Taomeow

Well, farewell. Until tomorrow, the day after, winter time. Well, farewell till March, till March then, winter we will meet apart. Meet apart and say good-bye to. Well... farewell till better days. Until spring. And eyes are shifty. Until spring. And later still. Well, farewell, farewell till summer. Fumbling with a glove, no point. Well, farewell till somehow, somewhere, sometime later, maybe then. Pointless, standing in the doorway. Nothing's more precise than this. Till the last, the final, deadly line, farewell. Beyond it too. --Alexander Kushner (in my translation)

Far as I'm concerned, not simplifying, not complicating -- destroying. (Please nobody point out I wrote this on a fracking electronic device. I know. It came to take away and usurp the place of what was a lot more, a lot better -- we used to call it life. We're in a place where it's not a choice between electronics and the fabric of actual life-creating presence of body, mind, spirit. It's a choice between electronics and nonexistence, for most people most of the time. Here's a study I saw yesterday: https://9to5mac.com/2017/08/04/impact-of-smartphones-on-mental-health/) Seductive and addictive, they are. So is crack cocaine. Is crack cocaine simplifying or complicating an addict's life? When the battery dies, yes, everybody is up a creek. Except for those who can calculate the time on their fingers -- forget electronics, I don't even need a pen and a piece of paper, all I need is the sun, the moon and the skill (I took a course, though electronic seduction has caused it to get very rusty over the years, but I can revive it anytime if necessary.) "When the battery dies" is an optimistic outlook though. I'm afraid it may outlive us.

Of course. Period 8, Ding You year, Han Lu season, Ji You month, Ji Mao day, Wu Shi hour. Qi is good in the Northeast, South, and West. The star 6, ruler of Lungs, Large Intestine, and Bones, stands in the Center of the day. Its combination with 9, the star of the month, is not that great, however the day has a lot of potential and is good for initiating stuff, not good for completing tasks (or starting the ones that are about closure.) And so on. "The way of heaven is easy and the way of the earth is simple," as the great classics put it.

Multiplication tables don't lie.

111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

Chinese popular culture -- what exactly is that? Traditional Chinese culture, and this includes folk traditions, is rooted in taoism, you can't separate them. Modern "popular culture" did not "evolve," anymore than the Chinese Rooster sign has "evolved" into the Western "Taurus," even though modern Chinese are more likely to say "Taurus" than "Rooster" when asked "what's your sign." Modern Western culture is expansive and invasive. This is not evolution, this is cultural colonization. The founder of my lineage, Lu Dongbin, is recorded as being between 20 and 40 years of age when he first met his teacher Zhongli Quan. The range is sufficient to give an idea of what he was: "a young man." Four hundred years later, he surpassed his teacher in cultivation (whereupon their roles got reversed and he became the teacher), so whether he was some 20 years younger or older when he started is of little interest to his followers. My own taoist teacher has taught us to think of one's age up to about 50--70 as our "teenage years" if we want to shoot for taoist longevity. The preliminary goal, to live to 160, warrants deprogramming your mind from the artificially imposed expectations of decline by viewing the first third of this period as adolescence, the second, as adulthood, and the third, as your prime. You are under no obligation to meet society's desire to label you as something you are not based on its idea of what age warrants what label.

You are very welcome. There's no such thing as a "superior" or "inferior" taoist art -- it all depends on the level of the practitioner. Taiji has its own levels, and that's where you can compare "superior" and "inferior" -- within a given art. While acupuncture has its own, and within the art, again, you can compare superior and inferior skill, modest or great attainment. But medical qigong practitioners focus on developing a different set of skills, which tai chi does not "emulate" -- it's just that gaining command of qi can be applied to different tasks, put to different uses. Medical can indeed be used to harm at the level of qi mastery, but that's not what the (non-deranged) practitioner is after, the skill bends to the will, to intent. A surgeon can also stab someone with a scalpel in a bar fight, but that's not what her training is for, and that's not the intent of having it in her pocket.

"Someone" humbly submits that sung is not the opposite of "tension." Rather, it is something a whole lot more skill-dependent -- you don't become sung by "relaxing." And it is something chronic tension does not allow a practitioner to develop. That's what "someone" saw in the first video. Also, applying the skill of reading comprehension would reveal this "someone" said "taiji can be practiced as a qigong," not "qigong can be practiced as taiji." Don't learn from the internet, Sudhamma. More importantly, don't teach unless asked. That's part of sung.

