Walker

This is not an accurate statement. 1. Buddhism is founded on the belief that a life lived in ignorance will invariably be full of suffering. 2. Ignorance of what? We can look to the Three Dharma Seals for an easy answer. The Three Dharma Seals are the most fundamental standard which any teaching must adhere to in order for it to be considered in accordance with Buddhism. a. Dharma Seal 1: All phenomena are transient; they are subject to change. We will suffer if we wish for conditions, objects, and sensations to remain permanent, which they cannot. b. Dharma Seal 2: Non-self, or no self-nature; this means that nothing exists "independently from its own side." It does not mean "there is no you." It means that nobody/nothing exists except as a result of conditions. It is very easy for us to forget this fact, and as a result we often suffer. c. Dharma Seal 3: Nirvana/cessation; cessation is not the obliteration of one's being or some such. It is the extinction of the habit of looking upon all phenomena with the ignorance of a mind that has not grasped the first two Dharma Seals. If one achieves this, then one's illusions are seen for what they are, and the suffering that comes from misapprehending reality stops. Secondly, you say, "life is... an experience which should be escaped in order to achieve liberation." Also, this is wrong. In fact, the Buddhist teaching is that the distinction between life and death is ultimately an illusion. Contemplating the implications of the first two Dharma Seals will explain to you why. The Buddhist does not attempt to escape life. The Buddhist learns to recognize that even birth and death are mere concepts, and in the end, untenable ones. One usually sees an increasing propensity for joy and vivaciousness in those who are a good distance along the path way of internalizing and realizing these teachings. Links: http://www.english.fgs2.ca/?q=three-dharma-seals http://www.abuddhistlibrary.com/Buddhism/G%20-%20TNH/TNH/The%20Three%20Dharma%20Seals/The%20Three%20Dharma%20Seals.htm http://www.lionsroar.com/the-practice-of-looking-deeply/ While it is true that this mistaken conclusion is drawn for a period of time by many people who identify as Buddhists, it is still a mistake. Because this mistake is easy to make, one finds teachers throughout history and the present day reminding people not to fall into this trap. If you read more broadly in Buddhism and make a point of seeking out more teachers, invariably you will realize that your conception of the teachings doesn't reflect what is taught by all teachers. This is a complex issue which in some ways relates to the teaching, expounded in the Diamond Sutra and elsewhere, that the most beneficial thing one can do for other beings is to exist in a state of awareness of one's ultimate nature; "deeds," being both impermanent as well as always ultimately double-edged swords, are not as important in Buddhism. Even so, be that as it may, there is a long history in Buddhism of both monastics and lay practitioners who actively made great contributions to society. That tradition continues to this day. Every single country on earth suffers from these problems, and always has. Adopting a national religion never guarantees that even a single citizen of a country will understand and embody its teachings. If we are to compare Daoism to Buddhism, then I can guarantee you that to this very day one will find very evil people who seek assistance from Daoist masters and profess a fondness for the Dao teachings. Ditto for Buddhism, and every other religion. I think your point is moot. This is a false belief that does not reflect the teachings of Buddhism. Even if you heard it from a Buddhist or many Buddhists, that doesn't mean they understood what they were talking about. I ask, which sutra says what you believe? Why did the Buddha take lay disciples? How was it that Milarepa's master was a married householder, as (if I recall correctly) was his teacher before him? What you describe is only one of many ways to live life as a Buddhist. Furthermore, the inner experiences of two different monks living in similar barren rooms chanting the same texts might be entirely different, depending on their levels of realization. Don't get caught up on appearances. Furthermore, many Buddhists recite texts precisely to "influence lives and impact humanity through the power of imagination and multidimensional consciousness." Yet further, the Buddhist path is one of seeing through preconceived ideas of life.

I tip my hat to you

Lofty achievements! Well, it should be no problem for you to visit me in the flesh, no? It would most certainly creep me out at first if you materialize in my dwelling, but I promise, after I get over my initial discomfort, I will brew the best tea I have on hand. If it's not too much to ask, perhaps you can even boil the water atop your dantian, thereby helping me reduce my carbon footprint whilst we continue this tete a tete. Your claim, be it accurate or deluded, isn't germane to my point. On this site you've offered up translations that sometimes don't stand up in the face of a trusty Xinhua dictionary, and other times veer far away from what Daoist texts that have been studied for hundreds of years say, all the while also dispensing with simple logic--ie, in order to make five distinct characters become four, you simply discard one of them; in order to promote your notion that Zhongli Quan had no teacher, you blithely ignore the fact that any "easily found on the internet" hagiography names his master. Perfect translation is impossible; mistakes are inevitable. Sloppiness is avoidable; stubborn attachment is a poor habit. You might have some gongfu, maybe a lot of it. Thinking that means that you're incapable of making mistakes is simply megalomania, something one sees far more of amongst cultivators than actual gongfu, and also, just as troublingly if not more so, one sees in some a blend of actual accomplishment and megalomania. Not just to you, but to all of us: 戒之戒之! Perhaps my hunch is incorrect. But to me your demeanor suggests a man who can't cope with seeing evidence that he's wrong, and who likes playing little games that others do not find amusing. Dan or no, these are not the marks of a particularly mature individual. That. Another rarefied achievement in this dusty world, eh?

