exorcist_1699

Hardly can you find good Chinese<=>English dictionary that covers classical Chinese terms, below is one that I find quite good : http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Lindict Just take a look .

It is strange to think that qi should be polished on high mountains or in deep caves, on the contrary , qi should be polished among the mass, in the society as a Chinese saying already tells us :" 小隐隐于野,大隐隐于市" ( "Real retreat is to hide among the crowd ,not in the wilderness" )

Method that starts from the upper dantian , no matter what point it targets at , is more likely to generate problems /diseases, especially to those who get some ridiculous idea that the 3rd eye will pop up from any part of our head... It is more secure to start from the lower dantian. It seems before starting to polish their qi/ spiritual power , people should spend several years on studying morals ,otherwise, what they later can initialize is a power first disastrous to themselves , rather than giving them any benefit. Tao and De are inseparable.

Although most religions view wet dream as unclean or even evil ,they all view it as something insignificant and never give it any important place in their religion . It is only in Taoist alchemy that its importance is identified. As we all know , the cornerstone of Taoist cultivation is qi; yet without having accumulated certain jing ( essence), the refinement of jing into high quality qi is unlikely . However, even a very self-disciplined guy who can behave himself well in daytime, he can't get rid of nocturnal releases in midnight once or twice a month . Because of this , the accumulation of essence in his body seems unlikely , and the upgrading of the quality of his qi is also repeatedly interrupted, seems hopeless. In fact, not all nocturnal release are accompanied by wet dream, but most of them do. From Taoist point of view, wet dream is just a not- yet- purified qi grasping our shen (" spirit") as a means to attain its goal . And, viewing it in a much bigger framework , as an individual had taken a lump of qi from the universe so as to be born and living as an individual , the universe is eager to take it back secretly (from his dream ).So , there is always some flow of qi , some balance between them ; the universe is never in a status of lack of qi .. so somehow immortality is unlikely to come true in any individual case.. Although Western people seem never pay attention to the time that wet dream happen , TCM and Taoism do notice it and carefully study it . They discover that the time most nocturnal release happen is when yin and yang of the day intercourse ...Qi in our body just responds to that much bigger stream of intercourse and sadly be manipulated to do its job.

Yeah, of course, as it is a crucial issue ; without method of solving it only means we guys can't move forward. One of the methods which adopted by the Taoist Wu-Liu School is to refine all our jing into qi by using our focusing ; of course, having succeeded it means even when we are having dream about sex, we don't get any jing released for all jing is already turned into qi.(WARNING : although the process is not non-reversible, it , of course, also means stopping your re-productive ability ) Another method is that as for most guys nearly all nocturnal release happen at certain time in night ,say mostly in between midnight and dawn ( 3am ~ 6am ), some guys may rise up at 5 am to start their meditation so as to avoid the happening of their nocturnal release. In fact, after the ability of our "shen" has reached certain high level in the later period of our cultivation ,we can awaken, instead of sleeping it through, just nearly before the release happen and stop it.

Qi between our two kidneys is said to yang which interacts and counteracts with our fluctuating and restless mind , which is said to be yin notwithstanding that it is in a status of logical reasoning or in a status of sex imagination .Weakened yang below will make the original controlled yin more restless , for example having more fantasy about sex ,which reversely makes the yang more deteriorated. This explains why some old guys are strangely addicted to sex abuse of little girls for the original reasoning is that old guys get weaker sex drive, therefore should commit much less sex crime. However, from the TCM's point of view, "Kidney" is symbolized by the trigram, Kan: one stroke of yang sandwiched in two strokes of yin , a more complicated model adopted so as to cure varied complicated diseases such as too much nocturnal release, sleeplessness, easy memory loss..etc ., all related to the loss of yin(essence/water ) or yang (qi/fire) of the "organ".

In most cases, I only act as some kind of translator who translates the ancient Taoist writings' content, most inaccessible to the Western readers , into English..nothing more. So, I view myself as a translator more than any other role..say a clumsy amateur doctor. Regarding your question on Shen, which I seem to miss , one important thing is that people should not concentrate on searching ...in order to achieve high level of Shen ; the best way is that they forget it . You forget it means you don't deliberately add mental factors intervening the appearance of it, which , conversely makes it happen easier. Strangely ,in the arena of Shen, it is after your having it forgotten that you then find it already there...so the training of Shen is the most difficult part of this adventure.

