SirPalomides

Oh and I case it wasn’t clear, when Fan Jun says the heart takes its place among “the three powers” he is referring to this principle ZYD quoted from the Liji: “Hence the sage forms a ternion with Heaven and Earth”

Thank you ZYD. Yes, I was aware that “ritual” for Li and “sincerity” for cheng are both inadequate; as a writer I also appreciate how words take new dimensions in new contexts and I hope the context of these admonitions helps to point beyond their immediate apparent connotation. Likewise “heart” for xin is tricky- some scholars have chosen to translate it as heart-mind to clarify that it is the seat of consciousness. However the notion of the heart as seat of consciousness is not entirely foreign to western thinking and I think the context of these texts makes clear that it is not merely talking about the heart as an organ or an affective center. For this and for poetic reasons I choose to just render it “heart.”

Those are all important for Buddhists but compassion is inseparable from wisdom and wisdom means seeing things as they really are. And of course like other religions Buddhists have not always lived up to their highest ideals and Buddhist history has seen its share of persecutions and wars.

In Tibet they have monks engaging in ritualized debate over ideas no one has held for 2000 years. Buddhists love debate, with themselves, with non-Buddhists, with dead people. They’re very doctrinally rigorous. Those stories about Chan masters ripping up scriptures? Definitely not the norm, even within Chan. Right view is a big deal for them. The Buddha Dharma is a fine tuned instrument and tweaking one thing the wrong way can set you down a path of delusion. This culture of doctrinal rigor and debate has produced some amazing philosophical insights and also some really frustrating episodes of sectarianism.

Huge question with centuries of debate about it, probably more than a few threads about it, but to start with it would be useful to look at Buddhist concepts like non-self, impermanence, and sunyata and see if and how Daoist teachings fit with them. The Buddhist cosmology is very different though there have been blends to some extent. The Buddhist idea of the six realms of rebirth/ samsara seems to have been adopted in some form by most Daoists, though I don’t think many Daoists accept the Buddhist view of the animal realm as one of inherent ignorance and suffering. Over the centuries Buddhists and Daoists have been borrowing from each other- I was looking at a book recently about how they were shamelessly copying each other’s texts with minor alterations. Generally Buddhists have a very clear doctrinal framework that has been systematically expounded in many ways over the millennia. Buddhist developed a scholasticism that I suspect Thomas Aquinas would have thought was too anal retentive. I don’t think Daoists have any texts comparable to the abidharma and lam rim texts that Buddhists produced. Something I noticed is that aesthetically Buddhists seem to like symmetry; Daoists like asymmetry with balance. The Daoist paradise usually looks like a majestic mountain range with uneven, craggy cliffs and gnarled trees; in the Buddhist Pure Land everything is just perfect, made of jewels- the trees are all symmetrical and the same height, the ground is perfectly flat, there are no seasons, everyone looks the same, etc. How much this actually reflects a fundamental difference is up for debate. It is popular to see that Buddhism and Daoism are basically one. Some Buddhists disagree and say Daoism is a “divine vehicle”- it’s good for becoming a godlike being but only Buddhism offers real liberation. Not all Buddhists have this attitude but one commonly encounters in from influential teachers like Yin Shun, Xing Yun, etc. There could be a whole thread about this and there are probably several already.

The Confucians’ usual equivalent for what Daoists call Dao is heaven or heaven-and-earth. Their Dao is more a pattern for virtuous conduct for personal life and government. It is there in the field of ethics that there is the most disagreement between Daoists and Confucians, though some have asserted that the paths are fundamentally compatible.

The general philosophical outlook of Daoism, as argued in Zhuangzi and Laozi, is argued mainly on the basis of observation and common experience, often using very homely examples or metaphors from life. Intuition of course is key too. So that is certainly verifiable. When it comes to the stranger claims about magic, alchemy, etc that would have to be verified by more special direct experience, so until then there is an element of faith and also perceived results eg “that talisman seems to be doing its job because I’m feeling a lot better this week.”