I have not. I merely offer you a glimpse at secondary and primary textual references showing that your understanding of the sentence in question as well as your translation of it is quite possibly mistaken.

http://www.chinafile.com/library/nyrb-china-archive/what-i-ching What Is the I Ching? Eliot Weinberger February 25, 2016 The I Ching has served for thousands of years as a philosophical taxonomy of the universe, a guide to an ethical life, a manual for rulers, and an oracle of one’s personal future and the future of the state. It was an organizing principle or authoritative proof for literary and arts criticism, cartography, medicine, and many of the sciences, and it generated endless Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist, and, later, even Christian commentaries, and competing schools of thought within those traditions. In China and in East Asia, it has been by far the most consulted of all books, in the belief that it can explain everything. In the West, it has been known for over three hundred years and, since the 1950s, is surely the most popularly recognized Chinese book. With its seeming infinitude of applications and interpretations, there has never been a book quite like it anywhere. It is the center of a vast whirlwind of writings and practices, but is itself a void, or perhaps a continually shifting cloud, for most of the crucial words of the I Ching have no fixed meaning. The origin of the text is, as might be expected, obscure. In the mythological version, the culture hero Fu Xi, a dragon or a snake with a human face, studied the patterns of nature in the sky and on the earth: the markings on birds, rocks, and animals, the movement of clouds, the arrangement of the stars. He discovered that everything could be reduced to eight trigrams, each composed of three stacked solid or broken lines, reflecting the yin and yang, the duality that drives the universe. The trigrams themselves represented, respectively, heaven, a lake, fire, thunder, wind, water, a mountain, and earth (see illustration below). From these building blocks of the cosmos, Fu Xi devolved all aspects of civilization—kingship, marriage, writing, navigation, agriculture—all of which he taught to his human descendants. Here mythology turns into legend. Around the year 1050 BCE, according to the tradition, Emperor Wen, founder of the Zhou dynasty, doubled the trigrams to hexagrams (six-lined figures), numbered and arranged all of the possible combinations—there are 64—and gave them names. He wrote brief oracles for each that have since been known as the “Judgments.” His son, the Duke of Zhou, a poet, added gnomic interpretations for the individual lines of each hexagram, known simply as the “Lines.” It was said that, five hundred years later, Confucius himself wrote ethical commentaries explicating each hexagram, which are called the “Ten Wings” (“wing,” that is, in the architectural sense). The archaeological and historical version of this narrative is far murkier. In the Shang dynasty (which began circa 1600 BCE) or possibly even earlier, fortune-telling diviners would apply heat to tortoise shells or the scapulae of oxen and interpret the cracks that were produced. Many of these “oracle bones”—hundreds of thousands of them have been unearthed—have complete hexagrams or the numbers assigned to hexagrams incised on them. Where the hexagrams came from, or how they were interpreted, is completely unknown. Sometime in the Zhou dynasty—the current guess is around 800 BCE—the 64 hexagrams were named, and a written text was established, based on the oral traditions. The book became known as the Zhou Yi (Zhou Changes). The process of consultation also evolved from the tortoise shells, which required an expert to perform and interpret, to the system of coins or yarrow stalks that anyone could practice and that has been in use ever since. Three coins, with numbers assigned to heads or tails, were simultaneously tossed; the resulting sum indicated a solid or broken line; six coin tosses thus produced a hexagram. In the case of the yarrow stalks, 50 were counted out in a more laborious procedure to produce the number for each line. (Wikimedia Commons) A diagram of ‘I Ching’ hexagrams sent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from Joachim Bouvet. The Arabic numerals were added by Leibniz. By the third century BCE, with the rise of Confucianism, the “Ten Wings” commentaries had been added, transforming the Zhou Yi from a strictly divinatory manual to a philosophical and ethical text. In 136 BCE, Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty declared it the most important of the five canonical Confucian books and standardized the text from among various competing versions (some with the hexagrams in a different order). This became the I Ching, the Book (or Classic) of Change, and its format has remained the same since: a named and numbered hexagram, an arcane “Judgment” for that hexagram, an often poetic interpretation of the image obtained by the combination of the two trigrams, and enigmatic statements on the meaning of each line of the hexagram. Confucius almost certainly had nothing to do with the making of the I Ching, but he did supposedly say that if he had another hundred years to live, 50 of them would be devoted to studying it. For two millennia, the I Ching was the essential guide to the universe. In a philosophical cosmos where everything is connected and everything is in a state of restless change, the book was not a description of the universe but rather its most perfect microcosm. It represented, as one Sinologist has put it, the “underpinnings of reality.” Its 64 hexagrams became the irrevocable categories for countless disciplines. Its mysterious “Judgments” were taken as kernels of thought to be elaborated, in the “Ten Wings” and countless commentaries, into advice to rulers on how to run an orderly state and to ordinary people on how to live a proper life. It was a tool for meditation on the cosmos and, as a seamless piece of the way of the world, it also revealed what would be auspicious or inauspicious for the future. In the West, the I Ching was discovered in the late 17th century by Jesuit missionaries in China, who decoded the text to reveal its Christian universal truth: hexagram number one was God; two was the second Adam, Jesus; three was the Trinity; eight was the members of Noah’s family; and so on. Leibniz enthusiastically found the universality of his binary system in the solid and broken lines. Hegel—who thought Confucius was not worth translating—considered the book “superficial”: “There is not to be found in one single instance a sensuous conception of universal natural or spiritual powers.” The first English translation was done by Canon Thomas McClatchie, an Anglican cleric in Hong Kong. McClatchie was a Reverend Casaubon figure who, in 1876, four years after the publication of Middlemarch, found the key to all mythologies and asserted that the I Ching had been brought to China by one of Noah’s sons and was a pornographic celebration of a “hermaphroditic monad,” elsewhere worshiped among the Chaldeans as Baal and among Hindus as Shiva. James Legge, also a missionary in Hong Kong and, despite a general loathing of China, the first important English-language translator of the Chinese classics, considered McClatchie “delirious.” After 20 interrupted years of work—the manuscript was lost in a shipwreck in the Red Sea—Legge produced the first somewhat reliable English translation of the I Ching in 1882, and the one that first applied the English word for a six-pointed star, “hexagram,” to the Chinese block of lines. Professionally appalled by what he considered its idolatry and superstition, Legge nevertheless found himself “gradually brought under a powerful fascination,” and it led him to devise a novel theory of translation. Since Chinese characters were not, he claimed, “representations of words, but symbols of ideas,” therefore “the combination of them in composition is not a representation of what the writer would say, but of what he thinks.” The translator, then, must become “en rapport” with the author, and enter into a “seeing of mind to mind,” a “participation” in the thoughts of the author that goes beyond what the author merely said. Although the I Ching has no author, Legge’s version is flooded with explanations and clarifications parenthetically inserted into an otherwise literal translation of the text. Herbert Giles, the next important English-language translator after Legge, thought the I Ching was “apparent gibberish”: “This is freely admitted by all learned Chinese, who nevertheless hold tenaciously to the belief that important lessons could be derived from its pages if only we had the wit to understand them.” Arthur Waley, in a 1933 study—he never translated the entire book—described it as a collection of “peasant interpretation” omens to which specific divinations had been added at a later date. Thus, taking a familiar Western example, he wrote that the omen “red sky in the morning, shepherds take warning” would become the divination “red sky in the morning: inauspicious; do not cross the river.” Waley proposed three categories of omens—“inexplicable sensations and involuntary movements (‘feelings,’ twitchings, stumbling, belching and the like)…those concerning plants, animals and birds…[and] those concerning natural phenomena (thunder, stars, rain etc.)”