Taomeow

I've always found advaita pretty Orwellian. But elaborations would belong in a thread "Taoist views on Buddhist interpretations of Hinduism."

Yup indeed. In most cases what we're are dealing with here is a bunch of mass hypnosis techniques. More than once have I seen the stage magician discreetly stuff a rabbit in his top hat and then demonstrate to the gaping audience that making special passes over the top hat and chanting "abracadabra" is what produced the rabbit. The "result" of the study. But most people are mesmerized by "peer" "reviewed" abracadabra. I invested some time into finding out who these "peers" are and how exactly they go about "reviewing" those top hats. The result? Almost zero interest in "studies" except to determine which way the wind blows. If they want it to blow in a certain direction, they will pull the rabbit out of the top hat, I have no reason to doubt that. And what I learn as a result is what it is that they're trying to hypnotize me into believing. This is useful information, of course. But that's where its usefulness begins and ends.

That's a bit Orwellian.

There goes all of Japan's zen tradition down the drain. The second most important Zen Buddhist master was, turns out, not practicing Buddhism. No wonder the Japanese imperial family are Roman Catholics.

You're talking about what (some) Buddhists think about other (different) Buddhists' practices. This answers the question of the thread even better than actually addressing it.

Here's a story I meant to share for some time... I went to Wang Liping's second Moscow seminar in May-June (to be blogged or otherwise immortalized later). Most of the participants were the same people who had attended his first Moscow seminar a year before. The story I'm going to tell, I didn't witness myself since it happened at the first seminar, but there were about 40 eyewitnesses all telling it more or less the same way, so here it is. Some of the practices were taught in the park, since they have to be performed in the open and among the trees (including a neat walking-breathing routine and some qigong aimed at communication and qi exchange with trees). So the master announced the days and times for this particular practice. Saturday and Sunday, from six to nine pm, he said. People began whining, because the weather was atrocious -- bitterly cold, heavy nonstop rain, and more of the same in the forecast for Saturday and Sunday. Wang Liping said, rain, hmmm... Well, if it was in China I'd talk to the dragon, but I'm not acquainted with the Moscow dragon yet... so I don't know if he will honor my request. Let me try though. Give me a half hour. He went to his room, closed the door, and was absent for a half hour. The students, perplexed, waited. Then the door opened, Wang Liping walked out smiling broadly, and said, "OK, I've made arrangements with the Moscow dragon. No rain six to nine pm Saturday or Sunday. See you in the park tomorrow." "Tomorrow" came -- that's Saturday -- and it was raining harder than before all day long and nothing in the sky was indicative of the rain having any intention of stopping by six -- or ever for that matter. All the students... well, I leave their feelings to your imagination, but grudgingly, they made their way to the park. At exactly six pm, the rain suddenly stopped. At exactly nine pm, when the practice was completed, it started raining again. It rained till six pm of the next day, Sunday, stopped at six, resumed at nine. It rained nonstop for another two or three days. Perhaps it's not for nothing that Wang Liping's taoist lineage is Dragon Gate.

Ormus, don't know about bigger seminars, but in Moscow, we were given the phone number of the senior instructor and urged to call for specific instructions if such and such events occur in the course of cultivation. Many of the possible "side effects" were discussed in advance, and dietary recommendations (traditional and genuine, rather than pop-cultural or indigenous to some other schools or sects or practices which you seem to have expected instead) were given in a special lecture dedicated to the subject. The vegetarian regimen, as well as a host of other restrictions, would only be necessary at the advent of particular events in cultivation, for a period specified. There's genuine masters who only teach one on one. But you probably never heard of them, precisely for this reason. If you find such a master, I bet it's a better deal -- let me know if you do, I'd be interested too. I've met a top notch feng shui master once who had taught only 16 students in 30 years, and only one on one. She was giving a public Q&A round to feng shui students of other masters and schools, of which I was one, on the request of one of her 16 disciples who also volunteered as her translator. It was amazing and the information I got serves me to this day, but to become her 17th disciple, I would have to become fluent in Cantonese, relocate to Hong Kong, and convince her that I am worthy of her time and effort. A bit of a conundrum. Hope this helps you accept that you can't apply Platonic ideals of how taoist learning "should" happen in the perfect world to the actual world we live in, and quit picking on master Wang Liping, or any other for that matter. It's a do or don't deal, taoism is not a compulsory education, nor an entitlement, and has never been.