Qi 's ability to cure most trivial diseases : a cold , skin diseases, stomach ache..etc seems undoubted to me because I test it many times myself; however, talking about severe diseases seems a little difficult because for decades I have never got any severe diseases or gone to see any doctors...so it seems a little troublesome to raise actual example... But based on the theory, qi very likely can cure severe diseases like cancer, SARS or AIDS, maybe also aging if you view it only as some kind of disease not something doomed to happen . In Taoist Alchemy, it does classify very clearly the ordinary qi ,which you raise by paying attention to your dantian or by visualizing something , from Yuan Qi which you initialize after your having attained some kind of Awakening out of a status of mindlessness ( also see my precedent posts under this topic). Qi that links with that kind of Awakening , of course, has much vigorous and delicate quality , powerful enough to cure most severe diseases. All diseases ,as we know, arise either because of the weakening/ imbalance of jing or qi in our body or invasion of malicious bacteria/virus. In the former case, Yuan Qi , as explained in above posts, can recover /re-balance it . In the later case, as all bacteria and virus , despite how strange a form it may appear or how newly born it is , is only a product of yin/yang qi( just like computer virus , no matter what forms they appear and how destructive they are, can be reduced to just a series of 0 and 1 ), so Yuan Qi as a much higher form over them , can "dismantle" them easily .

Hi, Rainbow-Vein , thank you for your comments. Yeah, I mean qiging healing. Anyone who takes a quick scan of most of the old Chinese TCM writings can easily find that herbs , plaster, acupuncture, Taijiquan ,Kungfu exercise, qigong..etc all are recognized means of treatment from the same legacy ; there are nearly no argument about it for all these means are based on the same jing-qi-shen framework of TCM or Taoist Alchemy. However, emitting qi is a technique more demanding for it requests our direct manipulating of qi via no other means , so only few doctors can do it . Emitting qi from a qigong doctor's hand( precisely speaking from an acupuncture point roughly located in the middle of our hands ,called Lao gong "労宫" （PC8）) , is not the highest form of healing ; it is a dose of Shen, coming from a glimpse of a Taoist master's eyes, is said to be the highest form of healing.

Mark, thank you for your comments. " Nourishing a MIND by paying attention to nowhere" is a way , as you say, of preventing people from adding other impurities into their consciousness. In fact , a pure consciousness without any characteristics can be said to be same as the emptiness existing everywhere in this cosmos, at least ,they are two faces of the same entity. This way, of course,is much more difficult than others ,for example, asking people to pay attention to their breathing, focusing on dantian or visualizing something . Many people may even overlook it as some kind of philosophical gossips.. In fact, all those other methods enable people to get some feeling of qi or light or whatever they want more easier and quicker . However, as people are approaching the higher stage of changing their qi into Shen , all those other methods unfortunately conversely become some kind of blockade , barring them from achieving such a huge, abrupt jump. Every stage in our cultivation has its own specific difficulty, saying that just by accumulating qi and jing , then naturally we can attain Shen is somehow too optimistic...

In fact, I have considered many times doing my " ed" as Hagar did after re-reading my posts here, but it seems too late as Taomeow says...how painful it is ... maybe the saying : "一層未到一層迷"( " whatever level people not yet reaching, whatever the point where people are destined to be bewildered" ) is the only excuse comforting myself .... Although Both Taoist Alchemy and TCM (Trditional Chinese Medicine ) are based on the same system , there are difference between them. TCM , of course, emphasizes more on healing patient's illness while Taoist Alchemy focus on rescuing people, or some individuals , from their pity destiny in this universe , and searching for immortality . For example, both systems talk about "Yuan Qi" yet TCM's concept of Yuan qi is just about a crucial life force inherited from our parents that located somewhere at our lower abdomen /in between our kidney ( specially called Mengmen "命門"); its understanding of Yuan Qi is not so deep as Taoist alchemy does. The TCM doctors ,including those Acupuncture practitioners, will give their patients a dose of medicine of ginseng(plus 白术,淮山..etc) or plaster or a puncture of needle at certain acupunture point ( say qi hai"氣海" ) for any disease related to lack of Yuan qi . The responsibility of the doctors is to re-balance the imbalance in our body by material means as mentioned. Most of them can't initialize qi directly so as to cure diseases. That is , if a Taoist master can use a dose of Qi as medicine to cure hundreds of diseases, then TCM doctors have to use hundreds combination of herbs/ acupuncture points to cure hundreds of varied diseases . Why ? Because they are standing on different levels and using the same power( although with the same name : Qi) from its different levels... However, does it mean TCM's discovery of nearly 20 channels of qi running over our body and those acupuncture points ,its meaning insignificant ? Of course not. Considering Indian Yoga discovers dantians ( lower , upper..etc), and their locations similar to Taoist ( because qi exists objectively in human body, of course, two groups of human beings find nearly the same things!), yet doesn't find out the channels and several hundreds of acupuncture points , and their corresponding combination of cure ( herbs or acupuncture points) for diseases, we can say that Taoist achievement in this arena is greater. ( Buddhism's contribution to human beings is not in this arena, but in a spiritual arena much abstract )