It’s a big question and some would argue it is God. It really depends on how you define that though. In the classic theist position of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam God is supremely transcendent and distinct from his creation ~as well as~ totally immanent and pervading it. That is, while everything that exists is contained by and totally contingent on God, God himself is utterly beyond being; or to put it another way, God alone is true being and everything else is like a shadow of that being. Also this God speaks and manifests directly to his creation; the Dao operates through emanations which, however awesome and supreme like the Three Pure Ones, are not the single, definitive expression of Dao. Direct and final revelations like the Torah and Quran, or the unique incarnation of Christ, don’t seem to have a place (or need) in Daoist theology. As Mencius says (and the Confucian “heaven” is more or less analogous to the Daoist Dao) “Heaven does not speak but shows its will through affairs.” It might be worth noting though that in Chinese translations of the New Testament the word Logos is translated as “Dao,” so from a Christian perspective, the Dao is indeed God. The question is whether this is the same Dao of Daoism.

Fan Jun’s Heart Admonition Vast, vast are heaven and earth- searched up and down they are boundless. Humans in their midst- so tiny is their body! A small fraction of this body, like a grain in a great storehouse, is placed among the Three Powers- I speak of nothing other than the heart. From ancient times to now, who has lacked this heart? The heart in servitude to forms is then like beasts and birds- all because the mouth, ears and eyes, hands and feet, motion and stillness, invade its calm and press through the cracks to make the heart unsettled. A single heart's smallness, assailed by numerous desires- how much can it hold to? Alas! Precious little. The nobles keep sincerity, remaining attentive and reverent. Heavenly lords are tranquil, and the hundred organs obey them. 范浚《心箴》： 茫茫堪舆，俯仰无垠。人于其间，眇然有身。是身之微，太仓稊米。 参为三才，曰惟心耳！ 往古来今，孰无此心。心为形役，乃禽乃兽。 惟口耳目，手足动静。投闲抵隙，为厥心病。一心之微，众欲攻之。其与存者，呜呼几希。 君子存诚，克念克敬。天君泰然，百体从令。

Had you even a hint of genuine cultivation you would have immediately recognized the question regarding Goro as a profound coded inquiry into your levels of attainment- needless to say, your mistaking it for mere shitposting is yet further conclusive evidence of your stunningly low level of cultivation. What to any advanced cultivator is an obvious delivery vessel for the furthest esoteric truths not only missed but repeatedly rejected by you as you wallowed in your numbskulled clinical poopheadedness. When you are not wasting time on this forum you claim to revile or numbing your empty soul with vacuous video games and pr0n, you spend the hours in your Brussels apartment "cultivating" in the so-called Atlantean Sefirot lineage which was in fact proven to be fraudulent 200 years ago at the famed Contest of Hyperborea by those in the authentic Lemurian Sefirot line. Since you are wondering how I was able so effortlessly to pinpoint your Lowlands provenance, know then that to an ascended master, as I am, your posting stinks unmistakably of tulips, windmills, and beer.

I also forgot to mention the Red Hat sects which are closer to the level of popular religion. Officially the "orthodox" Daoists of Zhengyi see these guys as deficient or heterodox in some way but on the ground there seems to be more cooperation. Of course the orthodox Daoists themselves absorbed things over the centuries they would previously have considered heretical.

There are a lot of Daoist sects and lineages but in China nowadays they are all lumped into two main branches, Zhengyi and Quanzhen. From what I gather there are some sects that don't really fit in either but are classed as one or the other because the government requires that you register that way. The Zhengyi sect is the older one- they trace themselves back to the Celestial Masters sect but it's a little more complicated than that, as they absorbed a lot of other major sects (e.g. Ling Bao, Shang Qing, Qing Wei) into their fold and have changed accordingly. Sort of like how Chan Buddhism ended up absorbing Tiantai, Huayan, and Pure Land in China. The Quanzhen sect came about in the late Song, early Yuan period- they didn't introduce much in the way of new revelations or scriptures themselves but gave their own synthesis of it. To speak in very general terms, Zhengyi Daoists tend to be house-dwellers and a lot of their activity is related to public ritual, exorcism, and magic. However a Zhengyi master is also expected to be highly trained in meditation. Michael Saso's book Daoist Master Zhuang gives a great overview of a Zhengyi priest's activities, showing how a lot of esoteric meditations and self-cultivation are integrated in the very dramatic public rituals. Again, to speak in very general terms, Quanzhen is more ascetic/ monastic, with higher emphasis on meditation in seclusion and inner alchemy. The early Quanzhen movement had an interesting quality of demanding very rigorous, some might say harsh, asceticism while opening Daoist teachings to the public in a way that hadn't been done in a while. However Quanzhen Daoists can be trained to do the same public rituals as Zhengyi, and Zhengyi monastics are not unheard of. The historical sects did have their various emphases. Shang qing was focused on individual cultivation through intense visualized meditations. Ling Bao was focused on ceremonial magic (I read somewhere that most Daoist rituals today draw from the Ling Bao tradition rather than the earlier, much simpler Celestial Masters rites).