The version you found I'm not crazy about, to tell you the truth, but the problem is not the speed -- it's the body mechanics of the guy who demonstrates it. He's got no sung... To your questions: Can you replicate this just by Tai Chi, and, if so, how? Yes, absolutely. How -- by empirically learning and following all its principles under a good teacher's guidance, practicing, gaining sensitivity, control, command of your body, command of your qi. If you were a millionaire and could have a daily acupuncturist, would you even need to bother with Yi Jin Jing (assuming you did some kind of physical exercise such as running, swimming, weights)? Oh dear, please, no daily acupuncturist for me. Acupuncture is useful when something is wrong and needs to be corrected, but it is far from enjoyable. Millionaire or not, I would be doing exactly what I'm doing -- taiji (including martial applications), qigong (the ones I do regularly are Wang Liping's), swimming, a bit of rock climbing, a bit of yoga, no running, no weights. I'd summon my personal acupuncturist if I needed to deal with a problem, and shoo him or her away as soon as the problem was corrected (or, alternatively, if acupuncture proved not capable of fixing it. This happens, in my experience.) What's the difference between Yi Jin Jing and Tai Chi? Is it all the extra martial arts techniques or is it something else? The difference is, taiji can be practiced as a qigong -- for health, strengthening the body and spirit, healing or preventing illness, but you can also practice and use it as a fighting technique, since it is an internal martial art and is basically designed to turn your whole body into a deadly weapon without taking away from its health and without depleting its vital forces (in fact, it is geared toward replenishing them, not using them up, unlike sports and external MA.) With yi jin jing or any other qigong I'm aware of, the first part is the same -- health, strengthening the body from the inside out, healing, prevention, perhaps spiritual development and growth toward whatever "non-ordinary" goals -- but not the second part, since it's not a MA, and you can't use it to kick anyone's ass.

bee's knees

I do it on occasion, as a warm-up before a taiji practice. It is a very good qigong. "What you got from it" -- hard to tell, the bulk of my practice time is dedicated to taiji, and there's two kinds of taiji people -- the ones who like both qigong and taiji, and the ones who prefer to do some of their taiji as qigong when they're in the mood for qigong. So I mostly only do yi jin jing if a practice partner initiates it, and some of them swear by it. "I might be getting a headache, let's do yi jin jing first, OK?" "I almost got a cold yesterday, did yi jin jing, stopped it." So, far as I can tell, people use it very successfully as a pick-me-up, fix-me-fast practice. Me, I go along with it, but my heart belongs to taiji. Here's my teacher's version:

Written Chinese. 人 -- person. It's a picture of a human walking. Now imagine that instead of walking, this person extends his or her arms as wide as possible. You get 大 It means "big."

This has been discussed in my Ancestral Movement group. Prompted me to revisit my greatest inspiration coming from the all-around athletic (into their centenarian years) folks known for endurance walking/running better than anyone on Earth -- the Tarahumara. Watched many videos stopping many times to check their footwork when they walk and run -- on all terrains. (Theirs is primarily very rough.) The only time they step on the forefoot is when they run uphill. Sapienti sat. Also, my taiji teacher has always watched me like a hawk for proper stepping, and if I used the ball of the foot where I have to use the heel, or vice versa, he remembered for years after I'd corrected the mistake... "oh, good," he would say, "you step on the heel now, remember you used to get confused?" I wouldn't if he didn't remind me! I'd just remember that once I got it, there's no point stepping wrong, your whole body feels it and gets it. But reminders are a punishment for the crime. We step on the forefoot (toe, ball) when moving backward or when stepping where we're not looking or where we're not sure what we're stepping onto (testing the dubious or treacherous ground before committing -- or in the dark.) We land on the whole surface of the foot when jumping (another set of shameful reminders -- "remember you used to jump and I could hear you didn't land on the whole foot? If you land on the ball or on the heel, I can hear this wimpy sound, no power, a jumping noodle..." Picture Cersei Lannister on her shame walk. Not anymore.)

