shen (mind/spirit) are mixed and how the mind is gradually brought to being quiet. Most people have to go through this door and only a very few brilliant people can "focus without focusing," which is really one of the eventual big goals of practice. One of the reasons why the mind, breath, and physical aspect are usually brought together in the lower dantian rather than other points in the body (earlier methods of meditation often used any point in the body as a dan tian, the lower dantian thing really originated with embryonic breathing) is because This area of the body is capable of collecting pre heaven yang Qi and allowing it to build there. This is really the fundamental big goal of early practice in Nei dan is to build up yang qi in the body, and although focusing on other points can cause qi to build there (there is an entire five element art in fu qi lineages where people focus on each of the five organs) the Dan tian is the one place in the body which can hold the qi safely without causing health or mental unbalances. There are many early stages of practice that resolve themsleves as yang energy starts to build up in the Dantian, and some of them can trick people into thinking they have had profound experiences. The fact of the matter is that these effects like seeing a flash of light come and go before your eyes, or going into the mystery gate (the unconscious portal between post and pre heaven) are bi-products of correct practice, and aren't enlightenment or anything big. Many people who have studied with me are so surprised after entering into deep meditation and feeling qi for the first time that they write long essays to me about the experience, but these points in practice are really only the basic minimum requirement to enter into the Nei Dan practice. Before anything like opening the small orbit, the big orbit,building the embryo, or any other of the popular phenomenon that many people write about begin to happen, you have to achieve quiet and build up enough Qi in the lower dan tian. If the Qi isn't enough and you can't enter deep, profound silence, then the Qi will never move on its own. Many people are impatient about practice and if the Qi isn't moving in the Du Mai, then they just imagine they are moving it around by themselves. This is exactly the wrong thing to do and it does not have a positive effect. Even if you can feel something while you move your mind around the MCO, all that is happening is empty and it won't deeply benefit your health. The real way to get benefit from Neidan practice is to slowly cultivate the mystery gate, pre heaven, and lower dantian. If you get a positive effect like qi moving on the surface of your skin, or when the Qi suddenly moves up the spine to the brain, don't get excited, just keep slowly practicing in the correct way and you will build up a foundation. the practice should always end with you moving your mind back to quiet, back to stillness, and back to conserving the energy you have. Many people act like Qi gong is a contest to see who can open up all their energy gates the fastest, or they imagine they can get a mystical result in a short time. Neither of these things is a good attitude to be taking, and a better attitude would be to work on first understanding and then achieving the basics of the practice. The central reason why I'm posting this thread is because the board has entered into one of those cycles in which many people are talking about Qi gong practices which are genuinely dangerous to their physical health. It seems like some of them have teachers and that some others are just making up their own art as they go along. One poster even said that he makes himself nervous and sick when he practices. this is really bad and no one should do that. It doesn't matter whether you practice Neidan or qi gong, you should always follow a few basic rules to keep yourself happy and stabilize your progress. Anyone can make a feeling of Qi occur simply by making the mind intense and breathing in a convoluted way. The real skill isn't in feeling Qi, it is is building and keeping it. If you are a beginner, you should spend more time on achieving deep quiet (not just when you are seated in meditation, but in your day to day life), and protecting your energy (by practicing the Dantian properly in meditation, and by learning to minimize the amount of energy leaking from your sensory organs when you are doing day to day life). Even being able to do these two things is a big achievement and will give you more benefit than imagining the sun circling around your body ever would. I hope this thread is helpful and as always, if you have any criticisms, or want to add to it, please feel free.