—and found examples of all of them in his decidedly unmetaphysical reading of the book. Joseph Needham devoted many exasperated pages to the I Ching in Science and Civilization in China as a “pseudo-science” that had, for centuries, a deleterious effect on actual Chinese science, which attempted to fit exact observations of the natural and physical worlds into the “cosmic filing-system” of the vague categories of the hexagrams. It was Richard Wilhelm’s 1924 German translation of the I Ching and especially the English translation of the German by the Jungian Cary F. Baynes in 1950 that transformed the text from Sinological arcana to international celebrity. Wilhelm, like Legge, was a missionary in China, but unlike Legge was an ardent believer in the Wisdom of the East, with China the wisest of all. The “relentless mechanization and rationalization of life in the West” needed the “Eastern adhesion to a natural profundity of soul.” His mission was to “join hands in mutual completion,” to uncover the “common foundations of humankind” in order to “find a core in the innermost depth of the humane, from where we can tackle…the shaping of life.” Wilhelm’s translation relied heavily on late, Song Dynasty Neo-Confucian interpretations of the text. In the name of universality, specifically Chinese referents were given general terms, and the German edition had scores of footnotes noting “parallels” to Goethe, Kant, the German Romantics, and the Bible. (These were dropped for the English-language edition.) The text was oddly presented twice: the first time with short commentaries, the second time with more extended ones. The commentaries were undifferentiated amalgams of various Chinese works and Wilhelm’s own meditations. (Needham thought that the edition belonged to the “Department of Utter Confusion”: “Wilhelm seems to be the only person…who knew what it was all about.”) The book carried an introduction by Carl Jung, whom Wilhelm considered “in touch with the findings of the East [and] in accordance with the views of the oldest Chinese wisdom.” (One proof was Jung’s male and female principles, the anima and the animus, which Wilhelm connected to yin and yang.) Some of Jung’s assertions are now embarrassing. (“It is a curious fact that such a gifted and intelligent people as the Chinese have never developed what we call science.”) But his emphasis on chance—or synchronicity, the Jungian, metaphysical version of chance—as the guiding principle for a sacred book was, at the time, something unexpected, even if, for true believers, the I Ching does not operate on chance at all. The Wilhelm/Baynes Bollingen edition was a sensation in the 1950s and 1960s. Octavio Paz, Allen Ginsberg, Jorge Luis Borges, and Charles Olson, among many others, wrote poems inspired by its poetic language. Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics used it to explain quantum mechanics and Terence McKenna found that its geometrical patterns mirrored the “chemical waves” produced by hallucinogens. Others considered its binary system of lines a prototype for the computer. Philip K. Dick and Raymond Queneau based novels on it; Jackson Mac Low and John Cage invented elaborate procedures using it to generate poems and musical compositions. It is not difficult to recuperate how thrilling the arrival of the I Ching was both to the avant-gardists, who were emphasizing process over product in art, and to the anti-authoritarian counterculturalists. It brought, not from the soulless West, but from the mysterious East, what Wilhelm called “the seasoned wisdom of thousands of years.” It was an ancient book without an author, a cyclical configuration with no beginning or end, a religious text with neither exotic gods nor priests to whom one must submit, a do-it-yourself divination that required no professional diviner. It was a self-help book for those who wouldn’t be caught reading self-help books, and moreover one that provided an alluring glimpse of one’s personal future. It was, said Bob Dylan, “the only thing that is amazingly true.” The two latest translations of the I Ching couldn’t be more unalike; they are a complementary yin and yang of approaches. John Minford is a scholar best known for his work on the magnificent five-volume translation of The Story of the Stone (or The Dream of the Red Chamber), universally considered the greatest Chinese novel, in a project begun by the late David Hawkes. His I Ching, obviously the result of many years of study, is over 800 pages long, much of it in small type, and encyclopedic. Minford presents two complete translations: the “Bronze Age Oracle,” a recreation of the Zhou dynasty text before any of the later Confucian commentaries were added to it, and the “Book of Wisdom,” the text as it was elucidated in the subsequent centuries. Each portion of the entries for each hexagram is accompanied by an exegesis that is a digest of the historical commentaries and the interpretations by previous translators, as well as reflections by Minford himself that link the hexagram to Chinese poetry, art, ritual, history, philosophy, and mythology. It is a tour de force of erudition, almost a microcosm of Chinese civilization, much as the I Ching itself was traditionally seen. David Hinton is, with Arthur Waley and Burton Watson, the rare example of a literary Sinologist—that is, a classical scholar thoroughly conversant with, and connected to, contemporary literature in English. A generation younger than Watson, he and Watson are surely the most important American translators of Chinese classical poetry and philosophy in the last 50 years. Both are immensely prolific, and both have introduced entirely new ways of translating Chinese poetry. Hinton’s I Ching is equally inventive. It is quite short, with only two pages allotted to each hexagram, presents a few excerpts from the original “Ten Wings” commentaries, but has nothing further from Hinton himself, other than a short introduction. Rather than consulted, it is meant to be read cover to cover, like a book of modern poetry—though it should be quickly said that this is very much a translation, and not an “imitation” or a postmodern elaboration. Or perhaps its fragments and aphorisms are meant to be dipped into at random, the way one reads E.M. Cioran or Elias Canetti. Hinton adheres to a Taoist or Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist reading of the book, unconcerned with the Confucian ethical and political interpretations. His I Ching puts the reader into the Tao of nature: that is, the way of the world as it is exemplified by nature and embodied by the book. He takes the mysterious lines of the judgments as precursors to the later Taoist and Ch’an writings: “strategies…to tease the mind outside workaday assumptions and linguistic structures, outside the limitations of identity.” The opposite of Wilhelm’s Jungian self-realization, it is intended as a realization of selflessness. Moreover, it is based on the belief that archaic Chinese culture, living closer to the land—and a land that still had a great deal