Zhuo Ming-Dao

Just to clarify Blasto's post for those who are not in the know: http://precisiondocs.com/~altaoism/moLittleOrbit.htm All these names can get very confusing, especially if you know the techniques from their Chinese names.

I cannot speak on the trumpet, but my wife played a western flute through high school and college and that training made a huge impact when she started doing energy work. It taught her how to take in a lot of air quickly, expand her lungs, hold her breath, put pressure on the lower dan tien through the diaphragm, and release her breath very slowly and evenly. There is an entire sect of Zen Buddhism just devoted to playing the bamboo flute (shakuhachi), instead of seated meditation. They (the fuke sect) claim that playing the shakuhachi mimics the exact breathing method and pattern used in zazen. Unfortunately, the Fuke sect was wiped out during the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s along with a lot of other religious groups. Someday, when I have the time, I defiantly plan on learning the shakuhachi... But without the basket-hat.

This sounds fascinating, but I too am wondering what it would look like. It is not so difficult to transform into some animal, but to transform oneself into elemental fire, or a mountain, or wind, or thunder??, or the heavens... If anyone has attempted or accomplished lucid dream shape-shifting into more abstract things like these, I would love some advice. I could see, though, how this practice could have a huge impact on breaking down ones view of self as something fixed and static. I had also just thought that the Monkey King lucid dreaming technique was just for bi-location, flight, size changing, etc. What you guys have come up with presents some fascinating new possibilities for my practice.

Now I can be wrong, but I have always felt that energy workers are incapable of causing those highest level physical healings. The patient's higher self is what does all of the healing and just seems to use the healer as an excuse for the healing to take place. I mean, lets be honest with ourselves. Normally when I do energy healing, I remove some sick qi, put in some positive qi, make people feel better, and start a process toward increased physical or emotional health. But then, maybe twice out of all of the countless hundreds of people I have worked on over the years, I have seen miracles. I have done nothing different from my end of things, and yet they have just (with one treatment) been totally cured of some debilitating disease or physical injury. And in each of these cases, and in all of the other cases of this that I have heard about, the direction of the person's life radically changes of the better. Their miracle turns them toward spiritual pursuits, or community service, or a more healthful lifestyle, or toward better interactions with those around them. So clearly, yes, the direction of their lives will inevitably change when this level of healing occurs, which I suppose you could say means that their destiny changed. But this type of healing was not caused by the healer. Some aspect of the person's inner guidance system (higher self) was primed to offer them a choice, a fork in the road to continue their life as is or to begin a something new. If that miraculous healing took place, it had nothing to do with whatever the healer was doing. As healers, this means that we should not strive for or expect this level of healing (but remain gently open to the possibly). These types of healing are outside of our control and can only come from the patient themselves, in my opinion. (I know that we always say that all healing comes from the patient themselves, but for these remarkable cases, we must really accept and be humbled by this simple fact).

My wife and I folded 1,000 origami cranes for our wedding. They made for beautiful wedding favors and decorations for our Asian themed wedding. According to legend if you guys successfully fold all of them, you will have your hearts greatest wish come true. It is very common in Japan and Korea for a couple to work together to fold them all. Plus, the crane is one of the most famous Taoist symbols, representing longevity. Shuo Lao (or sometimes Lao Tsu) is frequently depicted as riding a crane through the air. As for romantic classical Chinese things... The Peiking Opera play on Chuang Tsu, The Butterfly Dream, is rather nice, if you can find a way to integrate it into your wedding. Here are a couple of Confucius quotes that you might be able to use: "It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get." "The moral man and woman will find the moral law beginning in the relation between husband and wife, but ending only in the vast reaches of the universe." I-Ching Quote: "When two people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or bronze."

Findley, if you go to China and try to show that you know something by quoting the TTC at someone IN ENGLISH as if you understood it clearly, you will get laughed out of the country. There is so much nuance that is totally lost in any translation that you will be out of your league if you take this approach. Also, bowing might not be part of the Tao (whatever that means ), but it is a big part of Asian culture. And seeing as you are in China, it might be wise to not be deliberately rude to the people that you want to convince to teach you - just like you would not really want to belch in someone's face when you are trying to make friends. Granted, China is more into the half bow/nod, which might be more gentle on ones pride. When I lived in Japan I had to do full bow to practically everyone that I met and a full kowtow prostration in more spiritual contexts. Humbling oneself is good for the soul, believe it or not. The Buddha in me acknowledges the Buddha in you, and all that jazz.