I've been collecting notes for about two years in planning for another book. Its going to be a syncretic approach to Nei Dan which uses documents from all of the major schools to explain the practice from early foundational levels to the development of the small and large heavenly orbits. The material in the book will be teaching the same stages as my first book (i am a stickler for developing the energy body properly, which I think many writers skip in order to favour more romantic material that really shouldn't be practiced until people have mastered the basics), but in much more accurate detail. One of my big regrets about the first book is not including enough translated material (it was mainly based on oral transmission from my teacher), so the second book will aim to fix that problem with much more exact primary document analysis. I have a publisher, but we are just waiting a while to finalize details. In the meantime, I do teach various online courses and am being invited out to start a Daoist centre in a secret (for now) location somewhere in North America.

the mystery gate is a fairly contested subject in Daoism, with early schools believing it to be the nose and mouth, and then some schools making the criticism that it actually referred to the lower dantian, third eye, or solar plexus, but the best definition of the mystery gate, and the one I personally use is that of Huang yuanji, which is that the mystery gate is the time when the mind enters into the "Hun dun" or chaotic state. This state is when the kun hexagram reverts to the fu hexagram (deepest yin passes and one yang line emerges as the base of the six lines), The first place I've seen this articulated in terms of neidan was in some poetry from the southern school, but the middle school totalizes it into a theory of how the meditative mind moves from the active (you wei) to the inactive (wu wei) and then action without action (wu bu wei). In this case, it is when pre heaven jing, qi, and shen all collect together in Chaos and fortify the energy body, as well as giving birth to stronger post heaven Qi. In practical terms, the mystery gate refers to when we forget ourselves. Huang Yuanji called this "I do not know what my home is." It is the big difference between practices which focus on the pre heaven and practices which focus on the post heaven. post heaven practices will look to build Qi by coaxing it with the intention, while pre heaven schools build Qi by entering into emptiness to the point where the mind disappears for a brief time. When it comes back, the alchemical process has been started without our even having recognized it happening. This is totally in keeping with how the Neidan school articulates two different kinds of Qi, one means the qi related to breath, blood and external nutritional elements, the other type of Qi refers to something which is tempered in emptiness.

Hi all, I'm starting up a weekly instructional email series starting next week. It will be by email and every week there will be a document or section of a document from the Daoist Omnibus (usually the Nei Dan school, but also other meditation schools when appropriate), and an explanation of the meaning and how to practice. The goal of the program is to give a comprehensive synthetic approach to meditation, which is the way my own teacher taught me. The first month will consist of: Week one: - An explanation of the "Embryonic Breathing Classic" from the Small Daoist Canon + notes. Week two: - The section on Qing and Xing (emotion and nature) from the small Daoist Canon. Week three: - Hundred Days Basic Training from "Da Cheng Jie Yao." week four: - Cultivating emptiness, from Wang Chongyang's ten discussions. The second month will deal mainly with Da Cheng Jie Yao and "Three carts secret method." anyone interested in taking the course can email me at [email protected] It requires a donation to enter, but the donation is on a sliding scale so that people from different economic levels can all take benefit. The suggestion is $30-50 per month, which is the same as taking a local meditation or taijiquan class in your city, so I hope you will think it is fair. Anyone taking the course is welcome to send emails asking as many questions as they want and I will usually answer emails on the day I receive them. A little background about myself: I study with Yang Hai, who learned in Beijing and Tianjin with many different teachers. His first Nei Dan teacher was Cao Zhenyang at White Cloud Temple, but he also studied with Qian Feng Pai in Tianjin as well as meeting with and learning from many masters, some who were famous and some not so much. He spend a long time collecting every known book on meditation in the Daoist Canon, and has read around 2000 documents in the Canon, as well as all of the Nei Dan documents. After he passed down the method to me, I spent several years teaching myself to read Classical Chinese (with his help) and my teacher helped me explain many of the secret language of Nei Dan. I continue to practice meditation and read every day, and am most interested in the historical connection between early methods such as "embryonic breathing" to later methods such as "Nan Bei zong," "Zhong Pai," and modern methods such as Jiang Weiqiao's and the work of Chen yingning. I am mainly teaching from the perspective of helping people understand early methods first, especially in regard to "embryonic breathing" and the documents in the small Daoist Canon. This is to gradually work up to helping students read Understanding Reality and then Zhong Pai material. My teaching method is based on the theoretical development that happened during Daoist history and is based on the premise that understanding how the theory of Nei Dan developed will help people master the most important concepts of the practice. If you think you would like to study, please feel free to contact me.