I think the yin/yang theory is a system involved many levels of two split ,counteracting forces ; Man is said to be yang does not mean that there is no yin element in his body; woman is said to be yin does not imply that all in her body is yin , otherwise ,she is already a dead body soon after her birth. For example, although woman is said to be yin , on a lower level , talking about her body, head on top is said to be yang and abdomen as yin ; and, back as yang , side and front part of her body as yin ( for tough readers, please read Huangdi Nei Jing "黃帝內經" for more details ) Anyway, the Pure Yang, or sometimes referred to as the yang-typed of Jing(陽精) ,is the crucial life force of both sex ; it helps us growing to adolescence, then it retreats and deeply hides somewhere inside us (This process is described by the I-Ching. By the way, the identification of this yang-jing and the way of finding it out is the main contribution of Taoism to human beings ). From Taoist point of view, this Pure Yang can also be said to be the Buddha Heart for Shen and Qi, in fact, are only two faces of the same entity . In Buddhist theory , the Buddhist Heart is repeatedly described as a moon being covered by thick clouds, or the huge ,soundless block under a rough sea,which is seldom seen by ordinary people . A Buddhist saying :"海枯可見底 ,人死不知心" (There will be one day even a big sea dried to be seen its bottom; there seems no possibility that a man can understand his Buddha Heart )tells us the truth . Most people think that they are always acting on their own will, which unfortunately is illusory; they are, in fact, just puppets manipulated by this hidden force, and sadly being driven towards death. The Taoist saying :"人情濃厚道情微 ,道用人情世罕知" talks about the same thing but having meaning much deeper.

One is for a healthy way of sex, one is for immortality..

What kind of Qi we get/ experience is related to what kind of mental state we have . If we can't get some kind of Awakening, then the qi we get anyhow is low quality; and, what prevent us from entering a much higher state of Mind are mainly 2 factors: 1) Our daily , fluctuating reasoning and feelings.. 2) Our ordinary, but fluctuating way of breathing So, only after the above-mentioned two are stopped, can the pre-heavenly way of breathing arise and then the Yuan Qi comes..

" Xian Tian " ? Do you refer to " Xia Tian " (下田),the lower dantian? By the way, the Taoist bedchamber arts should not be mixed up with Taoist Dual Cultivation.

I know very little about Taoist Dual cultivation, and I do not get the conditions to test it here, however, it is said to be a purely intercourse between yin and yang qi, without clothes being taken off, even the two persons practicing it not necessarily be in the same room , so Taomeow's description seems doubtful to me . Of course , to the male participant in the cultivation , he must already have succeeded in achieving certain stage of Awakening , otherwise , definitely he will lose rather than gain in the process. By the way, Yuan Qi /Pre-heavenly qi , before its embodiment in human body, its split into yin and yang, should be an unity of Shen and Qi ( How about jing ? people may ask . I have to say, it is only after its embodiment in living organisms, do we find the jing, talk about jing ), beyond the limitation of yin and yang. Because whenever the split of ying and yang starts, the vector of time towards death starts, no matter what living thing it is... Women can also be said to have" jing" as men do, only her forms of expressions more complicated : sometimes in the form of blood , sometimes in the form of milk...