of wilderness—was less estranged from nature’s Tao. To that end, Hinton occasionally translates according to a pictographic reading of the oldest characters, a technique first used by Ezra Pound in his idiosyncratic and wonderful version of the earliest Chinese poetry anthology, the Book of Songs, which he titled The Confucian Odes. For example, Hinton calls Hexagram 32—usually translated as “Endurance” or “Duration” or “Perseverance”—“Moondrift Constancy,” because the character portrays a half-moon fixed in place with a line above and below it. The character for “Observation” becomes “Heron’s-Eye Gaze,” for indeed it has a heron and an eye in it, and nothing watches more closely than a waterbird. Hinton doesn’t do this kind of pictographic reading often, but no doubt Sinologists will be scandalized. The difference between the two translations—the differences among all translations—is apparent if we look at a single hexagram: number 52, called Gen. Minford translates the name as “Mountain” for the hexagram is composed of the two Mountain trigrams, one on top of the other. His translation of the text throughout the book is minimalist, almost telegraphese, with each line centered, rather than flush left. He has also made the exceedingly strange decision to incorporate tags in Latin, taken from the early Jesuit translations, which he claims can help us relate to this deeply ancient and foreign text, can help create a timeless mood of contemplation, and at the same time can evoke indirect connections between the Chinese traditions of Self-Knowledge and Self-Cultivation…and…the long European tradition of Gnosis and spiritual discipline. In the “Book of Wisdom” section, he translates the “Judgment” for Hexagram 52 as: The back Is still As a Mountain; There is no body. He walks In the courtyard, Unseen. No Harm, Nullum malum. This is followed by a long and interesting exegesis on the spiritual role and poetic image of mountains in the Chinese tradition. Hinton calls the hexagram “Stillness” and translates into prose: “Stillness in your back. Expect nothing from your life. Wander the courtyard where you see no one. How could you ever go astray?” Wilhelm has “Keeping Still, Mountain” as the name of the hexagram. His “Judgment” reads: KEEPING STILL. Keeping his back still So that he no longer feels his body. He goes into the courtyard And does not see his people. No blame. He explains: True quiet means keeping still when the time has come to keep still, and going forward when the time has come to go forward. In this way rest and movement are in agreement with the demands of the time, and thus there is light in life. The hexagram signifies the end and beginning of all movement. The back is named because in the back are located all the nerve fibers that mediate movement. If the movement of these spinal nerves is brought to a standstill, the ego, with its restlessness, disappears as it were. When a man has thus become calm, he may turn to the outside world. He no longer sees in it the struggle and tumult of individual beings, and therefore he has that true peace of mind which is needed for understanding the great laws of the universe and for acting in harmony with them. Whoever acts from these deep levels makes no mistakes. The Columbia University Press I Ching, translated by Richard John Lynn and billed as the “definitive version” “after decades of inaccurate translations,” has “Restraint” for Gen: “Restraint takes place with the back, so one does not obtain [sic] the other person. He goes into that one’s courtyard but does not see him there. There is no blame.” Lynn’s odd explanation, based on the Han dynasty commentator Wang Bi, is that if two people have their backs turned, “even though they are close, they do not see each other.” Therefore neither restrains the other and each exercises self-restraint. The six judgments for the six individual lines of Hexagram 52 travel through the body, including the feet, calves, waist, trunk, and jaws. (Wilhelm weirdly and ahistorically speculates that “possibly the words of the text embody directions for the practice of yoga.”) Thus, for line 2, Hinton has: “Stillness fills your calves. Raise up succession, all that will follow you, or you’ll never know contentment.” Minford translates it as: “The calves are/Still as a Mountain./Others/Are not harnessed./The heart is heavy.” He explains: “There is a potential healing, a Stillness. But the Energy of Others…cannot be mastered and harnessed. No Retreat is possible, only a reluctant acceptance. One lacks the foresight for Retreat. Beware.” Wilhelm’s version is: “Keeping his calves still./He cannot rescue him whom he follows./His heart is not glad.” This is glossed as: The leg cannot move independently; it depends on the movement of the body. If a leg is suddenly stopped while the whole body is in vigorous motion, the continuing body movement will make one fall. The same is true of a man who serves a master stronger than himself. He is swept along, and even though he himself may halt on the path of wrongdoing, he can no longer check the other in his powerful movement. When the master presses forward, the servant, no matter how good his intentions, cannot save him. In the “Bronze Age Oracle” section—the original Zhou book without the later interpretations—Minford translates Gen as “Tending,” believing that it refers to traditional medicine and the need to tend the body. The “Judgment” for the entire hexagram reads: “The back/Is tended,/The body/Unprotected./He walks/In an empty courtyard./No Harm.” He suggests that the “empty courtyard” is a metaphor for the whole body, left untended. His judgement for the second line is: “The calves/Are tended./There is/No strength/In the flesh./The heart/Is sad,” which he glosses as “There is not enough flesh on the calves. Loss of weight is a concern, and it directly affects the emotions.” Both Richard J. Smith, in a monograph on the I Ching for the Princeton Lives of Great Religious Books series, and Arthur Waley take the hexagram back to the prevalent practice in the Shang dynasty of human and animal sacrifice. Smith translates Gen as “cleave” (but, in an entirely different reading, says that the word might also mean “to glare at”). His “Judgment” is puzzling: “If one cleaves the back he will not get hold of the body; if one goes into the courtyard he will not see the person. There will be no misfortune.” But his reading of line two is graphic: “Cleave the lower legs, but don’t remove the bone marrow. His heart is not pleased.” Waley thinks Gen means “gnawing,” and “evidently deals with omen-taking according to the way in which rats, mice or the like have deals with the body of the sacrificial victim when exposed as ‘bait’ to the ancestral spirit.” His “Judgment” is: “If they have gnawed its back, but not possessed themselves of the body,/It means that you will go to a man’s house, but not find him at home.” He reads line two as: “If they gnaw the calf of the leg, but don’t pull out the bone marrow, their (i.e. the ancestors’) hearts do not rejoice.” What is certain is that Hexagram 52 is composed of two Mountain trigrams and has something to do with the back and something to do with a courtyard that is either empty or where the people in it are not seen. Otherwise, these few lines may be about stillness, having no expectations, self-restraint, peace of mind, knowing when not to follow a leader, the care of various aches and pains, glaring at things, and the preparations for, and results of, human or animal sacrifices. None of these are necessarily misinterpretations or mistranslations. One could say that the I Ching is a mirror of one’s own concerns or expectations. But it’s like one of the bronze mirrors from the Shang dynasty, now covered in a dark blue-green patina so that it doesn’t reflect at all. Minford recalls that in his last conversation with David Hawkes, the dying master-scholar told him: “Be sure to let your readers know that every sentence can be read in an almost infinite number of ways! That is the secret of the book. No one will ever know what it really means!” In the I Ching, the same word means both “war prisoner” and “sincerity.” There is no book that has gone through as many changes as the Book of Change.