Do you mean "Golden elixir"? It probably means meditation, but it might also have something to do with "water sports" so make sure you ask first

http://anniepecheva.blogspot.ca/ Contact Annie Pecheva, she knows many people in the European Daoist scene and is a tremendous scholar on Daoist practices. edit: and please have a look at my blog, http://daoistmeditation.com/blog/ which although perhaps not as good as Annie's, also has considerable translation and discussion of practice.

busting a reverse nut up your own spine won't make you enlightened. Gaining spiritual understanding is something which takes multiple passes and lots of times. There is an old saying, I think by Gotanda Buddha which is "imagine a pheonix flying over the Himalayas with a silk scarf, and brushing it each time it flew by. How long it would take to wear that mountain to the ground is how long it would take to become liberated." Learning to control yourself is a great tool though, and teaching yourself not to engage in excess, be it excess of the plate, excess sexual activity, excess thinking, speaking, or any other activity, will ultimately allow you to break away from the negative things that drain your life away. Self control is the root of wisdom and its a great thing to do, but don't imagine that nofap is going to turn you into a boddhisatva, because there are plenty of people who don't fap that are total demons and assholes.

In regard to Zhuangzi's writing, it is very hard to say whether this was a specific technique back to that time, since it is not fully introduced, but we can interrogate it from the point of view of later meditation schools in Daoism. In the various "Qi fa" sections in "xiao dao zang" there are no methods that focus specifically on breathing into the heals, but there are many methods which will allow the Qi to penetrate to the Yong Chun point in the feet. If we look at Nei Dan practice, although there is no "breathing to the feet" there are practices in Li Xiyue's writing (san che mi yao) which focus on lying on your right side and focusing on the Yin qiao meridian in the legs, as well as seated practices which focus on what he calls the yin qiao cavity (under the qi xue, between the perenium and anus). The Qing dynasty Daoist medicine book "Yang Sheng Lei yao" has a practice which focuses on sending post heaven qi around the heal up the back of the legs to the head and back down, but that is very "post heaven" and that book is the only place I've seen it. Usually, the best way of "breathing to the heals" is just to practice meditation until the Qi naturally reaches down the Yin qiao into the feet. That is one of the phases of the yin qiao opening and once you can do it all the time, it can help the rest of your body open up as well. opening ren and du is called "he che" but opening the structure of the meridians in the leg that connect all up to the head is called "da he che" and you eventually need to be able to do both.

It is a very common rule in Nei Dan. Different schools think differently about this, but one of the most popular ideas is the 100 days foundation practice, three years to build the embryo, and nine years to form the "body outside of the body," and this assumes you are practicing very seriously. If practicing casually, it can take even longer, or never happen at all.