Yuan ("Meta")Qi or " Pre-heavenly" Qi , as the foundation of our life, comes from outside into a female 's body only after an intercourse of yin and yang (female and male ) under certain circumstance and the amount of it is quite constant. Together with what we eat , drink and behave after birth , Yuan Qi determines how long we live. Yet because the amount of this primordial Yuan Qi is already fixed , no matter how careful we live ,how well the food we eat, seldom can we live longer than the age of 120 . However, if we want to live longer than 120 years , or over 500 years ,even forever, what can we do? The key is to do that intercourse of yin and yang on ourselves again so that outside Yuan Qi can be absorbed into our body and nourish it , sustain it .But how ? Taoist alchemy finds that there are two ways: 1) By the way of Dual Cultivation : It says that as men get the yang qi , and women get the yin qi, so neither sex is perfect; Because of this, a man in cultivation has to find a female partner so that the said yin and yang intercourse can be done ,yet this time in a " pre-heavenly " way ; Because if it is done as an ordinary sex intercourse, then what they get is still a fetus in female's body at the expense of both of them ( losing their jing and qi). 2) By the way of Taoist Single cultivation: It says that both yin and yang are ready in our body despite our sex .Jing and qi , as the energetic/material (yin ) aspect, is always located in the bottom of our body , while spirit/shen (yang) on the top of us . Such a split of yin of yang , and their further distant from each other day after day ,is the main cause leading us to death : In daytime we spend a lot of spiritual strength in pursuing material wealth and sensational satisfaction, in night , we lose our jing in sex intercourse /nocturnal release. To counter such a process, we must enable our shen and qi to have an intercourse again so that Yuan Qi can come into us .Of course, whether our life can be sustained and lengthened is really dependent on how well we do in this process.

To many people, jing 's transformation into qi is quite understandable; of course , whether the quality of qi that they achieve is high and delicate enough is another story . However, how qi is transformed into shen("神") is always more difficult to grasp. Here , the shen we refer to is nothing similar to our daily reasoning, feelings or experiences.. ( By the way, women can be said to have "jing" as men do, the difference is only in its forms of expressions , which ,are always more complicate : it sometimes appears as blood, sometimes appear as milk ..also the location where its transformation into qi takes place is always different from men's ,i.e, not at the lower abdomen, but in the middle of the breast ) Even intuition , something a little mystical to many people , is not close to it . Likely the saying : "Nourish a MIND by paying attention to nowhere " ("應無所住而生其心" )from the "Diamond Sutra" is what close to it . Clearly, it is not anything similar to a feeling of extreme peaceful or a feeling of finding yourself united with the universe..that many people think of. Far from those feelings, it is something much more.

In fact, after having our jing refined into qi then nourishing our brain with it ("還精補腦" ) , our mental ability is greatly multiplied . We not only can read hundreds pages of dictionaries per day without having our eyesight deteriorated ,but also can memorizes hundreds of new vocabularies of a new language per day without tiredness. Any languages , no matter it is Japanese which composed of mixed symbols of kanji, kana and roma characters , or Spanish which is full of "unnecessary " requirements of matching gender, plurals and tenses, even in the Chinese where ten thousands of strange characters are needed to be recognized , all become something simple, a piece of cake to us . Rapid expansion of information is nothing frightening , what is frightening is the weakening of our body and mind in the process of aging. Only Taoist alchemy can reverse the process and enhance our physical and mental power in the flow of time .

I think, the best Taoist Alchemy writings likely come from the Yuan Dynasty (1279~ 1368, A.D.) , the Ming Dynasty(1368~ 1644. A.D.) and the Ching Dynasty(1644~ 1911, A.D.) , that is, the latest 700 years. Why ? Because before the Yuan Dynasty, say the writings of Zhong and Lu , written/ edited in the period of the Tang Dynasty(618~ 907 A.D. ) , are full of strange jargons, deliberately used by the authors to bar "unwanted" readers from knowing the secret of immortality or to test the persistence of the followers in chasing after it . ( By the way ,the said "Ling-pao pi-fa" (靈寶畢法) ,which is said to be written by Zhong Li Quan(鍾離權), sifu of LU, yet its content appears not equal to the style of a great Master . Keen readers can discover that there are too much unrelated and trivial stuff mixed in it, and,in my opinion, they likely were added afterward by those late-comers for the book has a history of over 1,000 years. ) However, by doing so, some side effects did arise, for example: - It opens the way for some evil or incorrect,careless interpretations of the secrets of Taoist alchemy . - Many Chinese intellectuals , after years' study of these Taoist writings, still couldn't cross the threshold , so they were discouraged and changed to search the truth in Buddhist Sutra . After all, the magnificence and eloquence of Buddha's teachings are undeniable , and it sounds better than those paragraphs of Taoist writings that are full of strange jargons : tiger, baby, dragon , genuine earth..etc. ( I have to say that I do not oppose people reading Buddhist Sutras, quite the opposite , you should or you must ) Because of this , starting from the period around the Yuan Dynasty, Taoist masters were forced to use terms such as Sheng, Qi and Jing straight in order to eliminate unnecessary misinterpretations. Only at the critical place, the jargons remain..