Mid-Autumn Festival, aka the Moon Festival, the second most prominent Chinese holiday after the New Year, fell on October 4th this time around, which was yesterday. The moon, as always on this day, was spectacular. The most beautiful moon of the year, as usual. I bowed to Lady Chang-O and her rabbit, as usual. I believe I never told the story of the rabbit on the moon here although I did tell the story of Lady Chang-O. So here goes: Once upon a time, many moons ago, three taoist immortals were walking through the woods, pretending to be beggars, asking animals to give them some food so as to test their moral character. A wolf and a bear gladly gave them what they had. The rabbit, however, had nothing to offer them. He didn't want to come across as greedy, useless, or otherwise to lose face, so he exclaimed, "Well, since I have nothing else to offer, venerable sages, I offer myself!" -- and jumped into the fire to get roasted! (Yup, taoist immortals are not vegetarians.) The three sages, moved by his self-sacrifice, decided it would not be nice to eat such a selfless creature, so they made the rabbit immortal, conferred alchemical skills, and sent him to the moon to serve Lady Chang-O in and around her cinnamon palace. You can clearly see him grind herbs in a large mortar when the moon is particularly bright.

Sun and moon exchange genders in quite a few cultures, but some designations make more sense than others. E.g. the taoist way of applying the dynamic yin-yang principle that posits nothing is yin by itself or yang by itself, only in comparison to something else -- i.e. things yang are merely "more yang than some other things," and things yin are really just "more yin than some other things." Nowhere is this comparison of two objects more obvious than with the sun and moon. One can't possibly see the sun as "more yin than the moon." In many cultures, there's much confusion which came about for assorted reasons and got embedded in the language. In Russian, e.g., the ambiguity of the moon's gender is practically guaranteed by the fact that there's two words for "moon," one feminine gender (luna) and another, masculine (mesyats). The masculine version is the same word as the word that means "month," same as in Chinese, but the word for a woman's menstrual period is also derived from that moon/month word (mesyachnye). The moon is male in the folk tradition, while the sun, being of the neuter gender, is neither. About the Aboriginal warning to not lie there looking at the moon when going to sleep, lest the Moon Man bash you with the club -- compare to the warning coming from Central Asia/Pamir Mountains region: "Don't lie there looking at the moon, or the Moon Woman will count your eyelashes! If you let her, she'll set the number as the number of months you've got left to live."

A Taiwanese friend told me yet another version of the story. He knows the rabbit as the beneficiary of the remainder of the immortality pill, which was shaped as a medicine ball, not the kind you will see if you google "Chinese medicine balls" that are for exercise, but rather, one of the forms in which Chinese herbal medicines can be dispensed. I've seen and used those, they are considerably bigger than the tiny ones you typically get from a bottle of Chinese herbal pills -- about the size of a quail's egg -- and soft, not hard. Each can be (and usually is if the medicine is valuable) placed in an individual ball-shaped or egg-shaped container "shell"-- modern ones are plastic, don't know what the original containers were made of. So, the Taiwanese version my friend shared asserts that Lady Chang-O, in a great hurry as she was fleeing after stealing the pill, didn't finish eating it and dropped the container shell on the floor with some of the medicine remaining in it. She was fond of rabbits all her life and kept them for pets, so there were always rabbits hopping around, and one of them immediately went to explore the container she dropped, and ate the medicine. Which made him immortal, and transported him to the moon right on his owner's heels.

Perhaps retained from earlier traditional cultures. To this day, there's isolated tribes still surviving the onslaught of "civilization," the very last of the Mohicans, where people not only never ask each other their age but don't know it themselves. When an "anthropologist" inquires, the answer is, "this is not something I concern myself with." This wise attitude safeguards the whole culture against the bane of "civilization" -- age discrimination. Besides, a recipient of a transmission may well be as old as the whole lineage -- the age of the mind (and/or spirit, soul, shen) may far exceed the age of the body. Alternatively, someone's old body is no guarantee of a mature mind contained therein. And someone looking as though they are of a particular age means nothing at all. For millennia, toward respect and recognition, people preferred looking older, it was a marker of life's experience. (Not anymore, many people today who have spent the last half-century commuting to a stupefying job and then sitting in front of the TV are not richer in life's experience than they were when they were fifty years younger.) With the advent of Hollywood, the fashion industry, and coordinated conditioning toward blatant ageism in all social spheres, the tables have been turned, now people prefer to look younger. Either way, one is better off avoiding the question, civilized society is hell-bent on bursting everyone's bubble, and no matter what they believe about themselves, making them stop. Just stop believing in yourself. You are too young. You are too old. You look your age. You give us your age and we'll find a way to flog you with it, it's a weapon we have against you, see? Taoism has many wise taboos...