Thank you for the thought and the quote. My thought exactly in my opening paragraph.

Right -- and still others might look at the source of wealth: one's own hard work vs. forcing the serfs into hard work.

In any society based on inequality as its primary practical (rather than theoretical, ideal, or confabulatory) modus operandi, a religious dogma has been installed by the overlords for the slaves that glorifies obligatory poverty in men and women of spiritual merit. Someone spiritually influential and financially independent would be too dangerous to the rulers -- hence the installation of the meme. Taoism is unique in that it remained completely immune to this meme. Worldly success and wealth were neither encouraged nor prohibited, and were pretty much left out of consideration as nonessential. Among taoist immortals, sages, teachers and masters, some come from poverty and some from wealth, some fought for worldly success and others couldn't care less, some were minimalists in need of nothing while others were powerful people in top positions in society. Westerners brainwashed by pop-buddhist ideas based on that meme might find it hard to stomach, but it's a fact of real rather than imaginary history. The Tang dynasty emperors facilitated the revival and the greatest period of flourishing, spiritual influence and material prosperity for taoists by supporting them in order to curb Buddhist appetites. Buddhist monasteries had grown dangerously wealthy and powerful due to the prior tax policy that exempted them from contributing to the empire's coffers while allowing them to tax the peasants either held in bondage or renting land owned by monasteries as heavily as they pleased -- and it pleased them to squeeze every penny out of those peasants while contributing nothing to the state. Taoists were never in this position and their appetites were nowhere near as excessive even at their worst. Doesn't mean none of them were ever supposed to have none whatsoever. Taoism ain't socialism. It's something that is equally at odds with socialism, capitalism and any other worldly -ism yet has been finding ways to coexist with all of them for six thousand years. "To go with the flow," one might want to actually pay attention to what the particular flow of the moment is like. At the moment, it's the flow of money... you can be tossed by it or you can navigate it, and if a taoist chooses to navigate it... how is it wrong compared to allowing it to shipwreck you?..

The motivation is "to roam the root of heaven and earth." I've never been to a church or temple or mosque service. If they were close to the root of heaven and earth, I'd go though.

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Heard this argument many times. Show a face in your 90s that looks better from cultivation than what a plastic surgeon can do for you, and that makes you legit. You can't? Then you've wasted your time, silly taoist. Some of the old withered masters with wrinkles and glasses and so on would have been dead, would have missed out on enjoying life for many years, would have been senile, decrepit, bitter, scared, dumb human wrecks instead of mere non-immortals they wound up becoming, mere contented humans. One needs to know where they started. Some started from a rather desperate place. Some were jing depleted from birth -- many! Some were jing depleted by their fifth birthday -- many! Do you realize the age we live in? and how hostile to human wholeness it is for everybody from the start? One of my teachers was starving in China during the cultural revolution and his father died of malnutrition when he was a child. Do you realize that someone who, decades later, is a powerful, cheerful, youthful "senior" in a body with which nothing whatsoever is wrong, with much to live for and a lot of enjoyment in living it, didn't practice in vain after all?

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I think it's the AI that always looks for shortcuts. It's a design feature of the machine to act this way, comes with the territory. To be a good machine you have to be efficient. Nature does not work like that, nature is guided by a whole host of principles of which efficiency is not the number one concern by far. So many wasteful rains and pointlessly breathtaking sunsets! Humans serving the almighty AI are merely in the monkey see monkey do mode, have been taught a bunch of circus tricks to perform on cue and forgot how to do anything else. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