Most of the Asian students here who , from their Kindergarten years , spend more than 20 years in studying English yet can't write decent English or read complicated English writings. So why grumbling about 10 years? Besides, spending 10 years in exchange for a likely possibility of 1,000 years of worldly life, seems not a bad deal ..

Spirit (性) and Life(命) , as the Yin and Yang aspects of Taiji, embody / "degenerate " themselves in human body as Li (fire)and kan(water) . In such an embodiment , qi is situated at the bottom of our body and spirit on the top , our genuine existence therefore is reversed and degenerated , ie, we are put to live in a post-heavenly way .Of course, such pattern of embodiment is only true in human beings and other higher form of livings, it may not be true in other living organisams. A sublimation and reversion of such status is therefore crucual for Man's emancipating from his being a trivial existence and changing himself into a much honourable one . No other systems of thoughts (for examples, Freud's theory regarding repression of all individuals' sexual drive and instinct gives rise to a collective civilization , Schopenhauer's or Buddhist ..) can point it out so clearly as what Taoist does...it is << 悟真篇>> not "Civilization and its discontent", when we talk about personal emancipation, that we should pay attention to. Even Tantric/ Esoteric Buddhism, who recognises the importance of qi, does not describe so clearly such a spirit-body polaization ,such a split and struggle, such a human dilemma so clearly as Taoist does.

The Buddhist way : In fact, mostly it does not talk about conserving any kind of energy ( as those mentioned as jing or qi in Taoism ) although clearly it targets at accomplishing an shen-typed body by some pure spiritual methods.For example, asking " who really I am " is one of those Buddhist ways. Unfortunately from there hardly can you achieve a separated shen-type of body , the best that most gifted practitioners can achieve , by adopting that method , is a yin-type of spirit, which despite its capable of leaving the physical body freely , is not free from re-incarnation,let alone talking about gettng close to the Great Way. The Taoist ways : I)By accumulating your jing and qi ( " post-heavenly type") , as most prevailing qi gong exercises that are being taught, you get a healthy body . However, this kind of low-quality qi definitly can't make you nourish a separated shen-type body . That is , immotality or any initial level of immortality is impossible if you only practice Taijiquan, or whatsover ways of deliberately circulating qi around your body or visualization of whatsover stuff for tens of years... Better II)Initializing the deeply hidden yang-typed jing (陽精) in your body , you can start to achieve a Taost typed shen .And,it is said that whoever can keep this type of "jing "( "asexual" because it is thing at a higher level , for both sexes ) in his/her body , immortality can be achieved . As a Taoist saying tells : "留得陽精, 个个長生" Having your mind nourished by this yang-jing , you gradually find a pop-up / detachment of yourself from your body ; however, it is still some kind of yin-typed shen (陰神) that should not be admired . Only by further refining it by pre-heavenly qi outside , can we talk about nourishing a fetos ,the yang-shen, an entity that really can free us from Reincarnation . So, the ability of detaining the yang-jing is crucial: In case of female, she has to "slash the red dragon" ; in case of male : " taming the white tiger";

I have to say ,as sexual energy is also the reproductive energy , the implication of this , if really done successfully , can only mean forever youth , ie, no wrinkled face or fallen teeth... Anyone who can't suceed in doing this can only explained by the fact that the qi he/she transforms is still not delicate and high quality enough, so people shouldn't blame the Taoist way for being exaggerating ...

The wisdom of Taoist way is that it does not try to solve mind's issue by mind itself, does not try to liberate mind by mind itself, but by the way of jing-qi-shen , by finding out the solution on the other end ... Thinking that a mind must arise from our heart or brain is some kind of bias.... It is why the importance of "yang in Kan Trigram grasping the ying of the Li Trigram " repeatedly raised...