So basically the whole neidan school and several other schools of Daoist focus on the Dantian, but the important thing to understand is what Dantian? When you look at xiao dao zang, for instance, it is pretty clear that Tang and Pre Tang ideas about Dantian were not fixed in the top, middle, and lower dantian, but instead, dan tian could be in many places, so each teacher would have their own understanding of how to cultivate Dan tian. It was only with the fixing of Dantian being the three main dan tian as well as the idea of the lower dantian, qi xue, and qi hai being the central point of practice that Neidan really became well organized as a school different from fu qi, cun xiang, or something else. Xing Ming gui Zhi is the same as other schools, it puts the main focus in the Qi Hai, which is under the lower dantian. The point of focusing on the "ancestor portal" is only for a few moments in order to pull the attention inside the body, then they move the attention to the "middle palace" and finally to the Qi hai. This completes the Ren Meridian circulation, and then that makes it easier to keep the focus on the qi hai point, but it is only a beginning level practice. Eventually, xing ming gui zhi also teaches to go to wu wei, wu ji, and the mystery gate, just like every other major nei dan school. The idea that people will focus for a long time on the zu qiao is an incorrect interpretation. The section saying to focus on that area all the time isn't about pulling the attention to the top dan tian, it is about controlling the eyes. that is called "Zhi yan," it means to maintain a soft focus so that the hun spirit is not pulled away through the eyes. It is easier to control the eyes by naturally allowing the attention to rest between them, on the top of the nose between the eyebrows, but this isn't about practicing the area as a dantian, it is about not allowing qi to leak. the practice of the Dantian is still mainly in the lower dantian, and then in later stages, after he che is achieved and the foetus is formed, then people will practice more in the upper dantian and middle dantian, just like in every other major school. many people don't understand the importance of building yang qi in the lower dantian, achieving wu wei, or achieving he che and the growth of the foetus, so they try to do upper and middle dantian meditation early in the process and end up hurting themselves. It is a very common mistake for both beginners and people who try to learn from books. If people want to do neidan properly, they need a teacher to help them as their mind begins to open. Without a guide, it is too easy to assume practice and make many mistakes. It should take at least three months to build the foundation and then at least another three years to build up he che, and maybe close to a decade to achieve the full energy body, and you can't skip stages. Xing Ming Gui Zhi is one of the most complete theoretical books explaining how the energy body works, it is a huge deal, but is very complicated and hard to understand. Usually I think people would be better off to study Huang Yuanji and Wu liu, since those writers were much more explicit about how to practice correctly, whereas too many things are implicit in Xing Ming Gui zhi, so it is easy to make mistakes.

He didn't understand the theory in Xing Ming gui zhi very clearly. Here is a rebuttal to that article: http://www.360doc.cn/article/1118715_57974264.html Most importantly: 所谓“先要存想山根”，不是要你死守山根不放，是开始的片刻，主旨在于“退藏”。如果断章取义，胡乱理解而专修“山根”，此女弟子不“发癫成傻”才怪！ "in regard to 'first, place the mind in the mountain root,' its method is not in you 'deadly maintaining' there without letting it go. It is just something you do for a short period of time at the start of practice. Its major idea is to 'withdraw inside,' if interpreted outside of its context and casually practice the "mountain root," it would be strange if this female disciple didn't go crazy and become stupid!!!" It is important to understand that Xing Ming Gui Zhi is a very complex and detailed manual and you need to understand the whole context of the book before you can practice it properly. People practice incorrectly and hurt themselves all the time, that is why Nei dan is orally passed down from generation to generation.

I think we need to have some sort of agreement to stop with the internal derision of Wu Liu Pai. The people making these threads are not citing any texts related to that style and are wasting a lot of time and energy trying to make a good style look weak. If they are not experienced enough to refer directly to the texts, they should just avoid talking about them altogether. I don't know how the mods or other posters feel about this, but from a personal perspective, this forum is much less enjoyable than it was before, since there is so much fighting and nonsense to sift through. There are still people practicing Wu Liu Pai and its daughter Qian Feng Pai in Beijing and Tianjin alive today and their practices represent an important part of the big picture of Dan Dao. Anyone wanting to talk about these things should do a bit of research about them first, instead of just opening up their mouths and letting out a bad smell.