In the West we have the ignoble tradition of Paracelsus, a lunatic driven insane by neurotoxic fumes of the mercury mine where he worked in his youth, surviving to this day in our very own (well, not really...) alchemical endeavors -- mercury compounds (Thimerosal) are in every vaccine, and in most teeth ever drilled by dentists, and it's been hundreds of years since the last time a human body remained uncontaminated by mercury. Hard to tell how different our history could have been if it wasn't for this brain- and nerve- and bone- and kidneys- and liver- and immune-system derailing infatuation. I doubt that waidan ever preceded neidan anywhere -- we knew the inside of our bodies hundreds of thousands of years before we learned (or, more likely, were forced) to mine for minerals and manipulate the outside forces to tweak with the inside of our body. But that's a different topic... Cinnabar of neidan stands for many things, but primarily of course for Fire, not limited in any way to the material Fire, or even the Sun, but Fire of wuxing, a phase of qi and a particular time in the cosmic process (Growth) and quite a lot of other stuff. CInnabar of waidan is -- well, I have a cinnabar bracelet and an antique cinnabar bottle for (in all likelihood) opium, and they are both pretty. People should have stopped there with waidanning this substance far as I'm concerned.

Surely you don't mean Cleary -- perhaps you wanted to ask if he's the Russian Joseph Needham? If the answer is "yes," then of course he would qualify as the towering height of most fundamental scholarly work on Chinese civilization in general and taoism in particular. Cleary is just a prolific translator. (Although "just" does not quite do justice to his effort, and I don't mean to belittle his contribution in any way.) I've read some Torchinov years ago, but I would have to refresh my memory and systematize my currently rather sketchy picture before voicing an opinion. I suspect Needham still stands peerless among the world's sinologists... if it turns out I'm wrong, I'll report back on new findings.

Thank you. The taoist concept of "luck" is a major stochastic science. I already wrote before about the deceptive simplicity of taoist scientific terminology that might cause a Westerner (or a Western style educated Chinese, which is to say nearly every modern Chinese) to mistake it for a sign of a "primitive" "unscientific" cognitive paradigm. In the West we say probability theory or chaos theory or genetics or quantum mechanics and allow only Ph.D.s to count as experts on their intricacies, while traditional taoists say "luck" and allow only folks with top notch training upwards of what a Ph.D. degree in all of the above and more would require (over 30 years of schooling and empirical applications) to count as experts -- and still those experts, some of whom have invested tens of thousands of hours into their education, will say "luck," because there's no need to get fancy when you're dealing with a fundamental principle of the universe, you can just stay fundamental. And they do. But of course I am not this kind of expert. Luck is the mover and shaker of the destiny of the universe, so you need time and... well... luck to master it -- but on any level of mastery you will still only scratch the surface. However, such "scratching" may make a big dent in a particular human's destiny.

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The wisdom of Chief Wiggum of The Simpsons: "Ralphie, if your nose starts bleeding, it means you are picking it too much. Or not enough."

That's the list I mentioned in the Logic thread and was hoping to get pinned and studied! Thank you, Dwai. Scotty offered a more complete one, but this could be handy enough for starters. The expunging of the ad hominem fallacy specifically is the one that, if understood for what it is -- a prerequisite to all normality in human communication that helps avoid many (neurotically excavated) communication pits wherein the arguing parties fall so often and in such an ungainly fashion -- I would probably make the main fail/pass point if people's ability to have conversations with other people was somehow to be tested in a formal setting.

Who are you kidding, you incorrigible nietzscheist?

We have a tradition here of pointing out someone's weaknesses only when they ask for it explicitly. "Please tell me what it is that's wrong with me in your opinion" would be such an invitation. Barring an invitation, we (or at least those of us who are here to stay) leave others' weaknesses alone. Friend or foe, please avoid trying to fix anyone unless they have invited you to fix them. Hope it makes sense to you and your peers, but if it doesn't, it's still useful to know that it's the consensual style of this particular place, and guests are expected to avoid breaking the hosts' furniture even if they find it less ergonomically sound than their own back home. This is not a correction institution, not an inquisition trial, not a doctor's office, not a confessional, and the fuse the place is equipped with for those who mistake it for one of those is short. Please keep that in mind and you and your peers will fit in just fine.