Good. I have no idea if you ever won't think that you're right, no matter what information you're presented with, but I can shed more light on this question if it would please you for me to do so. Doing so, however, will require me to make a trip to the library, maybe more than one, if I decide to look at the Daozang or if the book I need is checked out. Since this will require a fair bit of my time and energy, I propose we make a deal. This brings me to my second question: If I take the time to provide information about the background of the sentence in question, will you promise to discontinue any and all interaction with Opendao and Opendao's associates which Opendao and his associates construe as "trolling?" Two clarifications: -I offer only to provide information; I do not claim to have the ability to convince you that you're not right. -It should be obvious to you by now what types of comments you make about Opendao's posts are unwelcome and constitute trolling. If it is not clear to you, then, if you answer yes to my question, you must leave it up to Opendao to decide. I am not asking this question to "stick up" for Opendao or anybody else. I am making this request because, personally, I am tired of seeing your posts trailing on his. I find them disruptive and they detract from my enjoyment of this forum, as well as reduce my likelihood of participating here. If you will accept my selfish request, then I am happy to crack a few books to continue this conversation. If not, then, 随缘唄.

Well, I like courteousness. In that case, I would like to ask two questions. Below is the first, a two-part question: We are talking about the sentence 四字凝神入气穴 (Hanyu Pinyin for non-Chinese readers: si zi ning shen ru qi xue). Am I correct in believing that your your translation of this line is: "Qi. Lair. Spirit. and Congeal. Four characters only, this to see and feel?" If so, do you mean that 四字 refers to 凝, 神, 气, and 穴?