I really don't like these particular discussions because they are partisan, but having read the better part of the Wu Liu Zong material, and also having practised other schools of Nei Dan, I want to comment based on my own comparison here. Wu Liu Pai follows a synthesis of earlier methods, most notably the Southern and Northern school. this is very easy to verify just by looking at their early curriculum up to later curriculum. They have also successfully adopted other types of theory into the school in order to fill in some of the gaps of other schools. The idea that Wu Liu Pai doesn't practice Wu Wei is silly and without merit. The first chapter of Wu Zhen Ren Dan Dao Jiu Pian: 仙佛合宗語錄 　 伍真人丹道九篇 　 最初還虛 第一 Absolute beginning, changing to emptiness: 太和問曰：《直論》中言：煉己先務，有當禁止杜絕之端。又言：不煉己，有難成玄功之弊。可謂詳言煉己之要矣！昨又蒙老師言：最初煉己，不過初入其門，仍要還虛，方入閫奧。敢請還虛之理，何謂也？ Tai He asks: Zhi lun's middle talk says: "the early work of refining Ji* should first adopt the method of absolutely stopping everything." and "not refining Ji will endure the hard suffering and will not be able to achieve the mystery pearl. This is the real discussion of the secret of refining Ji! Zuo You Meng Lao Shi said: The most basic of refining Ji, before even beginning to enter the door, is the secret of changing to emptiness. to enter into this calm mystery. May I ask, how to change to emptiness. 伍子曰：儒 家有執中之心法，仙家有還虛之修持，皆一致也！蓋中即虛空之性體，執中即還虛之功用也。惟仙佛種子，始能還虛盡性，以純於精一之至詣。 Wu Zi answers: Confucianism has the method of holding the centre, the immortality school has changing to emptiness and cultivating without stop. They arrive at one place! The centre of the body and consciousness should be empty and open. Holding the centre is the method of use for changing to emptiness. Only the immortal Buddhist seed can be opened by the exhaustion of changing consciousness into emptiness. This is the way to make the Jing will arrive at one fullness. 　*according to (San Ming Tong Hui), Ji is the "Yuan QI" of the heavens and the real Earth. Ji is yin aspect of the earth element. The yin aspect of the earth element is "Zhen Yi," or real intention. So "refining Ji" is refining the real intention. I'm going to stop the translation there and make some comments. firstly, sorry for my poor translation of the first couple sentences, I don't have time to think about how to make it into a perfectly cogent idea right now (packing to leave for Beijing tomorrow), but I think you can get the idea. Secondly, Wu Zhen Pian says "the original purpose is that wu and ji are the beautiful matchmaker," and according to San Ming Tong Hui, Wu and Ji are the yin and yang of the earth element. Now, understanding this and understanding that Ji is the "real earth," we know that "Zhen yi" comes from refining Ji, so this should already tell you a lot about how Wu Liu zong considered Wu Wei in their practice. Now, if we compare this to Huang Yuanji, it is the same meaning, so when awaken posted the Huang yuanji first chapter, both that and this part of the Wu Liu curriculum are talking about the same thing. The difference is that Huang Yuanji uses Confucian ideas like Wuji to talk about achieving the original seed, whereas Wu Liu Zong mostly use Daoist and Buddhist language, but otherwise, there really is no practical difference between these two ideas. The more important thing, and the thing which stupid face and her stupid parade of adoring idiots haven't mentioned (probably because they are amateurs) is that once the mystery gate has opened, you have to do something with the resulting energy that happens in the body. If we are looking at it from the perspective of Nan Zong, then once the qi moves, at the beginner level, we would just place it back in the lower dantian and focus on wu wei again (same with Lu Dongbin's method), but if we look at later methods like Huang Yuanji's style, we will find that he already talks about He Che in the second chapter and gives advice about how to harmonize He Che with the middle dan tian, so even though all schools use wu wei to enter the mystery gate, after the energy has moved, you have to do something with it or it will just dissipate and leave your body (IE: it will be wasted). It doesn't matter what school of neidan you practice, every one of them will cultivate all three dantian and every meridian and energy pathway of the body. the central difference between Wu Liu Pai and other schools in this regard is that Wu Liu Pai has a much more exact method of building He Che, the heavenly foetus and all the way to cultivating two bodies, making the spirit leave the body and much more. Some schools treat this practice as implicit while other schools have more precise methods. Wu Liu zong and Qian Feng Pai which followed it in Beijing and Tianjin have more conspicuous and exact methods, but I don't think anyone would accuse Xing Ming Gui Zhi of being external, so why would we accuse the Wu liu Zong curriculum. as with all things in life, people get jealous and when they get jealous they get stupid. It is very clear that Awaken is not providing anything positive to the conversation here, and besides that, what she needs to do is attend an English class, not talk in gibberish about her august and ascended methods of bullshitting. If she would like to have a debate about practice, she should cite directly from documents, not just skirt the issue by making thinly veiled insults that come from a place of utter ignorance and greed for fame. People like this are a total shame to Dao De and by now she's been causing trouble here already for more than a month. I'm not enjoying coming to this forum anymore because every second thread is her or her minions talking trash about good things. Have the mods given any thought to this disruption and how it might be dealt with?