Saw this bumper sticker today: "Eat people not animals." Didn't have a chance to ascertain whether it was the driver who was purple, or the people he ate.

Disconnect

Make guns illegal?.. Why do I always feel like bursting into song when I hear the proposition? I'm back in the U.S.S.R... you don't know how lucky you are, boys... Back in the U.S., back in the U.S., back in the U.S.S.R... It was done very successfully there -- only took killing about 70 million citizens and then it was very peaceful, for some 30 years out of a total of the empire's 1,000-year lifespan, but then, mysteriously, it was over and guns proliferated like mushrooms after the rain, because the empire fell apart and no one was in the position to do anything about it. All violence had been the privilege of the powerful, the citizens had none. So "when they came for the empire," there was no one left to defend it.

Got it from my paleo days guru, Nora Gedgaudas,Ph.D. -- either from her book "Primal Body, Primal Mind" or from an interview or website of hers, don't remember which. (The book is always on loan... an aside: there's three books I know I own and once read cover to cover which I never get to re-read because someone else is hogging them... too difficult to read, too difficult to admit defeat, that must be it -- there's a haiku somewhere in there, might remove a couple of syllables and voila... They are the one referenced above, then "The Vegetarian Myth" by Lierre Keith, and "The Book of Five Rings" by Miyamoto Musashi. Fighting books all of them, and nigh invincible. )

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I keep a jar of raspberry preserves for this. The traditional sore throat/cold/flu remedy where I come from. Works better in my experience. Honey is used too, any good unadulterated honey (hard to find anywhere these days), and I don't know (and am too lazy to look up) what UMF is, but what I do know is that one "mystery ingredient" with antibacterial and antiviral properties is contained in all honeys too but in different amounts in different kinds: hydrogen peroxide. Yup. Which is why I occasionally make a honey-based hair mask to lighten my highlights. Oh, and for anti-cold/anti-sore-throat treatment, we use tea with honey, lemon and a splash of cognac. Anyone sick will sleep like a baby and wake up feeling better from this potion. Contraindicated if there's high fever though.

Thank you, Rene, it was sweet and funny about the fish.

I missed that one back then. So, better late than never, here's my two yuan. Let's see... I didn't know any Blofeld (except for translations) at the time, read his "My Travels in Mystic China" since then, with mixed feelings. Which is no surprise, since the author himself was a mix of a mystic and a playboy, a scholar and an epicurean, a buddhist and a colonial social climber... The parts I remember vividly (I donated the book upon reading -- part of one of my "methods," a new thing since that post -- a tendency toward minimalism) are his lamentations over the disappearance of the authentic (as he thinks of it) pre-war Beijing with all its marvels -- chiefly gastronomical and erotic were his biggest regrets; also, for some reason, his complaints about his argumentative Chinese wife, who comes across as a protagonist of that Genesis song, "I could say day, and you'd say night, Tell me it's black when I know that it's white, S'always the same, it's just a shame, that's all!" More water under the bridge... Is my method really working? What do you think? I learned to manage hurricanes (and applied Her teachings to several, beginning with Irene that was supposed to destroy New York but did nothing of the kind) in a way that may prevent or at least minimize human and animal deaths (I have no control over what happens next in the affected areas, I'm a hurricane shamanka, not a politician). I took my taiji to the level of international instructor certification, not that it matters, they're just trying to formalize taiji "levels" in a manner copycatting all other, overwhelmingly bureacratic-hierarchical, human endeavors, but my taiji is really light years farther along compared to what it was like back then. The rest of my methods have to do with immortality, taoist style (i.e. in the case of success you get to choose the kind of immortality you want, you don't let any bigger-badder powers, even tao herself, take that decision out of your hands and dish it out to you pre-cooked. There's many different kinds to choose from. If you succeed.) So time (or whatever passes for time as we pass time in this-here 3D video game) will tell if they are working. Thanks for asking!