There are those of you who do not like Opendao's delivery. No surprise there--it's not like he sweetens his words (honestly, I haven't met all that many Russians who do!). But there isn't just an empty argument going on here between these two guys. Opendao is making an important point, and Taoist Text's "explanation" of “四字凝神入气穴” is so far from the mark as to be, to the cultivator hoping to learn what is meant by that line, utterly useless. I'd give Taoist Texts the answer--it's no big secret--but, well, full cup problem. Best to stay clear of a man running wild with a brimming cup. Stand too close and it's not just him who ends up scalded.

I'm humbled by the flexibility and open-mindedness you've shown Thanks for the document, too--looks like an interesting read.

Opendao, sometime in the next week or two I'll try and find the time to start a thread comparing a few important sections of the English and Chinese versions of that text, so that readers here can decide for themselves. Nathan, again, I enjoyed reading your response. The history surrounding Ancestor Qiu's meeting with Genghis Khan is fascinating to me--hopefully later I'll get around to learning more about this event and its ramifications. Thanks for clarifying some things about Master Wang's connection to Laoshan. In light of everything you've shared, it seems like the most accurate thing one could confidently say about Wang is that he is the head of a Laoshan Daoist tradition, not the tradition. There is the added complication that the idea of "Dragon Gate tradition" is fuzzy. I've never heard people talk about the "龙门传统" in China. The term seems like a new invention that's been made in order to facilitate making a bold claim that doesn't really stand on it's own two feet. And if you must use this term, you still can't account for the fact that most Laoshan monks and nuns who obviously fit under its broad umbrella probably wouldn't agree with the idea that Wang is its head/头/首. Now, I get what you mean about the conundrum of not trying to sound too academic or use too many words describing your teacher's background. If I were making such a page, I think I would make the simplest, safest statement I could. Not necessarily the shortest statement, but the one with the least possibility of causing confusion and any possible resulting 麻烦 for myself, my teacher, and any other cultivators. The tendency I've seen exemplified by the living Daoists I know is one of erring on the side of understatement and conservativism. There's plenty of precedent for this type of cautiousness in the Daodejing, too: "慎终如始，则无败事" and the rest of chapter 64; "不敢为天下先"; lots of etcs. Some of Ancestor Lv's ten tests with Zhongli Quan are yet another place where we see the ancients erring deep on the side of caution. Outside of Daoism, we see traditional Chinese culture as a whole littered with such thinking--慎身修永; 病从口入祸从口出; 出来混, 迟早得还... plus endless other examples. Don't wanna end up 背ing any more 业 than we have to, right? 天网恢恢，疏而不漏... 多一事不如少一事! Anyway, I doubt any good will come of yet more words, so I will try to cease my harping... 保重

Nathan, I appreciate your sincere and interesting responses to the questions I raised, and also am grateful that you did not see it as an "attack," which it was not meant to be. Since you've clarified the Mt. Lao connection, I'm curious how, if at all, did the abbot of several temples on Laoshan during the last century, 匡常修, relate to the line of transmission which Wang inherited? This is the first time I've heard that Genghis Khan's orders made all Daoists Dragon Gate, de jure. Where can I read more about this change? Opendao, no need to thank; believe me, I find the fellow's antics tiresome, too. Is Taoist Texts the same person as ChiDragon?

I see, Taoist Text, thank you. I hope I can clarify my post in case other readers share your confusion with what I meant, and to prevent your confusion from spreading to other people. That is not what Opendao said. You are right. As was Opendao, when he said that language ability is a must, but that it is also not enough. If it is not enough, then what else is needed? That is a question that is truly worthy of contemplation! You're just being silly now. As I said very clearly in my last post, I do not know if Wang makes/made that claim himself. What I do know is that many Westerners who say they've studied with him make that claim. Look at Brine's page. It says on the text that splashes on the front page, "head of the Dragon Gate tradition." The terms lineage holder and "head" mean two very different things. See above, re: "head." Also, it says on Brine's page, that Wang is "the 18th heir and holder of the lineage." The problem is with the word "the," which, especially taken alongside the word "head," implies exclusivity as well as leadership. Within the Dragon Gate sect of Complete Reality Daoism, Wang has neither. It would be correct to say that Wang is an heir and a lineage holder in the 18th generation. To say that he is the heir and lineage holder is a mistake. Is the mistake Wang's or is it Brine, et al's? As I wrote above, I truly do not know. False. I am not a teacher, I do not sell anything. I am not qualified to be a Daoist teacher, and perhaps I never will be. Therefore, in terms of Daoism, I am not planning on becoming a teacher. Furthermore, Daoist teachings were given to me for free, and out of respect for my teachers, in the unlikely event that they one day tell me to teach, then I will continue their tradition. For the record, I have no affiliation with Opendao, nor, to my knowledge, do we even know any of the same people, online or off. Aside from a couple of brief PMs three or four years ago, all of my communication with him is in public, right here. If we seem to agree on many things here, it is probably because we have been exposed to similar veins of orthodox Daoist teaching, that is all. I did not single out this book for leaving out methods. Rather, for leaving out very important bits and pieces of instructions within the methods, to the extent that the instructions are simply no longer the same. If people other than the insatiably argumentative Taoist Texts have a sincere interest in seeing what I mean, perhaps if I have enough time at a later date I can present some examples in a separate post. You are attempting to back me into a corner that does not exist. In these little games you play you are ultimately the loser. If I may: such exertions are not a worthy use of one's limited time alive. I cannot control you, though, so I suppose we'll just have to put up with your mind games until you grow out of them. For your sake, I hope that time comes sooner than later. Yes, yes, now think up something smug and cute to say in response with a wink, very clever, Taoist Texts, you are oh so very clever. It is such a terrible waste of life to argue for argument's sake. See above. That's generally true. Be that as it may, one can't eschew the classics. Textual study and study with teachers are mutually complementary. I accept your advice and hope that with time I will see these issues with greater clarity.