My take on it is simply not to concern yourself with controlling energy in any specific way. It is profoundly superior to learn to calm down your mind and anchor your consciousness in quiet and openness than to move feeling around your body in various ways. If you don't achieve quiet first, moving energy will have no use at all, and you will probably damage yourself.

Hi, Dr. Khokhlov, thank you for making this very clear post. It is very important for the new student to have a qualified teacher, but in the case of the western student, it is even more difficult, because of the lack of native language skills in Chinese. My own teacher said once that he thinks most people will find it almost impossible to study nei dan because of the complexity of its theory and linguistic problems facing both westerners and young Chinese, as well as the lack of qualified teachers available today. Later he rephrased it and said that it will be very difficult, and anyone wanting to study nei dan will have to work very hard and make big sacrifices. I'm glad to see someone as learned as yourself sharing with us here and wish to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your generous translation of these materials. Best wishes to you and your future success! Sincerely, Robert J. Coons

Hi, Yuan refers to the original. Usually the English translation of Yuan Qi for instance is "primordial Qi." It is considered to be the building blocks every everything. So when nei dan practitioners meditate, the more well educated ones will access yuan jing qi and shen rather than post heaven jing qi and shen. This is sometimes split into two types of practice, external medicine and internal medicine. External medicine is based on intention, controlling yin and yang and breathing, while internal medicine is based on achieving non action, staying that way, and only making the smallest adjustments needed to maintain a non action state. The first practice is only good for cultivating some qi, but the second practice can let you open the "mystery gate." This particular concept I'm paraphrasing from Zhong He Ji, but it appears in other books too.

At the risk of walking into a mine field (already been ad-hominemed a few times today but what they hey!), my teacher told me that the original use of red clay "zhu sha" and wai dan in general was to kill parasites in the body so that the body could be made strong enough to do internal cultivation practices. I suspect that "bi gu" and other types of fasting may also have some relationship with this. Early types of Daoist practice could be very tiring and so people would have to be healthy enough to practice, so there might have been a reasonable cause for taking a toxic medicine which would kill of parasitic infections, even though it might be dangerous. Hu Haiya said in one of his books that Chen yingning was successful in making Wai Dan in the 20th century, but felt that there was no practical need for it and thus they replaced it with Chinese medicine in their practice (xian xue). Keep in mind that wai dan went out of fashion after the Song dynasty, and I personally believe it was because of the success of the neidan school and the writings of Lu Dongbin and Zhang Boduan against bad practices like wai dan, strong types of breathing techniques, and visualization, all of which can damage the body if done improperly. Nei Dan by comparison is much safer if you have a proper transmission, and certainly in the way that the Northern school teaches, it won't be dangerous even if your teacher is withholding information from you.

Zhang Boduan is not talking about Neidan in that article, he is talking about "fu qi" and "cun si" which are breathing and visualization techniques respectively. Anyone who wants to know about the difference between Fu Qi, Cun si, and Nei Dan should read "xiao dao zang" because it has sections dedicated to each ("zhu jia qi fa" for fu qi, "cun si bu" for visualization and jin dan for various external and internal elixir), here is a link to a website with all of the documents from xiao dao zang www.zggdwx.com/yunji.html