I received my first reiki attunement from a reiki master who had a lot of experience, came from a direct Usui lineage (she was attuned by Ethel Lombardi), but who could not herself feel the energy. When she attuned me, my simple world turned upside down. I felt very heavy energy sensations, saw vibrant colors before my open or closed eyes, and rapid temperature changes during the treatment. About an hour afterward I was thrown into my first experience of kensho, or direct experience of reality as-it-is. This radically altered state lasted about three days (three very wonderful and frightening days). Before this I did not really meditate or do anything more spiritual than go to church a couple of times per year. But you can bet that after this, I wanted answers and I wanted to experience more. So for me, reiki was the gateway drug of spiritual systems. I too have seen many people get nothing out of there weekend initiations (or *shudder* online attunements of 0 to Master in five minutes). And I was also thrown too quickly into healing others. Within about 3 months of taking level one, I was working on others, and I had a number of terrible negitive energy/spirit experiences to go along with it. It took a number of devoted years to get the level of experience that I needed to work with it in a safe, yet potent, way. Even with all that, I still defend the system because it gave me the instant gratification, energy peak experience that I needed at that time in my life to place me firmly on the path of spiritual self-development.

Here is a very interesting little book that I just found. http://www.amazon.com/When-All-Hell-Breaks...9188&sr=8-1 It is a book for those of us in the midst of suburbia, offering practical (life saving) tips and advice in case of worst case scenarios where water, power, or food lines are disrupted or destroyed. If you think this type of information is unnecessary, you only have to think back as far as Hurricane Katrina. Blasto is right (no matter the character of Deng Ming-Dao) in that the Taoists were known for their flexibility, self-reliance, and lack of dependence on the cogs that make civilizations turn.

The neck rest looks like it is doing an occipital pull, which is very nice for removing head aches. I do not think it would be very convertible for long term use though. Along these lines, anything that supports the neck while letting the back of the head stay flat and even with rest of the body is a VERY good thing for people who sleep on their backs. This strange compulsion to angle the head upwards with tall pillows is terrible for the neck. I use a firm, small, airplane-style pillow with those small beads inside to give support to my neck when I sleep. This type of head support does not work for side sleepers, though. Has anyone ever tried those ball chairs that Michael Winn was pushing a few year ago? [url=http://www.healingdao.com/ballchair_instructions.html]http://www.healingdao.com/ballchair_instructions.html[/url Edit: I looked closer at the neck rest.

@Creation - Great summary! I think this game would have worked a little better if it were focused on either community (folk) Daoism or monastic (cultivation) Daoism. By having both, it leaves the game a little unfocused. That said, I will throw in a funny anecdote from community Daoism to highlight an interesting fact about that manifestation of religious Daoism. A close Taiwanese friend of mine was born with a very auspicious given name, which meant Soaring High (Tengfei). When he was 12 years old, his aunt took him to a Daoist priest who specialized in naming-astrology, and the priest "discovered" that his future would be quite mundane and that he would suffer throughout his life from not being able to live up to his name. So the priest had them legally change it to one that had the correct stroke count and that meant Stable (Peng). Suffice it to say, he hated his new name and as soon as he was 18 he had it officially changed to Kevin. By switching to an English name, he decided to sidestep the whole problem.

Now that this conversation is so pleasant, I will join in with a cup of milk-oolong.

The singularity theory was disproved by Steven Hawking. Matter and energy that enter a black hole is crunched into a type of cosmic radiation that leaks back out of the black hole and is called Hawking Radiation. This has been verified many times over the last few years by astrophysicists.

I am sorry, I should have been more clear in my explanation of the link I offered. With that website, you just point your cursor over the Chinese character and it tells you all of the possible translations. You can easily create your own personal translation or just verify others translations with a quick look through. Classical Chinese is VERY easy if you have the characters already defined since it has so little grammar. All you really need to know is that it is a basic Subject-Verb-Object language, like English, only more clear and simple. You can just use the site as a resource, even if you do not create your own original translation. It will keep you from accidentally straying too far from the original text.

