SirPalomides

The root of monasticism is in hermits, whether they lived in caves, huts,, etc. So the Greek word monachos= solitary, whence we get "monk." The early Christian monks were solitary ascetics like St Anthony the Great who lived in caves or, sometimes, huts (e.g. St John the Hut-Dweller). As they acquired disciples they began to order a more common life which eventually developed into the sketes and coenobia that we now call monasteries. But monasticism at its core isn't defined by these institutions, so Wang Chongyang living by himself in a tomb or a hut is practicing a kind of monasticism. Sun Bu-er and Ma Yu were indeed a married couple, but they were not accepted as a married couple. Rather Ma Yu abandoned Sun Bu-er who later joined him but they were thenceforth celibate. The early Quanzhen masters were adamant that you had to abandon your family if you really wanted to cultivate. It was definitely a monastic movement.

If your contention is that bad writers don’t attract ladies I have news for you about bestseller lists.

Indeed, I am terrified of learning that this forum is loaded with iron-thewed barbarians, the mere whiff of their sweaty, oily chests enough to draw away any of my potential female companions as a magnet draws iron shavings.

What do you think a poll of a handful of men on a small Daoist Internet forum will prove or accomplish?

It's a fact, then. In the grim darkness of this post-feminist world, 4 out of 5 men are doomed to wander, sexless and alone, with naught but the hardhearted hyenas on internet forums to give ear to their woes. Meanwhile 1 in 5 live as gods upon the earth, smiting incels with their savage blades as willing females gather at their feet.

So among men under 35, 80% are single whereas the remaining 20% are studs running around with 4 or 5 girlfriends apiece, like some old Conan paperback cover, is that your contention?

Christian theology has plenty of ambiguity here. What exactly is the character of the resurrected bodies? What does Paul mean when he says "it is sown a psychical body, it is raised a spiritual body" (the theologian David Bentley Hart does a great job talking about the "psychical" and "spiritual" distinction in ancient Christianity here)? While we will live in resurrected bodies they are quite different from the "psychical" bodies we have now. So a dichotomy between "ascending to heaven" and "live eternally in a body" is not so clear in fact. This is both a lazy and ignorant summation of Christian theology. The "how many angels" trope is a modern caricature of scholasticism and has little relation to what Christian theologians actually did. As for theosis itself, it was far from one idle speculation among many, but a central part of the patristic Christian message, as found in Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, Maximus the Confessor, and the whole theology of the incarnation of Christ. In the debates around the dogmas of Christ, the question of the deification of man is central. It is embedded, implicitly or explicitly, in the hymnography of the Byzantine Church and even shows up in popular modern hymns in the West by Charles Wesley and others. The rest of your remarks are so ignorant as to be not even worth responding to. I would even say that a distinct "Abrahamic" category of religion wasn't really relevant in the 1st century; that the Judaism out of which Christianity emerged was pretty Hellenized to begin with and Christianity began as a Hellenistic religion. When Paul talks about hierarchies of angelic rulers (archons) he is expressing a cosmology shared by both Jewish and pagan thinkers of his era. What strikes me about the Protestant Reformers, especially the Calvin-Zwingli axis, is that in their attempt to purify Christianity they leaned very hard on a very dour interpretation of Plato and Aristotle (combined, of course, with the worst aspects of Augustine). Some of their work, like Zwingli's sermon "On Providence", seem hardly Christian at all and more like a carcass of Platonism with all the fun and humor drained from it.

Let me make a friendly suggestion. I will not attempt to dissuade you if you think Jordan Peterson is brilliant. He certainly has... gifts. But set him aside for a while- say, two years. In those two years, read through some of the figures of civilization and culture that Peterson likes to reference. Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, take your pick. Peterson would definitely agree that these are all worth reading. And definitely read some Marx- not summaries, some actual Marx. A fair amount of philosophy in general is good- Peterson would surely agree. When the reading feels heavy, take breaks in between with some mythology or poetry. After two years of this come back and see if you still find Peterson impressive.

This again. Look, anyone who has spent time in academia and has met their share of professors will know that being a university professor, or having a doctorate, is far from a guarantee of credibility, even when they aren't straying far beyond their area of specialization. And it seems your answer to Ilumairen's question is, "Yes."

I have a few friends who work in or have been schooled in Waldorf schools and everything I've seen about their way of teaching looks great to me. Their use of literature and myths, along with hands-on activities (like animal husbandry) seem pretty awesome to me. One thing that was supremely odd, albeit in a harmless way, was the Anthroposophical wedding I attended, conducted by a priest of the Christian Community (Anthroposophy's in-house church) whose ceremony consisted of some fairly esoteric rhetoric and gestures that, in the context, just seemed silly. But as far as I can tell, Steiner's weird racial theories don't have any persistent role in the organization. I admit I haven't had the patience to go through the work of Steiner (or Blavatsky, et al). A lot of that stuff seems very much wedded to its age- the late 19th and early 20th century Europe- where newly translated works of Hindu and Chinese philosophy were meeting with revolutionary new scientific ideas, ambitious social programs, spiritism, and hermetic revivalism, often in awkward combinations. Of course the weird racial theories are part of this too. A lot of the scientific discoveries they were latching on to were really just bunk. Now that much more straightforward Buddhist, Daoist, Hindu, etc. teaching is available, the Theosophical milieu seems a bit of a relic. I feel the same perusing much of the literature of the various Rosicrucian groups.

Some people are just wankers and have not a whiff of spirituality about them. Some people are genuinely struggling though with the wankerly aspects of their personality and it is helpful to be removed from temptation (or an audience).