I can assure you I have never seen snake oil even once in my life, although I did try snake wine once. Luckily I only had a little tiny tea cup of it, but my mate has a bunch and got really stupid in public. We ended up doing kung fu in a park and singing Michael Buble songs to each other, it was lots of fun. Anyway, vis-a-vis negativity, most people who live in society will have to learn to deal constructively with negativity. The original spirit of my post was that it is better to learn to recognize the parts of yourself that need to be fixed and then work on fixing them than to use various methods to avoid them. I don't study Buddhism, but I've heard some Buddhist friends talk about how even meditation can become an addiction if you use it for the wrong reasons. I personally don't think people should run away from their problems, but should instead make wise and careful decisions about how to deal with them. Edit: I just realized the humour of being an advocate of useful negativity in regard to my position as a meditation teacher, since telling people that meditation won't solve all of their problems is really shit advertising. oh well, Cest la guerre, cest la vis. Professor Jordan Peterson at the University of Toronto talks about the movie Pinnochio as an example of how people learn to genuinely be their own persons. He says that at the beginning, Geppetto's hope is that one day Pinnochio will stop being a puppet and become a real boy, and then as Pinnochio goes through is trials and tribulations, he gradually grows and becomes stronger, and against all odds, eventually the strings are cut, he is no longer a puppet, but instead, he is his own person. Peterson says that this is the best thing that anyone can do (its cute when he talks about it on camera, because his voice chokes a bit and his eyes start welling up, you can see that he holds this as a deep personal conviction). as part of my own personal philosophy, I've also adopted this way of thinking. It is very true and very useful as a way to help people navigate through a very difficult life full of suffering and compromise. If you personally have achieved a life without suffering, I highly commend you, but for the rest of us mortals, most of us will have a long way to travel on that road. Ci bei ci bei.

The reason is because the original yang line in the water trigram changes to the centre of the the fire trigram, turning it into the heaven trigram, so in order to go back to yuan xing (yuan xing, yuan qing and yuan ming are discussed in Qing Jing Jing Tu Zhu by Shui Jingzi, which is a quanzhen text but similar ideas are talked about in the middle school as well), so yuan shen/yuan xing is the correct combination of ming and xing. As the text you posted says, leaving the three realms is the result of cultivation pure yang energy, but the pure yang energy is the result of the yang of life (the centre line of kan) and the mind (the outer two trigrams of li) coming together. Ming is not yin energy, it is yang energy. yin energy is the kun trigram and is the corporeal body and post heaven jing, once the yang line is added, then ming is found at the centre of the water trigram and is yuan jing. I'm kind of surprised that you consider ming to be a yin energy. Yuan Jing, Qi and Shen are all yang energies, they are what would be called the inner three treasures (Wang Chongyang said this first as far as I know).

Negativity is part of life and you can't avoid it so don't try. Feeling negative, even feelings of hatred for yourself and others can have positive results if you interpret and act on them properly. One of the greatest spiritual falsehood perpetuated since the Kurt Cobain generation is that if you hate yourself, you must also want to die. Instead of hating yourself and wanting to die, why not hate yourself and want to improve? If you feel angry about something, it either means something is wrong with you or something else in your life. If you can fix it, you should do your best to do so and then things will improve for you. Only cowards and children run away from pain and only idiots revel in it.

Usually the term Ming in Neidan practice refers to pre heaven Qi or pre heaven Jing. Wang Chongyang defined Ming as pre heaven Qi and further stipulated that he defined as such because jing and qi are one family (qi coming from jing). on the other hand, the middle school book xing ming gui zhi defines ming as pre heaven jing essence because it is the first aspect of life in our bodies at conception. Either way, the cultivation of xing and ming are the basic concepts of Neidan, and usually any meaning related to destiny is less important than the actual practice of xing and ming as characteristics of the mind and body. Simply put, xing means nature and ming means life, but in the context of neidan practice, xing means consciousness and ming means generative energy, thus "ming men" or life gate refers to the root origin of life (in neidan practice this usually means the area under the belly button, since this is where the foetus connects and feeds from the mother, so it is different than the Chinese medicine understanding which places the ming men on what is called the wei lu in nei dan practice). Usually Nei Dan considers its dual practice of xing and ming to be unique to nei dan, whereas they typically stress that Buddhists only practice xing (I'm not experienced in Buddhism, so I can't tell you if this is true or not). Chen yingning said that ming is like the oil of a lamp and xing is the brightness of the flame. without ming there is no xing (without life there is no consciousness) and without xing, ming remains useless (without consciousness there is no life). There are very few Nei Dan books that discuss ming in detail from the perspective of destiny, and usually Daoist prefers to use the term "Yuan," although Ming as destiny is very common in Neo Confucian work, especially Zhu Xi. It should also be noted here that Nei Dan is quite different from other Daoist schools and has its own terminology and use of words that is very different from other schools. It is also important to recognize that different schools inside of nei dan use the same words differently, so interpretations of xing and ming vary between schools. I personally prefer Li Daochun's interpretation which is that ming is the pure yang energy in the kidneys and xing is the pure yang energy in the heart.

