morning dew

Thanks everyone. I'm still really enjoying reading everybody's experiences. I just started reading chapter 6. It's quite fascinating. Very interesting. I've never heard of this before, but it already mentions smell a few times in chapter 6 of Paul Dong's book.

Thanks, absolutely fascinating.☺ Yeah, that's cool. I wasn't expecting anyone to prove anything, just to share genuine experiences.

Fascinating stuff. Thanks for sharing. The video was just for laughs – it's not a serious debunking. But it did get me thinking about the limits of what you can do with chi on a kind of 'physical' level with it.

Well, autonomy is probably my highest value, so I probably would agree with this kind of thinking (on a personal level). I'm afraid my knowledge of politics is very poor, though. I don't know how well it would work if everyone was doing this, especially if they, or some of them, were irresponsible or had conflicting ideas of how they wanted to govern themselves.

Thanks, very interesting. I'll have to dig around some more on him. As a side note, I tend to find somebody like him more convincing as he's not putting on a big show of being a 'master', and he's goofing around.

Fascinating thread (what I can understand of it) This is probably a major factor as to why I am more drawn towards Taoism, personally – I'm just a bumbling newbie, but this seems reasonable to me. I don't think anyone has mentioned proselytisation or seeking to convert people in this thread. I remember vaguely in BCE times, both Taoists and Buddhists were very keen to convert and gain political power in ancient China. In general, however, I get the impression Taoists aren't urged/keen to go out and convert people, unlike something like 'Mahayana' Buddhism. Is this a fair or accurate distinction? (I guess I see something like 'Hinayana' Buddhism more in line with Taoism for this issue, so maybe it isn't that much of a distinction.)

Thanks guys I shall have to do some more reading on Taoist metaphysics. I don't think I've fully grasped the setup, according to ZZ anyway.

Thanks, I'm a little bit lost here. You'll have to help me out. 1. Fish live together in water because they can't breathe air, walk on land, etc? If so, how is this related to humans living together due to the dao of ethical behaviour? What exactly does this mean? Why do they have to live together because of this? Why don't they live together because it's easier to survive in a community (and continue the human race, etc.) rather than on their own ?

Okay, you've probably answered some of these points with your later discussion with Stosh, but I'll start here with some more thoughts. 1. I find it a little inconsistent that he's very sceptical with the butterfly story, yet ZZ seems happier to pick a side here and be more definite about there being more than the physical (and also that 'The' Dao' has self-awareness, experiences, judgements and knowledge of what's best, etc.). 2. Well, yes, that's a fair point. But, on the other hand, why denigrate it and call it a cyst/tumour lol? Why not make the most of it and just enjoy it while it's here? 3. I'm not sure what that would mean and what we would lose (Personal identity? Ability to think, experience, feel?). Maybe it is as he suggests elsewhere that we'll end up somewhere better. 4. Well, I'm not so sure about this. Life for humans is far from perfect and some awful things still happen to them. To say the universe is wiser than us seems to me to be almost lapsing into a 'God has a plan' some Christians will give for the 'problem of evil' and suffering, etc. The Dao/universe may well be smarter than I am; however, this doesn't mean I feel obligated to think it's done a good job or think it cares about what's best for me as a human being (or what's best from a human perspective), IMO.

Thanks, I gave this a go this morning and it was quite nice. I do do the beginnings of BKF's outer dissolving before I start doing things like cloud hands and Wu Tai Chi form. Maybe I should bring this to the beginning as well, before I start doing the brocade.

Okay, some (more) inane ramblings: 1. Again with the incomprehensible translation of the names … 2. Confucius vs ZZ. I don't know much about Confucianism but I get the general idea that Confucius was more into universal rules, always the same in every situation, whereas ZZ was a relativist and I would imagine relied more on intuition rather than explicit rule following for following the way (wu wei). So we have a natural, intuitive response to Mulberry Door's death that confuses the rule-following Confucian disciple. 3. I'm still not really making much progress on this other than to suggest, best case scenario, he is saying that physical life appears like this in relation to the wonderfulness of returning to the Dao (whatever exactly this entails) and that physical life isn't actually that bad in itself. If the Dao knows best (as was suggested in an earlier section), then presumably it would have created or given rise to a physical existence which wasn't that awful? 4. This fish analogy seems a bit confused to me (or maybe it's just me that confused). I was guessing something like 'thrives' instead of 'delights' would have made more sense. Looking here: http://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=2757 we seem to have 'zào' (?) http://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&char=造 which was translated as 'breed and grow' and 'develops'.

Thanks, that's interesting. Some moves lead to (a little) opening/improvement with just one repetition; with other moves I don't particularly feel anything after ten repetitions. I assume it's important to keep some sort of balance between all the moves and do roughly the same number of repetitions for each move within any particular session?

Fair enough. It's getting late here and I need to get some sleep. I shall look forward to going over this section in more detail this week.

The banter in this thread cracks me up. I'm still pondering on this section and will come back to it properly. However, at first glance, the following springs to mind: Whenever I see these negative kinds of 'spiritual' opinions about life/physicality expressed, I always think to myself 'Well, why don't you just end it all right now and jump off a cliff if it's all so bad?'.

Ah, interesting, so you still keep both brocade and wu. Fair enough. I'll keep doing what I'm doing, unless anyone else has any input. Thanks

Welcome to the site. I don't really have any recommendations because I'm just a bumbling amateur. I would, however, be quite interested in reading/participating in a very practical 'how does Daoism assist your daily life' kind of thread (I'm guessing it's been done before, but it's always fun to get new people's opinions).

Yeah, I wonder what the difficulty is here. I've been having a look at VM's homepage and he certainly seems qualified enough to be doing a serious translation – although, to be fair, the book was written back in 1998, and also he doesn't seem to be the only one struggling with translating the ZZ in places. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/ealc/mair This is an interesting review on Amazon about VM's book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wandering-Way-Taoist-Parables-Chuang/dp/082482038X/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1495378805&sr=8-13&keywords=victor+mair#

Mair seems to struggle when translating names, although, to be fair, at least he gives it a go. Now this makes a bit more sense to me. The two translations we have on here have: How does one have the Way of a sage or the Dao without the abilities of a sage? This doesn't seem very logical to me.

I'm still pondering on this. I found this translation a bit less incomprehensible, although Woman Hunchback appears to have turned into a Sir in this one, for some reason: http://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&id=2755

Woah, I'm getting nervous just reading some of these replies. I grew up in London, so it would have been unthinkable not to have locked the front door and I still feel the same way. I was in an area last year (out of London) for a while where the main door to the block of flats didn't lock, and even that made me quite uncomfortable (although it was a fairly quiet and safe area).

A friend of mine shared this to me on Facebook, and it seemed to me it was quite a nice visual representation of wu wei. Anyone got any others they'd like to share?

Well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that. I see many examples of wu wei (as I understand it) throughout life; efficiency is how I approach everything, personally – if it didn't have a practical use, it would be useless to me. How do others on here understand wu wei or apply it in their lives?

Well, ZZ's Cook Ding being an expert butcher is quite a random example just as the cyclist is. If it can be applied to chopping oxen, I would imagine wu wei can be applied to anything. Am I sure this is an exact meaning of this term, though? Nope. Sounds like a person after my own heart.

Ouch Road rash? I'm guessing that's more painful than a broken bone.

Yeah, basically what the others said. I'm not an expert, but I tend to see wu wei as efficiency: getting the job done as quickly as possible with the least expenditure of energy, i.e. speed and conservation by working with the environment rather than against it.