Sure, people have their individual weaknesses, and some enter monasteries with less than lofty motivations, but the idea of monastic enclosure is to minimize worldly temptations and regular internet access brings them all flooding back in.

Re: watermelon fucking, on a general note, I think it must be concluded that internet access is one of the worst things a monastery can have. Not that crazy things didn’t happen before- humans are humans. I remember an episode in the novel Seven Taoist Masters where the disciples are made to sleep next to wooden boards. They dream about beautiful women and in the morning the boards are covered in... uh, jing. Further afield I was a bit shocked when I first read this quote in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers: and this from an age where Christian monasticism was supposed to be at its most pristine. So stuff happens, but man does the internet not help. In my years in the Orthodox Church I saw more than a few cases of monastics from respectable places who got internet connections and *poof* goes that old aura of sanctity and wisdom. Maybe some guy on Mount Athos launching into a tirade about how the EU is trying to turn everyone into slaves of the one world government with biometric passports; or a monk in Romania singing fascist songs with a chorus of nuns on his birthday; or a Russian elder going on some anti-Semitic conspiracy rant. And of course all kinds of sexual abuse and predatory behavior. Keep the monks away from the internet, folks.

I knew nothing about mo pai until maybe 2 weeks ago. Based on your interventions here it looks like a crock of shit. Please go away so people can discuss stuff that matters without your dumbass avatar showing up on the activity feed.

Fun fact, the Chinese word for cat is mao 貓, probably originally based on the sound they make, but the word for the sound they make now is different- miao 喵.

An interesting blog post by a Yao/ Mien American about Yao Daoism: https://dsaechao.wordpress.com/2019/05/12/yao-daoism-five-things-to-know/ According to him, Daoism was brought to the Yao by missionaries sent by the southern Song emperor Huizong. They belonged to the Tianxin Zhengfa tradition, which I gather is a sub-tradition within Zhengyi. The primary source he uses is the book, A History of Daoism and the Yao People of South China, which looks pretty fascinating. What I'd be really curious to see is how Han Zhengyi Daoists today interact with Yao Daoists, if at all.

How much interaction is there between Yao and Han Daoists? How do they regard each other's practices, ordinations, etc.? Do Yao ever concelebrate rituals with Han Daoshi? The religion of the Yao people is a kind of Daoism where every member of the community is initiated as the equivalent of Daoshi, with varying ranks. In this it is similar to the early practice of the Celestial Masters movement where even children would be ordained and given command over a handful of spirit generals. I've wondered if there has ever been any inclination in Han Daoism to return to this kind of popular initiation.

On the contrary: “Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country Daobums forum.”

I doubt Falun Gong's numbers got that big. But yes, they were quite popular as far as qigong groups go and did manage to get a lot of people out to their public manifestations. The PRC is inherently paranoid about any unauthorized public gathering. It could be a religious, political, or union meeting, or just a dance party, or even a Marxist book club- if they haven't been asked for approval, the authorities get nervous. Li Hongzhi seemed to be deliberately making a show of strength and pursuing confrontation with the state. Perhaps he actually thought he could force the government to back down to some extent. There are a lot of qigong groups in China still, and they generally meet without trouble, though the government might put out propaganda trying to discredit them or certain leaders.

If one goes from the fact that prisoners are tortured in Chinese prisons, to lurid assertions of FLG practitioners being murdered and organ-harvested en masse, that's not an exaggeration, it's a straight-up lie. Fabricating stories like this does a disservice to actual victims. A similar problem exists for legitimate North Korean refugees, who have to distance themselves from bullshitters who fabricate crazy stories to get money from unscrupulous journalists. Quite a few credible and harrowing stories are coming out of Donald Trump's border concentration camps, but if someone tells me Donald Trump keeps a shark tank in the White House that he daily throws Honduran babies into, I'm going to require some serious substantiation before I give it credence.

Mencius said, "Instruction makes use of many techniques. When I do not deign to instruct someone, that too is a form of instruction."

I'm pretty sure it would be impossible for me to maintain any concentration with a penguin poking around my camp.

Thanks Walker and Taomeow for the fascinating talk. I've seen bits of Monica Esposito's book Creative Daoism and am pretty curious to read the whole thing. My impression, based on sketchy reading about early Quanzhen, is that it had a paradoxical quality of both opening Daoist teachings to a wide range of laypeople while also insisting on much stricter ascetic standards than before. I had also read (this might have been in Esposito) that there are lay associations in Taiwan who claim affiliation with Quanzhen but who have not had a formal lineage connection, at least until recently. Their affiliation is rather grounded on spirit writing revelations received from Lu Dongbin or other Quanzhen patriarchs. I've been surprised learning how much stuff now considered pretty standard or common in Daoism would have been frowned upon at at some point, including acupuncture, worshiping local spirits, and much of the Jiao rite. But I really shouldn't be surprised- every ancient religion undergoes such changes.

Thanks, ZYD. Yeah, if we were talking to the historical Zhuangzi and asked him, "So, are you a closet Confucian?" I'm guessing he would laugh. I guess I'm more interested in the way these various figures get read through the lens of traditions, in this case an ecumenical Chan Buddhist one, by someone who sounds like an eccentric but intelligent interpreter. Sometimes traditions at odds with each other at one time are successfully synthesized by later, insightful disciples, but not without a bit of historical slight-of-hand. I'd also be curious about what Juelang Daosheng meant by saying Confucius is the "great systematizer of the three traditions." Would this make Confucius the superior teacher? That would seem like a very surprising thing to hear from a Buddhist.