Speaking in terms of Daoism, early Daoism does not clearly discuss the role of women, which makes sense, because China was and is a patriarchal society in which men are assumed to be actors and women are assumed to be objects (IE: passive). This change in Chinese gendering really didn't change until Mao Zedong came to power and made women and men equal as producers. Modern Chinese culture has regressed slightly in terms of equality, but I can only come to the conclusion that it is a tacit part of the social contract in which women choose to take advantage of traditional social roles within the framework of a competitive market economy. Daoism changed radically with Quanzhen and Sun Buer who developed a line of nuns who have been historically treated as exactly equal to men. In a conversation with a scholar (who asked not to be named) who studied Quanzhen in China for a decade, he said to me that the nuns actually tend to have a more complete understanding of Daoism than most of the male Daoshi in the Longmen sect. In terms of Daoist folkways, men and women tend to fit with Chinese social narratives, which places emphasis on the male as actor and female as object, or pseudo-actor. Chinese cultural history has many admonitions against women coming to power, as is evidenced by the Dowager empress and Madame Mao, so my overall feeling is that Chinese patriarchy will go more or less unchallenged long into the future. In regard to feminism and the relationship between women and men in Europe and North America, it is important to understand it in relation both to the Enlightenment age and to the overall effect of Marxist thought on equality movements. The enlightenment essentially gave women the tools to demand equal social status to men and also gave them the technology to print documents on the subject. The success of feminism in gaining the vote in America is directly commensurate with non land owners and African Americans getting the vote, it was a natural expansion of Liberty to all people, but of course we shouldn't forget the important effect of Sufrage in hastening the process. The 1960s sexual revolution needs to be viewed in the context of both changes in social morality and Marxist creep, since Marxists ideologues played a very important role in the dissemination of what would become critical theory and Post Modernism, both of which are very important in the context of female liberation. I think the recent silent return of many young women to more "traditional" ideas (The last time I checked, only 9% of women in the UK identify as feminist) is mainly to do with Neo-Marxist radicalism achieving a majority voice within the context of academic feminism. I think basically most people disagree with identity politics, the gender movement has lost a lot of its social viability. Another serious problem has been that in the drive to improve standards of life for women (which of course should be seen as a good thing), men have gotten left behind and are beginning to face serious inequality on a number of very important issues (access to public programs, unfair practices in family courts, and political demonization are three that instantly come to mind), so now we have a men's movement. Now I tend to agree with David Shackleton that a new gender movement ought to start with a mutual giving of thanks between women and men. Men ought to say to women "thank you for giving birth to us and nurturing us for the millions of years of our human existence. thank you for being our mothers, our daughters, our sisters and our friends." and women ought to say to men "Thank you for protecting us and providing us through the millions of years of our human existence, thank you for being our fathers, brothers, and our friends," and then women and men should talk and cooperate together about the shape that the future of our mutual story should take. Discussion, compromise, and eventual cooperation is what makes a society strong. Fighting, calling names, and being malevolent is the way to destroy society. We should emphasize cooperation and mutually respectful progress together.