I will grant that this is your belief, since I am not really familiar with Dzogchen, I cannot comment on it. Though if your view is ultimately the distillation and break down offered in the Heart Sutra, why do you hold so tightly to the more relativistically true beliefs of karma, reincarnation, et al. If you hold that these are conditionally true, then you contradict your stance on non-duality. I just to not see how this is tenable from a philosophical perspective. If we throw away all of the semantics and look at this from an experiential perspective, sure! Your belief is great . In which case, your "primordial potentiality fully realized" sounds a heck of a lot like the experience of entrance into wuji, which is a movement beyond form and formlessness into the primordial. Dzogchen is about as Taoist as it gets when it comes down to wuji (which is not simply void). Wuwei, which you have argued against as being movements of conditions, is actually ones clear, primordial, intrinsic awareness, or Buddha Nature guiding moving them. We get so hung up on the names and concepts, that we often lose the spirit of the practice.

Since I was just quoting from it in another thread, I will offer The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti. It is a wonderful Buddhist sutra that is really designed to rock you to the core and leave you with no place to hang your hat. Not only that, it is one of the few sutras that is just plain fun and entertaining to read, due to all of the amazing stories and crazy magic (which is also supposed to throw the reader through a loop and break down your preconceptions of true and false). This book had such radical ideas on non-duality that it seriously disturbed many of the more traditional Buddhists of the time.

Ok. Fine. Here come the big guns. Nagarjuna: Admittedly, I am better at the "both," while you seem to be better with the "neither." I cringe a little bit though whenever anyone says that they or their system is transcendental of samsara or even transcendental of both samsara and nirvana. Saying that your systems is beyond the two truths model just establishes one more layer or level of dualism. From Vimalakirti: All explanations, of course, are themselves dualistic, so when Vimalakiriti was asked to comment, he was poignantly silent. I should probably take his advice, since discussing all of this only mires one deeper in duality. And to end with a line from Nagarjuna:

PS. Here is a site to help you with your project: http://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/daodejing.php This way you can go back to the Chinese and compare your interpretations with the original. When you put your mouse over the characters you get different possible translations. Hope this is helps!

Originally is a little too hard of a question, from the academic perspective. According to modern scholarship the Tao Te Ching existed as individual poems by different authors in an oral tradition for a long period of time. These poems were put together in a number of different ways, with some versions having altogether different collections and orders. The scholarship actually places the inner chapters of Chuang Tzu as older than any compiled version of the Tao Te Ching. According to the current theory, when the TTC was put together, people pulled the name Lao Tzu from the teacher of Confucius, since Chuang Tzu had already claimed that Lao Tzu was a master of the Tao and Confucius did not understand the teachings. Since this name (which is not really a name, but just "Old Master") was so popular in the tradition already, it was used to validate the Tao Te Ching as having had an important, historical author. Then, four hundred years later Sima Qian, the Grand Historian, reported his "real name" based on some records that he found (which he admitted were probably inaccurate), and the rest was history. Of course, all of this could be bunk and the original mythology could be right, but there is some very good evidence supporting this interpretation and not much in favor of the classical view. Marblehead: You are probably right, though. This is way more information than a new student really needs. I was just trying to point out that some of the Outer Chapters of the Chuang Tzu can be confusing because they contradict some very basic Taoist tenets (read the final chapter closely, for example - when Chuang Tzu was alive legalism did not exist and Chuang Tzu would have absolutely hated it, not promoted it). I am sorry if I derailed your interesting project a little.

The enlightened person does not exactly "transcend" nirvana/samsara. If he transcends it, rises above and separates from it, then he is no longer a part of dependent origination and is therefore not empty. A "transcendent being" is heretical to Buddhism because that would necessitate that he has independent self-hood. Maybe using Buddhist jargon is not very helpful. Here is an example from Thich Nhat Han: A piece of paper is impermanent and empty of independent existence. We can see this when we examine the paper closely. The existence of the paper is contingent upon paper factories, glue, trees, seeds, tree farmers, soil, clouds, rain and so forth. All of these conditions and countless others come together make that piece of paper and put it in front of you. It cannot exist without those conditions and similarly, it will create conditions that cause further things in the world to be as they are. Everything is connected in this way in one giant network, which is referred to as Indra's Net in the Flower Garland Sutra. When you look at it from the conventional, samsaric perspective, things are separate. From another perspective, everything is completely interwoven into One tapestry, and this is nirvana. A mistaken view of samsara leads to a feeling of independent self-hood, attachment, and suffering while a mistaken view of nirvana leads to nihilism or to spiritual elitism. The Enlightened Man views reality clearly and does not fall into either dangerous extreme, but holds to the middle way. He embraces the whole but navigates the center. Edit: Before you edited your post it looked like you were disagreeing... so I went back and edited too so that I was not disagreeing with you not-disagreeing with me.