It could be a dank basement oops sorry three level penthouse in Brussels.

Excellent Grayzone article countering US misinformation: Read the rest here: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/04/01/us-conspiracy-theory-on-china-coronavirus-trump/

Obviously paid actors, paid mourners, paid grave-diggers, nurses and doctors being paid extra to work overtime doing nothing, etc.

Oh I can’t wait, I’m sure it will be utterly conclusive and irrefutable

Knowledge of recent and less recent history of the American media and its pro-war, xenophobic bias is not a “crystal ball.” Nor is recognizing a well-laid pattern. Thanks for the penetrating insights about my childhood trauma though. Unfortunately I don’t have time to get into a granular, point by point discussion here, so I cede the floor to you.

Walker, I don’t doubt your personal experiences or knowledge but in a country as big and complicated as China, “I’ve been there” just isn’t enough to establish a broad argument about the state of a country. Among people that have lived there all their lives you will get an enormous range of opinions, not to mention foreigners who have lived there. Within my own family I’ve got people who spend a lot of time there, some of whom have very rosy views and some less so. And while there are many legitimate criticisms to be made of the PRC as of any government, it is another thing to single them out as uniquely evil, as a monster not only to their own people but an octopus threatening to strangle the globe in tyranny. This is the basic thrust of most of the mainstream western reporting on China as well as Russia, Venezuela, Iran, etc. Its purpose is not to help Chinese people or anyone for that matter but to manufacture consent for a policy of escalating confrontation and xenophobia.

There will continue to be an uptick in anti-China propaganda and hysteria as Western governments seek to deflect from their own mismanagement. The people most harmed will not be the CCP but Chinese citizens and people of Chinese descent living in the West. Those who question the narrative will be accused of being paid agents of Beijing.

OP/ thread title: Do you think GSmaster has screw loose?

Yes. In terms of printings and distribution, the single most popular Daoist text would be the Tai Shang Gan Ying Pian, a morality text attributed to the deified Laozi. You can read a translation here. Basically, do x deeds and avoid y, accumulate good karma, eventually become immortal. And here's an amateur translation I did of another morality tract, the Divine Lord Wenchang's Essay on Hidden Kindness:

Right, the big goals would be a good rebirth and eventually immortality. Immortality has a lot of different meanings. Images of carefree wandering through clouds and mountains are common, as well as dwelling in heaven or a paradise like in Kunlun. Sometimes it is couched in terms similar to Buddhist liberation or the Bodhisattva ideal. The Confucian language of a sage who assists heaven and earth in their creativity has some connection too. There are modest temporal goals like longevity, or having a happy healthy family, or good job. Something that seems to have completely receded is the apocalyptic utopianism of some early Daoists like the Heavenly Masters, but that was a thing once.

It's not that Western expressions of Daoism (or Buddhism) are necessarily inauthentic (though some of them are), but Westerners who are interested in these religions do tend to be bookish types who want nothing less than what they think is the most advanced or esoteric teaching. They are usually put off (often with good reason) by popular expressions of Christianity and want nothing that looks like that. They are inclined by culture and upbringing to think they are ready for the "serious" stuff and that devotion, piety, etc is for the peasants. So if your entry into Daoism is through its lofty philosophy or its more arcane meditation practices, that's not necessarily wrong, it's just not a complete picture. All ancient religions have these multiple layers. Perceiving the spiritual depths hidden in an apparently popular, shallow piety is perhaps a spiritual art in itself.