Worth repeating!

Good points, Opendao.

No idea if interest is on the rise or if new books, websites, and teachers are popping up to satisfy a long-unsatisfied thirst in the West. Maybe both. Regardless of what is prompting the new availability of purported teachers and teachings, at the end of the day, I think the best advice I got early in my attraction to Daoism remains the best possible advice I could give any enthusiast today: learn classical Chinese. Even though the Dao, obviously, is not limited by national boundaries or human language, it is damn hard to understand Daoism if one is divorced from its cultural context by not being able to live around Chinese lineage holders. The older generation's role is to explain the teachings; fill in blanks and resolve the confusion left by reading and talking to others; transmit methods; and lead by example. If you don't have access to such teachers, and you don't take the time to learn Chinese (you say you don't have time to learn a language, and yet you think you have time to seek Dao? Which do you think will take more time and effort? Will the smaller task not improve the chances of success at the greater?), how can you hope to tell if these English books and websites are genuine or downright fraudulent, or perhaps a mix of wheat and chaff? On what can you rely other than your "intuition" and luck? To give an example of what I mean: Mr. Brine, on the front page of your website, in big letters, we see, "Taoist Master Wang Liping, head of the Dragon Gate Tradition." Deeper in your page, we see the claim, "Wang Liping was chosen by three masters of the Dragon Gate Tradition to become the 18th heir and holder of the lineage." Your biography says you are fluent in Chinese, so how do you not realize that there is no "head of the Dragon Gate Tradition"? There is no Dragon Gate "pope," most certainly not a layman-pope, and there are/were probably hundreds of monks and nuns in the 18th generation, some of whom are/were quite highly achieved. There are also plenty of Dragon Gate monks and nuns who have not even heard of Wang, and others who only have a vague impression of having heard the name of this fellow! I am speaking on the basis of conversations I've had with monks and nuns at many monasteries--people who've devoted their entire lives to Daoism, some living in such penury that they don't know when they'll get their next chance to take a shower and sleep literally on bunk beds in closets with a piece of cloth for a door! If he's the "head" of the Dragon Gate sect, then for these devotees to not even know who Wang is like a Jesuit priest never even having heard of the pope or a Gelug lama never having heard of the Dalai Lama... patently ridiculous! I have seen this false claim in the writings of so many students of Wang Liping on the internet that I can't help but wonder if it is Wang himself who propagates the illusion. Then again, maybe it is a mistake made and passed on by those who don't read Chinese and haven't spent time around Daoists, like with the game telephone. Why the notion splashes across the front page of a website associated with an practitioner-academic who is responsible for translating Daoist Canon texts baffles me. This kind of problem is not just superficial. For example, if would-be internal alchemists buy a in a book in English that apparently was prepared by students of Wang's, Ling Bao Tong Zhi Neng Nei Gong Shu, they will be buying a book that suffers from omissions of important material in the translated text! If a book claiming to present practical instructions omits information, what becomes of the people who use it as an instruction manual? Now, does Wang possess and pass on true transmission? Does he have great accomplishments? I have no idea and don't care to speculate. For all I know he is a profoundly achieved adept and is busy transmitting invaluable teachings to students around the globe. Be that as it may, there is still a very real and easily identifiable problem with misinformation that follows this man. The questions I propose to people spending their money on Amazon: If Wang's teachings suffer from this deeply troubling problem, what about the books and websites of others? If Westerners never learn how to refer to the classics that have stood the test of centuries and milennia, how many will actually benefit from these new books and websites? With the current crop of teachers and teaching materials, will neidan really "rise" in the West, or will it be just more chaos bearing the long-suffering name of Daoism? Caveat cultivator. (Forgive my Latin, dear Jesuits, I know it sucks )

I commend you for your hard work and dedication; I'm also sorry to hear that zhangzhuang did not reveal more fruits for you, but I'm glad to know that you have found them elsewhere. As for the rest, well, as is often the case, frankly you confuse me. First you say: Then in the very next breath you say: Can you be sure that patiently and determinedly deepening zhanzhuang practice won't dissolve the "block" that you for whatever reason you are so confident Robin (who says s/he has practiced qigong for 20 years and knows many moving forms!) is suffering from? I don't get it. At any rate, the issue is that you're offering prescriptions to people in the form of blanket statements without really understanding the complexities of their personal practices nor, clearly, the vast differences between different types of zhanzhuang. I have learned zhanzhuang from a wide variety of teachers, and have had in depth discussions with many teachers and long-term practitioners. It is as Opendao says: there are "many variations to get different effects." What one gets out of zhanzhuang is in large part a question of very subtle adjustments to posture (we're talking stuff that you need to have physically done to you, because just hearing it or reading it or seeing another person in a photo or video do it is not enough--your mind thinks it understands but your body doesn't know how to "obey," and thus you need your body to be put into that position time and again until your body remembers). The other important factor is the "mental instructions" or 心法, ie, the instructions you receive about what to do with your mind while you stand there. Both of the above factors are very different from teacher to teacher and practice to practice. They are just about impossible to convey in writing or even in video. Because of this, what you get out of zhangzhuang from study with one master can extraordinarily different from what you get out of practice with another. Due to these complexities, even though one might practice for hundreds or thousands of hours, it's still next to impossible to be in a place where one can make accurate and informed statements about the forms of zhanzhuang that one has not personally experienced.