Haha, that was deliberate. I was just trying to make a point about how these different philosophies could be see as complementary. Sorry if it was a little obtuse.

If you say that you are completely liberated from samsara, how do you avoid the dualism of samsara and nirvana? As someone who loves the Madhyamaka philosophy, I have trouble understanding your how you could ever be separate from the dependently originating dance of the cosmos. Wouldn't this necessarily set you up as a being with inherent self-hood? This being the case, it seems to me as if the Enlightened man (see Vimalakirti) would be someone who is always without desire in order to see its mysteries and always with desire in order to see its manifestations. In other words, he is enlightened because he is able to simultaneously embrace and both samsara and nirvana. I have not personally gone through the different jhanas, as I personally practice zazen. Perhaps this would give me some more insight into your philosophy. Which school most informs your Vajrayana practice?

Marblehead, when you say that their are 33 chapters of the Chuang Tsu, be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that all of the text was written by one person or one group of people. When approaching it you will want to focus first on the inner chapters, then work with the later chapters allowing for variation in the ideas and philosophy. If you try to force the ideas of inner chapters to line up with some of the later chapters, you will lose all of it in the contradictions. One group of philosophers, known by later scholars as the Naturalists, did believe this and wanted to deconstruct much of what we call civilization. The Naturalists have several chapters in the Chuang Tzu and you can also see some of their themes (contributions?) in the Tao Te Ching. The Naturalists were lumped together with the Taoists because of some of the commonalities when Taoism began to coalesce into a single school of philosophy/religion in the Han Dynasty. Interestingly, the philosophy of Yang Tzu, a hedonist friend of Chuang Chou, was also lumped into Taoism, despite the fact that it contradicts many of the Naturalist beliefs.

Are you sure? Plenty of things lead to immortality. You might even say that eating your broccoli can lead to immortality...or maybe that was for something else In all seriousness though, you have to ask yourself first what the term immortality means to you. The word that we typically translate as "immortal" in Chinese is xian/hsian, which does not itself mean "not mortal" or everlasting life, like in English. Etymologically the character is composed of the radical for "man" next to "mountain." In Japanese this same character is more generally used to mean "mountain man/hermit" or sennin, which would be someone who left society to better themselves spiritually in the mountains and caves. Also in Chinese the term can be used to refer to certain nature spirits that can be found in sylvan forests and is variously translated as fairy, pixie, or sprite depending on the context. The Taoists often used it in a more specialized sense for someone who was an advanced cultivator/hermit, for someone who had achieved immortality of the spirit, or for someone who has immortality of the physical body. The earliest reference that I know of to a xian that was not a nature spirit was in the first chapter of Chuang Tsu, when he describes the man on the mountain who can fly on dragons and live off of qi and dew. By the end of the warring states period they were discussed mostly in terms of a group of powerful people living either on an island in the Pacific (Penglia) or as being on Mount Kunlun in the Himalayas. These people had magical powers, could fly, and lived forever, though it was never clear if they were corporeal, since everyone who visited them did so in there dreams or visions. Sooooo... It all depends on what you think an immortal is and what you expect from your practice. That said, I would love to hear other people's thoughts on the effectiveness of the 8 Pieces, as this is the only physical qigong routine that I am doing everyday now that school is back in session.

I do not believe that the author meant the word "equivalent" to mean the same. Of course the practices and philosophical interpretations are different for the two traditions, but this is trying to remind us that both Buddhism and Taoism have tools to address form and formlessness, body and mind, samsara and nirvana, and as such, both systems will develop all aspects of the spiritual aspirant. This is a wonderful quote given some of the discussions that have been circulating TTBs lately. It is important to remember that although Taoism seems to put more emphasis on the body and energy and Buddhism on the mind and emptiness, that both have tools to address all aspects of enlightenment and spiritual immortality (so to speak). It is sometimes easy to get caught up in terms and philosophy while totally loosing the spirit of the practice.