I think that's a good general principle but I practice a variety of postures and most definitely they affect the body as well as the mind in very, very different ways. However, basic hunyuan zhuang is still taught to be the basis from which the subsequent practice evolves.

I think your sentiment that people need to move more today is generally spot on--especially if we're talking about urban people in most white collar jobs and a lots of working class jobs, too. Nevertheless, in my years in China I have encountered more than enough "success stories" attributed to practice almost solely based on standing that I have to strongly disagree with the blanket-statement notion that the practice of zhan zhuang necessarily is incapable of being an all-encompassing practice for people alive today. Additionally, if you read the works on Yi Quan/Da Cheng Quan written by Wang Xiangzhai as well as some of his students and grandstudents, you will see that "finding movement within stillness" is essential to the practice. The word "蠕动" is used to describe this type of movement. Here's a quote on the topic, maybe Google Translate can get the gist across, otherwise when I've got more time if you guys like I can translate it, but you'll have to wait till late Feb: 芗老在《大成拳谱》中说：“大成拳试力的动作，讲究大动不如小动，小动不如蠕动（蠕动即是姑荣、鼓蠕）。鼓蠕的动作虽微不可见，却是全身皆动。大成拳的要求就是要一鼓蠕就能把力发出去。此种蠕动正是功夫到了体成一块的整劲之动。蠕，是一种爬行的软体肉虫，它的动作很微小，但一动则全身皆动，这是它特有的本能。我原意是说大动不如小动，小动不如蠕动。可能是由于不理解或理解得不深，有人却把我的话说成大动不如小动，小动不如不动。请问，不动怎么能打人呢？这也可能是因为不理解，也可能因为蠕动二字与不动的读音易混吧。” At any rate, standing for ten years more or less without break, with about a year and a half of standing in there before that, has allowed me to taste what the word 蠕动 points at. Gerard, if I recall correctly, you have stated before that you don't really do much standing. Respectfully, if that's the case, perhaps you might consider speaking about the practice with less certitude. This practice unfolds and reveals its potential depths over the course of looooong periods of time. What happens when you stand in your first year versus your third year versus your fifth versus your tenth will be very different. What it would be like after thirty years, I literally cannot pretend to imagine, just as how standing works for me now is nothing like it did ten years ago! That sounds like an overly grandiose statement that doesn't really reflect what the five elements are meant to represent. "The wood element" is always influencing us, as are the other four "elements." In reality, speaking of the five elements is just a more detailed way of speaking aboyt yin and yang. Ie, the word water alludes to the extreme of yin, with qi being stored; wood alludes to this stored qi coming into manifestation, yin transforming into yang; fire alludes to the flourishing manifestation of qi and is the extreme of yang; metal alludes to the opposite of what wood alludes to; and so-called earth is word used to represent the "center" around which this neverending cycle "revolves." In other words, because all five "elements/phases" are inextricably part of the process of unending change in all aspects and levels of the grand totality of existence, it's not really possible to say that any one object, idea, or place in time represents just one "element." By extension, it's also impossible to rule anything out on the basis of such thinking. Just as yin and yang are always present in our lives, so are the five elements. They are also always present in any zhan zhuang practice, and as one's skill increases, that will become increasingly evident, but the key is years of practice. More or less I agree. Practicing in wilderness and in the city are two different kettles of fish. However, personal experience, experiences of friends and acquaintances, and the opinions of people who've devoted their lives to these practices leave me quite confident that standing can be taught, learnt, and practiced in ways that take care of the kind of stagnation you mention.

Gerard, I think that your comments present some facets of the truth with respect to the need for a teacher, and the need to mix movement with standing still, but I think you may be unaware of the fact that in China there are plenty of people who believe that one can make one's accomplishment with a primarily standing-based regimen. The most widely cited example from famous practitioners in history is Hao Datong, disciple of Quanzhen Dao founder Wang Chongyang, who was instructed to practice standing, and was finally achieved in this way. There are other Daoist groups that base their practice on standing, supposedly some even practicing alchemy in a standing posture. A friend of mine who has climbed many mountains and visited many masters in search of Dao spent some time with an old Daoist master in a cave in the desert in Gansu, a fellow who stands ten hours a day. If it is true that, as you say, movement is necessary to prevent the "stagnant water" condition of the popular analogy, then you might want to read some of what Wang Xiangzhai wrote about standing. These essays are available in English and can be found online.

No luck... thanks anyway.

What are the Chinese characters for his name? Can't watch this video on this side of the firewall, but maybe there's a copy on Baidu...

Got new glasses a couple of weeks back. 0.5 degree improvement in one eye, 0.25 in the other. Seems that what I experienced over the last 20-odd months had a cumulative effect.

Depends who you ask. I have heard many explanations, some extremely complicated. Some even more complicated than that. I prefer the opposite one: no difference.

I can read the Chinese myself... what does it matter what Wong says. Why do you use an impish, gremlin-like manner in these discussions?